The Turing Institute was an

artificial intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by animals and humans. Example tasks in which this is done include speech ...

laboratory in

Glasgow Glasgow ( ; sco, Glesca or ; gd, Glaschu ) is the most populous city in Scotland and the fourth-most populous city in the United Kingdom, as well as being the 27th largest city by population in Europe. In 2020, it had an estimated popu ...

Scotland Scotland (, ) is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. Covering the northern third of the island of Great Britain, mainland Scotland has a border with England to the southeast and is otherwise surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean to ...

, between 1983 and 1994. The company undertook basic and applied research, working directly with large companies across

Europe Europe is a large peninsula conventionally considered a continent in its own right because of its great physical size and the weight of its history and traditions. Europe is also considered a Continent#Subcontinents, subcontinent of Eurasia ...

, the

United States The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country Continental United States, primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 U.S. state, states, a Washington, D.C., ...

and

Japan Japan ( ja, 日本, or , and formally , ''Nihonkoku'') is an island country in East Asia. It is situated in the northwest Pacific Ocean, and is bordered on the west by the Sea of Japan, while extending from the Sea of Okhotsk in the n ...

developing software as well as providing training, consultancy and information services.

Formation

The Institute was formed in June 1983 by

Donald Michie Donald Michie (; 11 November 1923 – 7 July 2007) was a British researcher in artificial intelligence. During World War II, Michie worked for the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park, contributing to the effort to solve " Tunny ...

, Peter Mowforth and Tim Niblett. It was named after

Alan Turing Alan Mathison Turing (; 23 June 1912 – 7 June 1954) was an English mathematician, computer scientist, logician, cryptanalyst, philosopher, and theoretical biologist. Turing was highly influential in the development of theoretical ...

with whom Donald Michie had worked at

Bletchley Park Bletchley Park is an English country house and estate in Bletchley, Milton Keynes (Buckinghamshire) that became the principal centre of Allied code-breaking during the Second World War. The mansion was constructed during the years following ...

during the

Second World War World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposi ...

. The organisation grew out of the Machine Intelligence Research Unit at

Edinburgh University The University of Edinburgh ( sco, University o Edinburgh, gd, Oilthigh Dhùn Èideann; abbreviated as ''Edin.'' in Post-nominal letters, post-nominals) is a Public university, public research university based in Edinburgh, Scotland. Granted ...

with a plan to combine research in artificial intelligence with technology transfer to industry. In 1983, Sir Graham Hills was instrumental in the institute moving to Glasgow where, with support from the

Scottish Development Agency Scottish usually refers to something of, from, or related to Scotland, including: *Scottish Gaelic, a Celtic Goidelic language of the Indo-European language family native to Scotland *Scottish English *Scottish national identity, the Scottish ide ...

, it formed a close working relationship with

Strathclyde University The University of Strathclyde ( gd, Oilthigh Shrath Chluaidh) is a public research university located in Glasgow, Scotland. Founded in 1796 as the Andersonian Institute, it is Glasgow's second-oldest university, having received its royal c ...

Lord Balfour of Burleigh Lord Balfour of Burleigh, in the County of Kinross, is a title in the Peerage of Scotland. It was created in 1607 for Sir Michael Balfour. He was succeeded by his daughter, Margaret, his only child. She married Robert Arnot, who assumed the sur ...

(chairman) and

Shirley Williams Shirley Vivian Teresa Brittain Williams, Baroness Williams of Crosby, (' Catlin; 27 July 1930 – 12 April 2021) was a British politician and academic. Originally a Labour Party Member of Parliament (MP), she served in the Labour cabinet from ...

joined the board along with a growing team of researchers and AI specialists. Notable amongst these was

Stephen Muggleton Stephen H. Muggleton FBCS, FIET, FAAAI, FECCAI, FSB, FREng (born 6 December 1959, son of Louis Muggleton) is Professor of Machine Learning and Head of the Computational Bioinformatics Laboratory at Imperial College London.inductive logic programming. Professor Jim Alty moved his Man Machine Interaction (HCI) group (later the Scottish HCI Centre) to the Turing Institute in 1984. The move included a significant expansion of the postgraduate school at the institute. Alty joined the Turing Institute Board and became chief executive. The HCI Centre and the institute collaborated on a wide range of projects.

