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.

Les Earnest for helping to start ARPAnet and creating the social networking program FINGER. During 1967-68 Les Earnest was a member of the ten person startup committee for the first packet switching network, which came to be called ARPAnet and later turned into the Internet. Their initial performance specifications were not too foresighted in that only two functions were specified: file transfer and remote computing, which came to be called Telnet. However the file transfer capability was adequate to support email when it came into use a short time later and the tight round trip communication requirement needed for Telnet made possible the much later interactive web services.

In the 1970s Les created the FINGER program, which could show who was currently logged in and, if not, when they last logged out. This was to help keep track of SAIL people who worked at all hours of the day and night. Given that nearly all SAIL software was made publicly accessible, a number of other laboratories with similar computer systems took copies of FINGER for their own use and soon requested that a network versioij be developed that could check on people at other sites, which Mark Crispin developed. FINGER also allowed each person to create a Plan file, tied to their email address, to describe such things as their planned work schedule or vacation plans. However in short order FINGER became a de facto social networking system, given that it facilitated finding which of one's friends were online and allowed people to post what amounted to personal blogs some 30 years before the term "blog" came into use. For more see http://asia.cnet.com/reviews/pcperipherals/0,39051168,61998604,00.htm . A Unix version was created by a UC Berkeley group that unfortunately had a security loophole that was exploited by the first Internet Worm, resulting in FINGER being suppressed on security grounds. Google is now developing a modem version called WEBFINGER.

Martin Frost for creating the first network news service. Martin Frost, with input from John McCarthy and Les Earnest, created two successive news services that each was the first of its kind. Beginning in 1972, APE could be used either to connect to the Associated Press newswire or to search recent stories based on combinations of pre-selected keywords. Beginning in 1974 NS (for News Service) indexed and stored stories from both the Associated Press and New York Times news wires and allowed users to either search for recent stories using any combination or words or leave a standing request to be notified whenever a story appears that contains the specified words. NS was widely used by people on ARPAnet for general news information.

During the Three Mile Island nuclear incident in 1979 the emergency response team at Lawrence Livermore Lab found that they needed up-to-the-minute information on developments at the site but couldn't get it until they were provided with access to NS. During the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989, Chinese students in the U.S. wanted to pass information to friends in China but there were no Internet connections there then. NS was then set up to locate news about China and forward it to a student distribution list so that they could print the stories and fax them home. Commercial news services were developed later that now provide similar functionality to anyone who wants it and is willing to pay a subscription fee.