SGAI: The Specialist Group on Artificial Intelligence


SGAI is the British national AI society. It is part of the British Computer Society and has been a member of EurAi, the European Association for Artificial Intelligence (formerly ECCAI), since 1992. SGAI was founded in 1980 by British AI pioneer Donald Michie and has played a substantial role in the development of the field in Britain for over 40 years.

It is probably best known for its long-running annual series of international conferences (AI-200x) held in Cambridge each December and as the host of the annual BCS prize competition for ‘Progress towards Machine Intelligence’. SGAI acted as the national host for the world's major AI conference, IJCAI-05, in Edinburgh in August 2005, thus returning IJCAI to Britain for the first time since 1971.