Training and resource centre

In 1984, following the UK Government Alvey Report on AI, the institute became an Alvey Journeyman centre for the UK. Under the guidance of Judith Richards, companies such as IBM (see: John Roycroft), Burroughs,

British Airways British Airways (BA) is the flag carrier airline of the United Kingdom. It is headquartered in London, England, near its main hub at Heathrow Airport. The airline is the second largest UK-based carrier, based on fleet size and passengers ...

Shell Shell may refer to: Architecture and design * Shell (structure), a thin structure ** Concrete shell, a thin shell of concrete, usually with no interior columns or exterior buttresses ** Thin-shell structure Science Biology * Seashell, a hard o ...

and

Unilever Unilever plc is a British multinational consumer goods company with headquarters in London, England. Unilever products include food, condiments, bottled water, baby food, soft drink, ice cream, instant coffee, cleaning agents, energy dri ...

seconded researchers to develop new industrial AI applications. The Turing Institute Library was formed in 1983 and grew by selling access by subscription to its information services. The library developed a large searchable electronic database of content from most of the main AI research and development centres around the world. Library affiliates logged into the system by dial-up and received weekly summaries of newly added items that could be ordered or downloaded as abstracts. The publisher Addison-Wesley developed a close working relationship and published the Turing Institute Press series of books. In 1984, Alty wrote a text book which was adopted by many universities and a much-cited paper on expert systems (with Mike Coombs). Throughout its existence, the institute organised a wide range of workshops and international conferences. Notable among these were the Turing Memorial Lecture Series whose speakers included

Tony Hoare Sir Charles Antony Richard Hoare (Tony Hoare or C. A. R. Hoare) (born 11 January 1934) is a British computer scientist who has made foundational contributions to programming languages, algorithms, operating systems, formal verification, and ...

, Herbert Simon, and John McCarthy. Major conferences included The British Association's 147th conference in 1985, BMVC'91, IEEE International Symposium on Intelligent Control (1992) and the Machine Intelligence Series.

Research and development

The institute won research funding from the

Westinghouse Corporation The Westinghouse Electric Corporation was an American manufacturing company founded in 1886 by George Westinghouse. It was originally named "Westinghouse Electric & Manufacturing Company" and was renamed "Westinghouse Electric Corporation" in ...

after it developed a machine learned rule-based system to improve the efficiency of a nuclear power plant. The research funding was used to launch the Freddy 3 advanced robotics project aimed at studying robot learning and robot social interaction. Barry Shepherd developed much of the Freddy 3 software infrastructure. Tatjana Zrimec used the system to investigate how playing robots could develop structured knowledge about their world while

Claude Sammut Claude Sammut is a professor of computer science and engineering at the University of New South Wales and Head of the Artificial Intelligence Research Group. He was appointed as a Trustee of RoboCup RoboCup is an annual international robotic ...

used the system to investigate machine learning and control and helped develop

reinforcement learning Reinforcement learning (RL) is an area of machine learning concerned with how intelligent agents ought to take actions in an environment in order to maximize the notion of cumulative reward. Reinforcement learning is one of three basic machine ...

. Ivan Bratko made several visits to the Turing Institute undertaking research in machine learning and advanced robotics. Donald Michie teaching

The institute undertook several projects for the US military (e.g. personnel allocation for the US Office of Naval Research), credit card scoring for a South African bank and seed sorting for the Scottish Agricultural Sciences Agency. Other large projects included the

ESPRIT Esprit or L'Esprit may refer to: * the French for Spirit; as a loanword: ** Enthusiasm, intense interest or motivation ** Morale, motivation and readiness ** Geist "mind/spirit; intellect" * Esprit (name), a given name and surname * ''Esprit'' (m ...

