Nils J. Nilsson, Kumagai Professor of Engineering (Emeritus) in the Department of Computer Science at Stanford University, California, received his PhD degree in Electrical Engineering from Stanford in 1958. He spent twenty-three years at the Artificial Intelligence Center of SRI International working on statistical and neural-network approaches to pattern recognition, co-inventing the A* heuristic search algorithm and the STRIPS automatic planning system, directing work on the integrated mobile robot, SHAKEY, and collaborating in the development of the PROSPECTOR expert system. He has published five textbooks on artificial intelligence. Professor Nilsson returned to Stanford in 1985 as the Chairman of the Department of Computer Science, a position he held until August 1990. Besides teaching courses on artificial intelligence and on machine learning, he has conducted research on flexible robots that are able to react to dynamic worlds, plan courses of action, and learn from experience. Professor Nilsson served on the editorial boards of the journal Artificial Intelligence and of the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research. He was an Area Editor for the Journal of the Association for Computing Machinery. He is a past-president and Fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence and is also a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He was a co-founder of Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, Inc. Professor Nilsson is a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences. He is a recipient of the IEEE Neural-Network Pioneer award, the IJCAI Research Excellence award, and the AAAI Distinguished Service award.

Part I. Beginnings: 1. Dreams and dreamers; 2. Clues; Part II. Early Explorations: 1950s and 1960s: 3. Gatherings; 4. Pattern recognition; 5. Early heuristic programs; 6. Semantic representations; 7. Natural language processing; 8. 1960s infrastructure; Part III. Efflorescence: Mid-1960s to Mid-1970s: 9. Computer vision; 10. 'Hand-Eye' research; 11. Knowledge representation and reasoning; 12. Mobile robots; 13. Progress in natural language processing; 14. Game playing; 15. The dendral project; 16. Conferences, books, and funding; Part IV. Applications and Specializations: 1970s to Early 1980s: 17. Speech recognition and understanding systems; 18. Consulting systems; 19. Understanding queries and signals; 20. Progress in computer vision; 21. Boomtimes; Part V. 'New Generation' Projects: 22. The Japanese create a stir; 23. Darpa's strategic computing program; Part VI. Entr'acte: 24. Speed bumps; 25. Controversies and alternative paradigms; Part VII. The Growing Armamentarium: From the 1980s Onward: 26. Reasoning and representation; 27. Other approaches to reasoning and representation; 28. Bayesian networks; 29. Machine learning; 30. Natural languages and natural scenes; 31. Intelligent system architectures; Part VIII. Modern AI: Today and Tomorrow: 32. Extraordinary achievements; 33. Ubiquitous artificial intelligence; 34. Smart tools; 35. The quest continues.