Papers with Impact

In this series of articles, researchers reflect on papers they found influential in their career. These articles have been contributed as part of the CP Newsletter. If you would like to contribute a story yourself, please email us at newsletter@a4cp.org.

Paper with Impact (M. Wallace)

In the 1970’s Artificial Intelligence was the new frontier. The research community divided into two camps: the “clean” ones, like me, who were wedded to logic, and the others for whom knowledge and inference was opaquely embedded in complex neural structures. For clean AI, the USA community used a language called Lisp, while the Europeans used Prolog: “Programmation en Logique”. Computer scientists were allowed to talk French in those days ;-)

Paper(s) with impact (J.-F. Puget)

For some reason, I have been asked to follow up on the great articles by Patrick Prosser and Gilles Pesant on articles with impact. Maybe this has to do with the fact that I started working in that field quite a long time ago, in 1989. As Patrick said, it was before lots of things taken for granted now (world wide web, mobile phones for everyone, Java, laptops, Google, etc) existed. Note that we were no longer using punch card either, we even had Apple Macintoshes in my lab, and we were connected to Internet! Still, can you imagine an Internet without the web?