A brief historical overview of artificial intelligence research

This paper gives a brief timeline of the evolution of the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI), a field that is currently generating approximately sixty thousand research papers per year. This represents a 12.9% growth in output over the past five years, and is markedly higher than the growth seen across all research, which has grown at a rate of 2.3% per year in the same period. AI research is of interest around the world and this paper highlights many of the activities undertaken to stimulate this research in the USA, Canada, Mexico, Europe, and Asia.