Australian Artificial Intelligence Institute


In Australia, the Australian Artificial Intelligence Institute was a government-funded research and development laboratory for investigating and commercializing Artificial Intelligence, specifically Intelligent Software Agents.

History

The AAII was started in 1988 as an initiative by the Hawke government and closed in 1999. It was backed by support from the Computer Power Group, SRI International and the Victorian State Government. The director of the group was Michael Georgeff who came from SRI, contributing his experience with the PRS and vision in the domain of Intelligent agents. It was located in the Melbourne suburb of Carlton before moving to more spacious premises in the city centre of Melbourne, Victoria. At its peak it had more than 40 staff and took up two floors of an office building on the corner of Latrobe and Russell Streets.
In the late 1990s, the AAII spun out Agentis International to address the commercialization of the developed technology. Another company, Agent Oriented Software was formed by a number of ex-AAII staff to pursue agent technology developing JACK Intelligent Agents. After the AAII shutdown, those staff that remained and the intellectual property were transferred to Agentis International.

Projects

This section summarizes a selection of the software and commercial projects that came out of the AAII: