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Artificial intelligence labs aren't what they used to be.

If you had visited our lab in 1990, you would have seen GigaMos Lisp machines, networked Sun Sparcstations, and perhaps the occasional MicroVAX.

And if this web page had existed then, its purpose would have been to impress you with a long list of the special computers available in our lab.

Times have changed. Today, our fastest workstations are Pentium 4 PCs running Windows XP and 2003. They have about 50 times the speed, 4 to 8 times the memory, and 100 times the disk space of the workstations we used to use. We use Roaming User Profiles so that each user can sit down at any PC in our labs, log in, and access his or her own personalized desktop and file space.

The current setup comprises 3 Windows 2003 servers and dozens of workstations.

We also have a wide variety of robots, many controlled by Palm computers, as well as a microcontroller lab with a universal device programmer, breadboarding facilities, and test instrument, including a Hewlett-Packard (Agilent) 18-channel oscilloscope.

For student laptops and robots, we provide a wireless network with three access points. There are other wireless networks elsewhere on campus and in downtown Athens; it is easy to set up your laptop to access all of them.

Software...

Our most-used software platforms are LPA Prolog and SWI-Prolog. We also use Allegro Common Lisp, Microsoft and Borland C and C++, Microsoft C#, Sun Java, Borland Delphi, Perl, Python, and other languages and compilers.

We have chosen Windows 2000/XP/2003 because it helps us do our work efficiently, it is easy to administer, and employers expect our graduates to have Windows experience.

What's more, Windows has some features that make them especially suitable for AI work. These include built-in speech components and a Lisp-machine-like object-oriented operating system API in the Microsoft .NET Framework.

We also encourage our students to learn about other computer architectures and operating systems; suitable courses are offered in our Department of Computer Science.

What lab work is like...

AI research isn't just sitting around and programming or building gadgets. As with any other kind of science, you have to find out what is already known about a research question before trying to innovate; and then, once you make a discovery, you have to communicate it. Our students often submit papers to conferences and scholarly journals, and every incoming student is expected to be a good writer.

One of our most important facilities is therefore the Science Library. Located in the same building as the Artificial Intelligence Center, the library has millions of books and bound periodicals and also provides online access to many indexes and journals.

Last updated: 5/19/04