Our History

Contents

Synopsis

JAIR began accepting submissions on June 15, 1993, and published its first article in August, 1993: Michael P. Wellman's "A Market-Oriented Programming Environment and its Application to Distributed Multicommodity Flow Problems" (JAIR Volume 1, pages 1-23, 1993). The Volume 1 Masthead lists the original JAIR editors, editorial board, and production supervisors.

The journal was conceived and developed in 1992 by Steven Minton, with help from Jaime Carbonell, Oren Etzioni, Ken Forbus, Matt Ginsberg, Rich Korf, Paul Rosenbloom, Bart Selman, and Dan Weld. Peter Friedland, Tom Dietterich, Pat Langley and Tom Mitchell also offered advice during the development of the journal prior to its establishment. The JAIR newsgroups were created by Matt Ginsberg.

JAIR has been managed as a grass roots "budgetless" enterprise, where the labor and resources required to run the journal are donated by individuals and scientific organizations on an "as needed" basis. The American Association for Artificial Intelligence provided a small grant to pay for JAIR's start-up legal expenses, including legal research to explore the issues involved in publishing source code. Mike Morgan of Morgan Kaufmann Publishers made an important contribution by courageously agreeing to publish JAIR in hardcopy (even though the electronic version would be available for free on the internet). Peter Friedland, as a branch chief at NASA Ames, was instrumental in providing administrative support at Ames. Fausto Guinchiglia supported a JAIR mirror site at the University of Genoa in Italy. Sites were also provided by the computer science departments at Carnegie Mellon and the University of Washington.

The original editor was Steven Minton, who initially was the only editor. As activity increased during the first year, he recruited a number of editorial board members to serve as associate editors. Minton's term ended at the end of 1996, at which time Michael Wellman took over as JAIR's second executive editor.

In 1995-96 Peter Turney created several new electronic facilities for JAIR, including a full-text search capability and a "comments facility". Unfortunately, the comments facility was not heavily used, but JAIR has continued to experiment with new ideas, including a more recent effort by Turney called Ask the Author

In 1996, JAIR began running out of disk space, but a substantial contribution was made by Jaime Carbonell and CMU, eliminating space problems for the next decade (we hope).

JAIR's initial issues and web site sported this original logo. JAIR undertook a redesign of its web site in November 1996, with most of the work performed by Jon Doyle.

Documents