Top AI Schools in the United States: Stanford University, Stanford, CA

Stanford University

The Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at Stanford University in California is one of the most prestigious destinations to begin your AI learning journey. Replete with courses taught by some of the most well-known names in AI research and development, SAIL, as it is known, was founded with government funding initiated by AI stalwarts Professors John McCarthy and Edward Feigenbaum in 1965.

Students, faculty, alumni and affiliates of the lab are known as SAILors, and have deeply influenced the world of technology. Did you know that the four most valued companies in the world – Apple, Microsoft, Amazon and Alphabet – all have deep connections to SAIL? In fact, the founders of both Microsoft and Apple were first introduced to interactive computing by SAILors.

In all, the ACM Turing Awards have been won by no less than 18 people who were affiliated to this AI lab, some of whom include Marvin Minsky, John McCarthy, Edward Feigenbaum, Niklaus Wirth, Ronald L. Rivest, Alan Kay and Barbara Hubermann Liskov. The Turing Award is considered to be the Nobel equivalent in the field of artificial intelligence.

SAIL was shut down by McCarthy in 1980, but it was revived by Sebastian Thrun, who took his self-driving car technology to what is now Waymo, a Google spinoff from the Google Self-driving Car Project. In fact, it was Lester Earnest, the original designer of SAIL’s graduate study facility, who first delved into self-driving cars with a project called the Stanford Cart. The project was shut down, again by McCarthy, but was later revived by Hans Moravec, then a new Ph.D. student at SAIL.

Today, SAIL offers some of the most comprehensive courses on artificial intelligence, applied machine learning, deep learning, natural language understanding, computer vision, robotics and a host of other areas in applied and theoretical AI and data sciences.

The faculty is among the best in the world, comprising giants of today’s AI landscape like Leonidas Guibas, Dan Jurafsky, Oussama Khatib and many others who have helped establish standards in various areas of AI.

If you’re interested in getting a graduate certificate in artificial intelligence, you should definitely apply to Stanford University as a first option. You can get more information about this on their Admissions page.