Adam Coates for acrobatic flight maneuvers of the Stanford autonomous helicopter. Autonomous helicopter flight is widely regarded to be a highly challenging control problem. It is particularly difficult to design controllers for non-stationary maneuvers in which the helicopter goes through various flight regimes, extensively exposing the great complexity of helicopter dynamics. Despite these challenges, human experts can reliably fly helicopters through a wide range of maneuvers, including aerobatic maneuvers at the edge of the helicopter's capabilities.

Pieter Abbeel and Adam Coates developed apprenticeship learning algorithms that leverage expert demonstrations to efficiently learn good controllers for the tasks being demonstrated by an expert. These apprenticeship learning algorithms have enabled their helicopters to significantly extend the state of the art in autonomous helicopter flight and aerobatics. Their experimental results included the first autonomous execution of a wide range of maneuvers, including flips, rolls, loops, auto-rotation landings, chaos and tictocs, which only exceptional human pilots can perform. Their results also included complete air shows, which required autonomous transitions between many of these maneuvers. Their system performs as well, and often even better, than an expert human pilot.

Larry Tesler for creating the PUB document compiler. In 1971, Les Earnest recruited Larry Tesler to create a document compiler that would go well beyond RUNOFF by supporting advanced publishing features. The software Larry built during the ensuing six months featured automatic numbering, headings, multiple columns, figures, footnotes, front and back matter generation, and cross-references. Its power was unprecedented. It also was evidently the first document compiler that provided for embedded spreadsheets. Today, we would call it a "scriptable markup language". The scripting language was a subset of SAIL. In that pre-SGML era, the markup syntax was non-uniform but it did allow arbitrary text to be bracketed by tags.

Because it was written in SAIL and because its syntax required use of the entire SAIL character set, the audience for PUB was limited. Nevertheless, at ARPANET-connected universities with PDP-lOs, many a thesis was formatted using PUB. Because the code was open-source, Russ Taylor added FR-80 microfilm output and Rich Johnsson of Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) added font capabilities.

As with other markup languages, the output was often difficult to predict. At least two PUB users reacted to these shortcomings by developing better languages. Brian Reid, then at CMU, developed Scribe for nontechnical users. He implemented the first version entirely in PUB. Don Knuth developed TeX for authors of mathematical texts. Meanwhile, SGML and C took over as the basis for most future markup and scripting languages, and PUB became a forgotten milestone in digital publishing history.