Machine Learning Toolbox developing CN2 and electrophoretic gel analysis with

. In 1984, the institute worked under contract from Radian Corp to develop code for the

Space Shuttle The Space Shuttle is a retired, partially reusable low Earth orbital spacecraft system operated from 1981 to 2011 by the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) as part of the Space Shuttle program. Its official program n ...

auto-lander. The code was developed with an inductive rule generator, ''Rulemaster'', using training examples from a

NASA The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA ) is an independent agency of the US federal government responsible for the civil space program, aeronautics research, and space research. NASA was established in 1958, succeedin ...

simulator. A similar approach was later used by Danny Pearce to develop qualitative models to control and diagnose satellites for

ESA , owners = , headquarters = Paris, Île-de-France, France , coordinates = , spaceport = Guiana Space Centre , seal = File:ESA emblem seal.png , seal_size = 130px , image = Views in the Main Control Room (120 ...

as well as optimising gas flow in the North Sea for

Enterprise Oil Enterprise Oil was a major UK independent exploration and production company based in Europe, with core areas of activity in the United Kingdom and Ireland, mainland Europe, Brazil and the Gulf of Mexico. The Company was once a constituent of t ...

. Similar approaches based on pole-balancing automata were used to control submersible vehicles and develop a control system for helicopters carrying sling loads.

protein folding Protein folding is the physical process by which a protein chain is translated to its native three-dimensional structure, typically a "folded" conformation by which the protein becomes biologically functional. Via an expeditious and reproduc ...

(with Ross King) and drug design as well as systems such as CIGOL that were capable of discovering new concepts and hypotheses. In 1986, Alty's HCI group won a major ESPRIT 1 contract to investigate the use of knowledge based systems in process control interfaces called GRADIENT (Graphical Intelligent Dialogues, P600), (with

Gunnar Johannsen Gunnar Johannsen (born 1940) is a German cyberneticist, and Emeritus Professor of Systems Engineering and Human-Machine Systems at the University of Kassel, known for his contributions in the field of human-machine systems. Biography Born and r ...

of Kassel University, Peter Elzer of Clausthal University and Asea Brown Boveri) to create intelligent interfaces for process control operators. This work had a major impact on process control interface design. The initial pilot phase report (Alty, Elzer et al., 1985) was widely used and cited. Many research papers were produced. A follow-on large ESPRIT research project was PROMISE (Process Operators Multimedia Intelligent Support Environment) working with DOW Benelux (Netherlands), Tecsiel (Italy) and Scottish Power (Scotland). In 1987, the Turing Institute won a project to build a large, scalable, network-available user-manual for the

Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication Swift or SWIFT most commonly refers to: * SWIFT, an international organization facilitating transactions between banks ** SWIFT code * Swift (programming language) * Swift (bird), a family of birds It may also refer to: Organizations * SWIFT, a ...

(SWIFT). The worldwide-web-like system was launched in 1988. Its success as a global hypertext resource for its users led to SWIFT sponsoring the Turing Memorial Series of Lectures. The close working relationship came to an end, in part, when a key member of the SWIFT team, Arnaud Rubin, was killed by a terrorist bomb on

Pan Am flight 103 Pan Am Flight 103 was a regularly scheduled Pan Am transatlantic flight from Frankfurt to Detroit via a stopover in London and another in New York City. The transatlantic leg of the route was operated by ''Clipper Maid of the Seas'', a Boein ...

over Lockerbie. One of the strongest business relationships the institute had was with

Sun Microsystems Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Sun for short) was an American technology company that sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services and created the Java programming language, the Solaris operating system, ZFS, t ...

. Sun funded a series of projects where the key institute personnel were Tim Niblett and

Arthur van Hoff Arthur van Hoff (born 16 February 1963) is a Dutch computer scientist and businessman. Biography After studying computer science at the University of Strathclyde and Hogere Informatica Opleiding, Van Hoff joined Sun Microsystems as an engin ...

. Several projects concerned the development of new user-interface tools and environments (e.g. GoodNews, HyperNews and HyperLook). HyperLook was written in

PostScript PostScript (PS) is a page description language in the electronic publishing and desktop publishing realm. It is a dynamically typed, concatenative programming language. It was created at Adobe Systems by John Warnock, Charles Geschke, Do ...

and PDB, an

ANSI C ANSI C, ISO C, and Standard C are successive standards for the C programming language published by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) and ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 22/WG 14 of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and th ...

to PostScript compiler developed at the institute, and it ran on Sun's

NeWS News is information about current events. This may be provided through many different media: word of mouth, printing, postal systems, broadcasting, electronic communication, or through the testimony of observers and witnesses to event ...

Windowing System.

Don Hopkins Don Hopkins is an artist and programmer specializing in human computer interaction and computer graphics. He is an alumnus of the University of Maryland, College Park, University of Maryland and a former member of the University of Maryland Huma ...

, while studying at the Turing Institute, ported

SimCity ''SimCity'' is an open-ended city-building video game series originally designed by Will Wright. The first game in the series, ''SimCity'', was published by Maxis in 1989 and were followed by several sequels and many other spin-off "''Sim ...

to Unix with HyperLook as its front-end. Arthur van Hoff left the institute in 1992 and joined Sun Microsystems where he authored the

Java Java (; id, Jawa, ; jv, ꦗꦮ; su, ) is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea to the north. With a population of 151.6 million people, Java is the world's mo ...

1.0 compiler, the beta version of the HotJava browser and helped with the design of the Java language. Throughout the 1980s, the Turing Institute Vision Group developed multi-scale tools and applications. A series of 3D industrial applications was developed and deployed using the multi-scale signal matching (MSSM) technology, specifically: * 3D head modelling * Robot navigation * Real time robot camera stereo vergence * Terrain modelling * Scene of crime capture of 3D footprints for the

Royal Canadian Mounted Police The Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP; french: Gendarmerie royale du Canada; french: GRC, label=none), commonly known in English as the Mounties (and colloquially in French as ) is the federal and national police service of Canada. As poli ...

* Maxillofacial reconstruction and denture cast digital archiving with Glasgow Dental School * Brain model labelling with Guys Hospital * Hyper-resolution methods to improve CCTV image quality for

Strathclyde Police Strathclyde Police was the territorial police force responsible for the Scottish council areas of Argyll and Bute, City of Glasgow, East Ayrshire, East Dunbartonshire, East Renfrewshire, Inverclyde, North Ayrshire, North Lanarkshire, Renfre ...

* High-speed target tracking for the UK

Ministry of Defence {{unsourced, date=February 2021 A ministry of defence or defense (see spelling differences), also known as a department of defence or defense, is an often-used name for the part of a government responsible for matters of defence, found in state ...

* Virtual backgrounds and camera photogrammetry for

BBC #REDIRECT BBC #REDIRECT BBC Here i going to introduce about the best teacher of my life b BALAJI sir. He is the precious gift that I got befor 2yrs . How has helped and thought all the concept and made my success in the 10th board exam. ...

...

broadcast TV. * 3D car body shape reconstruction from wax models; Ford Motor Company, Dearbourn, USA * With Sun Microsystems using a stereo pair of miniature cameras to create and re-project a normalised straight-on view for teleconferencing. Various other robot projects were undertaken at the Turing Institute where key researchers included Paul Siebert, Eddie Grant, Paul Grant, David Wilson, Bing Zhang and Colin Urquhart. In 1990, the Turing Institute organised and ran the First Robot Olympics with the venue at the

University of Strathclyde The University of Strathclyde ( gd, Oilthigh Shrath Chluaidh) is a public research university located in Glasgow, Scotland. Founded in 1796 as the Andersonian Institute, it is Glasgow's second-oldest university, having received its royal chart ...

Closure

From 1989 onwards, the company faced financial difficulties that caused it to close in 1994.

References

{{authority control 1983 establishments in Scotland 1994 disestablishments in Scotland Organizations established in 1983 Organizations disestablished in 1994 Artificial intelligence laboratories Computer science institutes in the United Kingdom Companies based in Glasgow History of the University of Edinburgh University of Strathclyde Alan Turing