University of Edinburgh School of Informatics

The University of Edinburgh's School of Informatics was created in 1998 by amalgamating the Department of Artificial Intelligence (DAI), the Department of Computer Science (DCS), the Department of Cognitive Science (CogSci), the Artificial Intelligence Applications Institute, the Institute of Adaptive and Neural Computing and a number of other associated Institutes and computing groups. However this has posed a problem for the School as DAI already had two different buildings in the centre of the city, CogSci had another, and DCS was housed at another site entirely (Kings Buildings, to the south). The three departments were also faced with the problem of integrating three entirely different computer networks (all based on Sun servers, though DCS had been developing Linux clients). This has led to the adopting of LCFG (an operating system configuration and management system) in a joint initiative with CERN (Geneva) to create a centrally managed computer network where clients are entirely updatable from central servers. These servers, all have duplicates at each building to allow for network failure causing as little interruption to computing services as possible. This project has evolved from being based on Solaris to being based on Linux with all clients and servers running standardised software.

The Cowgate fire of December 2002 destroyed one of the buildings of the old AI department, and damaged the renowned AI library.