The Three Waves of AI.

• Author: Harper, Jon
• Position: UP FRONT

The Defense Department's focus on artificial intelligence is nothing new to the folks at DARPA. They've seen it all before. "All of a sudden there is a lot of activity and people are very, very interested [in AI] and then it doesn't deliver, and then people get disinterested in it," said Dick Urban, special assistant to the agency director. DARPA has been involved in three waves of AI development. The first wave of machines did analysis with "handcrafted knowledge" to make them effective, but they didn't learn on their own without updates. Think popular programs like TurboTax.

The second wave did statistical analysis of data such as translating languages and identifying faces in...