An AI laboratory before there was a field
Carnegie Mellon's computing history starts earlier than its 1986 appearance on the timeline. Allen Newell and Herbert Simon founded an artificial intelligence laboratory at the university in the late 1950s, building programs including the General Problem Solver and developing the physical symbol systems hypothesis, the claim that a system manipulating symbols according to rules is what intelligence, human or artificial, actually consists of. The two shared the 1975 ACM Turing Award for that work. Newell, Simon and Alan Perlis then created a formal Computer Science Department in July 1965, and it became its own School of Computer Science in 1988, among the first schools of its kind in the country. [2][3]
Geoffrey Hinton was on that faculty when he, David Rumelhart and Ronald Williams published "Learning representations by back-propagating errors" in Nature in October 1986, the paper that made backpropagation widely known as a way to train multilayer neural networks. Hinton left for the University of Toronto in 1987 and remained there, with a stint at University College London from 1998 to 2001. He won the 2018 Turing Award, shared with Yoshua Bengio and Yann LeCun, for the deep learning work that grew out of that line of research. [4]
The parts of CMU still shaping AI
CMU's Robotics Institute, founded in 1979 by Raj Reddy and Angel Jordan with a $3 million grant from Westinghouse, was the first academic department in the world devoted exclusively to robotics, and it introduced the first robotics PhD program in 1988. Its Tartan Racing team won the DARPA Urban Challenge in 2007, driving a modified Chevrolet Tahoe named Boss through a 55-mile course with traffic and finishing in about four hours twenty minutes for the $2 million prize, after CMU vehicles Sandstorm and H1ghlander had placed second and third in the 2005 Grand Challenge. Reddy directed the Robotics Institute until 1991, won the 1994 Turing Award with Edward Feigenbaum for large-scale AI systems work, and served as dean of the School of Computer Science from 1991 to 1999, a tenure in which the school established its Language Technologies Institute, Human-Computer Interaction Institute and Machine Learning Department. [3][5][6]
Atlas interpretation: CMU's place on the timeline is less about a single lab and more about how consistently the same institution shows up across AI's history: the symbolic AI of Newell and Simon in the 1950s, the neural-network work Hinton did there in the 1980s, and one of the first dedicated robotics research organizations, running through decades in which those approaches were often treated as rivals rather than a shared lineage. [2][3][4]
Sources
- History
Carnegie Mellon University
- Allen Newell
Wikipedia · Sep 9, 2026
- Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Science
Wikipedia · Sep 9, 2026
- Geoffrey Hinton
Wikipedia · Sep 9, 2026
- Robotics Institute
Wikipedia · Sep 9, 2026
- Raj Reddy
Wikipedia · Sep 9, 2026