Foundation In the 1920s,
Stanford University professor
Robert E. Swain proposed creating a research institute in the
Western United States.
Herbert Hoover, then a trustee of Stanford University, was also an early proponent of an institute but became less involved with the project after being elected president of the United States. The development of the institute was delayed by the
Great Depression in the 1930s and
World War II in the 1940s, with three separate attempts leading to its formation in 1946. In August 1945,
Maurice Nelles, Morlan A. Visel, and Ernest L. Black of
Lockheed made the first attempt to create the institute with the formation of the "Pacific Research Foundation" in Los Angeles. A second attempt was made by
Henry T. Heald, then president of the
Illinois Institute of Technology. In 1945, Heald wrote a report recommending a research institute on the West Coast and a close association with Stanford University with an initial grant of $500,000 (equivalent to $ in ). A third attempt was made by
Fred Terman, Stanford University's dean of engineering. Terman's proposal followed Heald's but focused on faculty and student research more than contract research. Research chemist
William F. Talbot became the institute's first director. This and other issues, including frustration with Tresidder's micromanagement of the new organization, caused Talbot to repeatedly offer his resignation, which Tresidder eventually accepted. Talbot was replaced by
Jesse Hobson, who had previously led the
Armour Research Foundation, but the pursuit of contract work remained.
Early history SRI's first research project investigated whether the
guayule plant could be used as a source of
natural rubber. During World War II, rubber was imported into the U.S. and was subject to shortages and strict rationing. In 1948, SRI began research and consultation with
Chevron Corporation to develop an artificial substitute for
tallow and
coconut oil in soap production; SRI's investigation confirmed the potential of
dodecylbenzene as a suitable replacement. Later,
Procter & Gamble used the substance as the basis for
Tide laundry
detergent. in 1949 The institute performed much of the early research on
air pollution and the formation of
ozone in the lower atmosphere. SRI sponsored the
First National Air Pollution Symposium in
Pasadena, California, in November 1949. In April 1953,
Walt and
Roy Disney hired SRI (and in particular,
Harrison Price) to consult on their proposal for establishing an amusement park in
Burbank, California. SRI provided information on location, attendance patterns, and economic feasibility. SRI selected a larger site in
Anaheim, prepared reports about the operation, provided on-site administrative support for
Disneyland, and acted in an advisory role as the park expanded. In 1955, SRI was commissioned to select a site and provide design suggestions for the
John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. In 1952, the
Technicolor Corporation contracted with SRI to develop a near-instantaneous, electro-optical alternative to the manual timing process during film copying. In 1959, the
Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences presented the Scientific and Engineering Award jointly to SRI and Technicolor for their work on the design and development of the Technicolor electronic printing timer which greatly benefited the motion picture industry. In 1954,
Southern Pacific asked SRI to investigate ways of reducing damage during rail freight shipments by mitigating shock to railroad box cars. This investigation led to
William K. MacCurdy's development of the Hydra-Cushion technology, which remains standard. system, which uses
magnetic ink character recognition to process checks, was one of SRI's earliest developments. In the 1950s, SRI worked under the direction of the
Bank of America to develop ERMA (
Electronic Recording Machine, Accounting) and
magnetic ink character recognition (MICR). The ERMA project was led by computer scientist
Jerre Noe, SRI's assistant director of engineering at the time. As of 2011, MICR remains the industry standard in automated check processing.
Rapid expansion , as designed by
Bill English Douglas Engelbart, the founder of SRI's
Augmentation Research Center (ARC), was the primary force behind the design and development of the multi-user
oN-Line System (or NLS), featuring original versions of modern computer-human interface elements including
bit-mapped displays,
collaboration software,
hypertext, and precursors to the
graphical user interface such as the
computer mouse. As a pioneer of human-computer interaction, Engelbart is arguably SRI's most notable alumnus. He was awarded the
National Medal of Technology and Innovation in 2000.
Bill English, then chief engineer at ARC, built the first prototype of a computer mouse from Engelbart's design in 1964. SRI also developed
inkjet printing (1961) and
optical disc recording (1963).
