Guest Editorial

This special issue follows the discussions held at the 2024 Edition of The Workshop on the History of Artificial Intelligence (WHAI 2024), celebrated in Santiago de Compostela within the framework of the 27th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI 2024). In WHAI, presentations were held about the starting and evolution of artificial intelligence (AI) in several European regions, and about the contribution of European research and researchers to specific paradigms and to the history of AI in general. Following these discussions, this issue includes the extended versions of two papers presented at WHAI, one on how AI originated at the University of Edinburgh and another on the contributions of European researchers to the foundations and applications of model-based reasoning. The special issue is now enriched with a historical perspective of AI in Catalonia, the motivation for the AI community to build and disseminate the timeline of the History of AI in Europe and a proposal for a Collective Memory of Artificial Intelligence, which expands the timeline initiative. All papers are a contribution to The History of AI Timeline, an open project for the future, which also began with WHAI2024 and will be updated and enriched through the discussions of subsequent editions of WHAI.