The sequence of projects listed here started in the department for Numerical Analysis at Uppsala university around 1969. (It was really the department for 'Information Processing' but Numerical Analysis was the major part). Erik Sandewall, who obtained his Ph.D. there in 1969, engaged a few graduate students in forming a 'study group' in the area of software methods. The Swedish term, 'datalogi', corresponds to 'computer science' in the U.S. sense, including artificial intelligence.
The initial members of the group were Anders Haraldsson, Hans-Jürgen Holstein (a sociology student), Mats Nordström and Jaak Urmi, besides Erik Sandewall. Several additional students joined soon after, in particular Sture Hägglund, Lennart Drugge, René Reboh, Anders Beckman and Östen Oskarsson. The financing for the students in the group came almost exclusively from external grants and from the university's computation center, headed by Werner Schneider.
By 1975 the DLU group had grown to have 15 members, most of them as graduate students. At that point 10 out of the 15 members moved to join the 'datalogi' group at Linköping University after Erik Sandewall had obtained a professor position there.
Already in Linköping was a group formed by a lecturer, Nils Lindecrantz, and several graduate students: Hans Lunell, Christian Gustafsson (who later changed his family name to Krysander) and Arne Börtemark. The datalogi activities in Linköping were originally a division in the Mathematics department.
The computer science activites were able to grow due to a generous funding system and a rapid increase in the number of students. A separate Department of Computer and Information Science (IDA) was formed in 1981, based on the 'datalogi' activities, a group for business information systems ('Administrativ Databehandling') headed by Lecturer Eva-Chris Svensson, and a division for computer systems, headed by Professor Harold Lawson which had until then been in the Department of Electrical Engineering.
A number of senior researchers from other universities joined the department during these and following years. Please see the IDA website and other historical sites for additional information.
The IDA department has been organized since its start as a number of research groups, each of which is called a laboratory. The structure of research groups has changed over the years. The present website is the combined history of groups or 'laboratories' that were or are headed by Erik Sandewall.
At present we are experiencing a period of difficulty due to the combination of two factors: a general downturn in the research funding for information technology in Sweden, and a particular difficulty in obtaining funding for continued work on UAV technology which is where we have spent most of our efforts during the last seven years. I profit from the present relative lull in terms of projects for developing the historical overview in the CAISOR website.