After three decades of disappointments, artificial intelligence researchers are making progress.

Recent developments made possible spam filters, Microsoft’s new ClearFlow traffic maps, and the driverless robotic cars that Stanford teams have built for competitions sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

Daphne Koller, a researcher at Stanford, is creating a set of computational tools for artificial intelligence that can be used by scientists and engineers to do things like predict traffic jams, improve machine vision and understand the way cancer spreads.