Liquid-crystal display (LCD) technology was developed at RCA Laboratories in the 1960s, which later became
Sarnoff Corporation in 1988, a wholly owned subsidiary of SRI. Sarnoff was fully integrated into SRI in 2011. In the early 1960s,
Hewitt Crane and his colleagues developed the world's first all-magnetic digital computer, based upon extensions to magnetic core memories. The technology was licensed to
AMP Inc., who then used it to build specialized computers for controlling tracks in the
New York City Subway and on railroad switching yards. Equipped with a
television camera, a
triangulating rangefinder, and bump
sensors, Shakey used software for perception, world-modeling, and acting. The project ended in 1972. SRI's Artificial Intelligence Center marked its 45th anniversary in 2011. , developed by
Don Cone, was the site of the first three-way
internetworked transmission. On October 29, 1969, the first connection on a
wide area network to use
packet switching,
ARPANET, was established between nodes at
Leonard Kleinrock's laboratory at
University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and Douglas Engelbart's laboratory at SRI using
Interface Message Processors at both sites. The following year, Engelbart's laboratory installed the first
TENEX system outside of
BBN where it was developed. In addition to SRI and UCLA,
University of California, Santa Barbara and the
University of Utah were part of the original four network nodes. By December 5, 1969, the entire four-node network was connected. In the 1970s, SRI developed packet-switched radio (a precursor to wireless networking),
over-the-horizon radar,
Deafnet, vacuum microelectronics, and software-implemented
fault tolerance. The first true
Internet transmission occurred on November 22, 1977, when SRI originated the first connection between three disparate networks. Data flowed seamlessly through the mobile
Packet Radio Van between SRI in Menlo Park, California, and the University of Southern California in Los Angeles via
University College London,
England, across three types of networks:
packet radio,
satellite, and the ARPANET. In 2007, the
Computer History Museum presented a 30th-anniversary celebration of this demonstration, which included several participants from the 1977 event. SRI would go on to run the
Network Information Center under the leadership of
Jake Feinler.
Split and diversification The
Vietnam War (1955–1975) was an important issue on college campuses across the United States in the 1960s and 1970s. As a belated response to
Vietnam War protesters who believed that funding from the
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) made the university part of the
military–industrial complex, the Stanford Research Institute split from Stanford University in 1970. The organization subsequently changed its name from the Stanford Research Institute to SRI International in 1977. In 1972, physicists
Harold E. Puthoff and
Russell Targ undertook a series of investigations of psychic phenomena sponsored by the
CIA, for which they coined the term
remote viewing. Among other activities, the project encompassed the work of consulting "consciousness researchers" including artist/writer
Ingo Swann, military intelligence officer
Joseph McMoneagle, and psychic/illusionist
Uri Geller. This
ESP work continued with funding from the US intelligence community until Puthoff and Targ left SRI in the mid-1980s. For more information, see
Parapsychology research at SRI. Social scientist and consumer futurist
Arnold Mitchell created the
Values, Attitudes and Lifestyles (VALS)
psychographic methodology in the late 1970s to explain changing U.S. values and lifestyles. VALS was formally inaugurated as an SRI product in 1978 and was called "one of the ten top market research breakthroughs of the 1980s" by
Advertising Age magazine. Throughout the 1980s, SRI developed
Zylon,
stealth technologies, improvements to
ultrasound imaging, and
many-sorted logic. In computing and software, SRI developed a multimedia electronic mail system, a theory of
non-interference in computer security, a
multilevel secure (MLS)
relational database system called Seaview,
Open Agent Architecture (OAA), a
network intrusion detection system, the
Maude system, a declarative software language, and PacketHop, a peer-to-peer wireless technology to create scalable ad hoc networks. SRI's research in network intrusion detection led to the
patent infringement case
SRI International, Inc. v. Internet Security Systems, Inc. The AI center's robotics research led to Shakey's successor,
Flakey the robot, which focused on fuzzy logic. In 1986, SRI.com became the
8th registered "
.com" domain. The Artificial Intelligence Center developed the
Procedural Reasoning System (PRS) in the late 1980s and into the early 1990s. PRS launched the field of
BDI-based
intelligent agents. In the 1990s, SRI developed a letter sorting system for the
United States Postal Service and several education and economic studies. Military-related technologies developed by SRI in the 1990s and 2000s include
ground- and foliage-penetrating radar, the INCON and REDDE
command and control system for the U.S. military, and IGRS (integrated GPS radio system)—an advanced military personnel and
vehicle tracking system. To train armored combat units during battle exercises, SRI developed the Deployable Force-on-Force Instrumented Range System (DFIRST), which uses
