DARPA
In plain wordsThe US military's research-funding agency, which paid for much of the early development of artificial intelligence and the internet and runs prize competitions such as driverless-car races.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the US Defense Department's funder of ambitious, high-risk research, which has no laboratories of its own: program managers on short appointments choose and steer projects carried out by universities and companies. Through its Information Processing Techniques Office, founded in 1962 under J. C. R. Licklider, it was the principal patron of early AI research at MIT, Stanford, Carnegie Mellon and SRI, supporting work such as Shakey the robotShakey the robot, prop. n.: A wheeled robot built at a California research institute between 1966 and 1972 that could look around, make a plan and carry it out: the first mobile robot to work out its own steps toward a goal. and the 1970s speech-understanding program. Cuts in the 1970s and the winding-down of the Strategic Computing InitiativeStrategic Computing Initiative, prop. n.: A billion-dollar US defense research program, run from 1983 to 1993, that tried to build machine intelligence for military uses such as self-driving vehicles and assistants for fighter pilots. (1983–1993) contributed to the AI wintersAI winter, n.: A slump in which disappointment over AI's unmet promises leads governments and companies to pull back money and attention. Historians count two big ones: one in the 1970s and one starting in the late 1980s.. Later it ran the DARPA Grand ChallengeDARPA Grand Challenge, prop. n.: A series of US government-sponsored races for driverless vehicles held in 2004, 2005 and 2007. No robot finished the first race; within three years, cars were navigating mock city traffic. races for autonomous vehicles (2004–2007), the Cyber Grand Challenge (2016), an explainable AIexplainable AI, n.: The field and set of methods that let people understand why an AI system produced a particular output — for example, which factors led it to reject a loan application. program (from 2017) and the AI Cyber Challenge (2023–2025), and its CALO personal-assistant project gave rise to Apple's Siri.
Origin
Created in February 1958 as the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), in response to the Soviet launch of Sputnik; it was renamed DARPA in 1972, briefly reverting to ARPA in 1993–1996. Its ARPANET (1969) was the forerunner of the internet.
Related
- DARPA Grand ChallengeDARPA Grand Challenge, prop. n.: A series of US government-sponsored races for driverless vehicles held in 2004, 2005 and 2007. No robot finished the first race; within three years, cars were navigating mock city traffic.
- Strategic Computing InitiativeStrategic Computing Initiative, prop. n.: A billion-dollar US defense research program, run from 1983 to 1993, that tried to build machine intelligence for military uses such as self-driving vehicles and assistants for fighter pilots.
- AI winterAI winter, n.: A slump in which disappointment over AI's unmet promises leads governments and companies to pull back money and attention. Historians count two big ones: one in the 1970s and one starting in the late 1980s.
- Shakey the robotShakey the robot, prop. n.: A wheeled robot built at a California research institute between 1966 and 1972 that could look around, make a plan and carry it out: the first mobile robot to work out its own steps toward a goal.
- explainable AIexplainable AI, n.: The field and set of methods that let people understand why an AI system produced a particular output — for example, which factors led it to reject a loan application.
- MIT AI LabMIT AI Lab, prop. n.: The artificial intelligence laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, founded in 1959 and one of the birthplaces of AI and hacker culture; it is now part of MIT's computer science lab, CSAIL.
Mentioned in
MIT AI LabMIT AI Lab, prop. n.: The artificial intelligence laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, founded in 1959 and one of the birthplaces of AI and hacker culture; it is now part of MIT's computer science lab, CSAIL., SRI InternationalSRI International, prop. n.: A nonprofit research institute in California, once part of Stanford University, where the Shakey robot was built and the technology behind Apple's Siri assistant began.