# Lawrence Roberts **Domain:** Computing / Networking / Research Administration **Doc Type:** Person Node **Maturity:** Historical ## Definition **Lawrence G. Roberts** was a computer scientist and ARPA program leader associated with the development of packet networking and the agency's early speech-understanding initiative. ## 1970s AI Context Roberts initiated the [[wiki/Speech Understanding Research|Speech Understanding Research]] program in 1971 with an ambitious goal of understanding a ten-thousand-word vocabulary spoken by anyone. Its advisory group later narrowed the target to a more controlled task. ## Corpus Context [[articles/Modern Artificial Intelligence in the 1970s|Modern Artificial Intelligence in the 1970s]] places Roberts at the beginning of the SUR/HARPY sequence through which performance evaluation became an institutional problem. ## See Also [[wiki/DARPA|ARPA/DARPA]], [[wiki/ARPANET|ARPANET]], [[wiki/HARPY|HARPY]]