History
The Australian AI conference was established with a one-off cash grant from DITAC (the old Department of Industry, Technology and Commerce) that was arranged by John Whitelaw when he was “Canberra’s AI person” and worked with Elizabeth Smith.
The first conference was held in Sydney in 1987. At some stage (we can’t remember when) the ACS formed a “National Committee for Artificial Intelligence and Expert Systems” with Professor Robin Stanton as Chair. Stephen Hood (DSTO Adelaide) was the second chair. John Debenham became the third chair possibly at the PRICAI meeting in 1996. Chengqi Zhang was elected as the fourth chair from 2005. The original formation of the committee definitely occurred prior to, and probably because of, Australia’s successful bid (again financed by DITAC through John Whitelaw) to bring the premier AI conference, IJCAI (International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence), to Sydney in 1991. Professor Ross Quinlan (UTS) was strongly in favour of aligning AI activities with the ACS and he would certainly have had something to do with the conference becoming an ACS conference. Ross Quinlan and Mary O'Kane flew to Canberra to discuss things with Robin Stanton at some early stage, shortly after that the AI Research Report that John Debenham edited became an ACS publication.
The Committee was renamed to The ACS National Committee on Artificial Intelligence on 4 December 2006.