GPS satellites, high-speed wireless communications, and digital terrain map displays. SRI created the
Centibots in 2003, one of the first and largest teams of coordinated, autonomous mobile robots that explore, map, and survey unknown environments. It also created
BotHunter, a free utility for
Unix, which detects
botnet activity within a network. With DARPA-funded research, SRI contributed to the development of
speech recognition and
translation products and was an active participant in DARPA's
Global Autonomous Language Exploitation (GALE) program. SRI also created translation software for use in the
IraqComm, a device which allows two-way, speech-to-speech machine translation between English and colloquial
Iraqi Arabic. In medicine and chemistry, SRI developed
dry-powder drugs,
laser photocoagulation (a treatment for some eye maladies),
remote surgery (also known as telerobotic surgery), bio-agent detection using upconverting phosphor technology, the experimental anticancer drugs
Tirapazamine and
TAS-108,
ammonium dinitramide (an environmentally benign oxidizer for safe and cost-effective disposal of hazardous materials), the
electroactive polymer ("artificial muscle"), new uses for
diamagnetic levitation, and the antimalarial drug
Halofantrine. SRI performed a study in the 1990s for
Whirlpool Corporation that led to modern
self-cleaning ovens. In the 2000s, SRI worked on Pathway Tools software for use in bioinformatics and systems biology to accelerate drug discovery using artificial intelligence and symbolic computing techniques. The software system generates the
BioCyc database collection, SRI's growing collection of
genomic databases used by biologists to visualize genes within a
chromosome, complete biochemical pathways, and full
metabolic maps of organisms.
Early 21st century SRI researchers made the first observation of visible light emitted by oxygen atoms in the night-side
airglow of
Venus, offering new insight into the planet's atmosphere. SRI education researchers conducted the first national evaluation of the growing U.S.
charter schools movement. For the
World Golf Foundation, SRI compiled the first-ever estimate of the overall scope of the U.S.
golf industry's goods and services ($62 billion in 2000), providing a framework for monitoring the long-term growth of the industry. In April 2000, SRI formed Atomic Tangerine, an independent consulting firm designed to bring new technologies and services to market. In 2006, SRI was awarded a $56.9 million contract with the
National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases to provide preclinical services for the development of drugs and antibodies for
anti-infective treatments for
avian influenza,
SARS,
West Nile virus and
hepatitis. Also in 2006, SRI selected
St. Petersburg, Florida, as the site for a new marine technology research facility targeted at ocean science, the
maritime industry and
port security; the facility is a collaboration with the
University of South Florida College of Marine Science and its Center for Ocean Technology. That facility created a new method for underwater
mass spectrometry, which has been used to conduct "advanced underwater chemical surveys in oil and gas exploration and production, ocean resource monitoring and protection, and water treatment and management" and was licensed to Spyglass Technologies in March 2014. In December 2007, SRI launched a spin-off company,
Siri Inc., which Apple acquired in April 2010. In October 2011, Apple announced the Siri personal assistant as an integrated feature of the
Apple iPhone 4S. Siri's technology was born from SRI's work on the DARPA-funded
CALO project, described by SRI as the largest
artificial intelligence project ever launched. Siri was co-founded in December 2007 by Dag Kittlaus (CEO),
Adam Cheyer (vice president, engineering), and
Tom Gruber (CTO/vice president, design), together with
Norman Winarsky (vice president of SRI Ventures). Investors included
Menlo Ventures and Morgenthaler Ventures. For the
National Science Foundation (NSF), SRI operates the advanced modular
incoherent scatter radar (AMISR), a novel relocatable atmospheric research facility. Other SRI-operated research facilities for the NSF include the
Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico and the
Sondrestrom Upper Atmospheric Research Facility in Greenland. In May 2011, SRI was awarded a $42 million contract to operate the Arecibo Observatory from October 1, 2011, to September 30, 2016. The institute also manages the
Hat Creek Radio Observatory in Northern California, home of the
Allen Telescope Array. In February 2014, SRI announced a "
photonics-based testing technology called FASTcell" for the detection and characterization of rare circulating tumor cells from blood samples. The test is aimed at cancer-specific biomarkers for breast, lung, prostate, colorectal, and leukemia cancers that circulate in the bloodstream in minute quantities, potentially diagnosing those conditions earlier. In September 2018, the NSF announced that SRI International would be awarded $4.4 million to establish the backbone organization of a national network. In April 2023,
Xerox announced that it would donate
PARC and its related assets to SRI. As part of the deal, Xerox would keep most of the patent rights inside PARC, and benefit from a preferred research agreement with SRI/PARC. ==Description==