SICS was founded in 1985 in cooperation with
KTH in
Kista at the initiative of
Ericsson and
Televerket. The creation of SICS was a response to the creation of the Institute for New Generation Computer Technology (ICOT) by Japan's
Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI). At this time similar organizations were created in the United States (
Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation) and in the European Commonwealth (
European Strategic Programme on Research in Information Technology and
European Center for Research & Consultancy). The main driving force was that Japan had started to create
Fifth Generation Computer Systems, that using massive parallelism in hardware and a strong focus on the programming language
Prolog had set out to create computers capable of communication in
natural languages. One of the first projects initiated by SICS was related to parallel execution of Prolog, and already in the first year of activity SICS initiated development of a Prolog implementation named
SICStus Prolog, featuring a Prolog-dialect, a compiler and a virtual machine. Around 1991 this implementation started to see use in the field of
constraint programming. SICS today explores the digitalization of products, services and businesses. In January 2005, SICS had about 88 employees, of whom 77 were researchers, 30 with PhD degrees. , SICS had about 200 employees, of which 160 were researchers, 83 with
PhD degrees. The institute is headquartered in the
Kista district of
Stockholm, with the main office in the Electrum building. ==Software==