E1AR0002@SMUVM1.BITNET.UUCP (02/28/87)
Summary of the Spang Robinson Report February 1987, Vol. 3, No. 2 Development Tools Migrate From Micro to Mainframe Discussion of the trend for companies selling expert system software for IBM PC's to put their systems on higher level machines such as minis and mainframes and vice versa. Some companies are porting major applications to microcomputer tools that ostensibly offer "less functionality." Examples of this are a paint manufacturing application ported from KEE to Insight and another port from Inference's ART to ACORN. __________________________________________________ Connecting to the Corporate Database KEE connection provides an interface with the SQL query language. A data base relation maps into a class with a database attribute mapping into a slot. Data is downloaded from the database as needed to solve the problem. Projects to directly integrate the expert system into the database include Postgres at Berkeley, Probe at Computer Corporation of America and Starburst at IBM. The prices for development versions of the system range from $18,000 to $45000 with delivery versions ranging from $3000 to $18,750 depending upon size of VAX. __________________________________________________ Shorts Hitachi, IBM Japan and Carnegie Mellon are developing a multi-lingual machine translation system. They have already developed a system for analyzing the natural language utility specifications. Fuji Electric has developed an expert system to control turbines for a thermal power generation system. Also, thermostats are selected and configured for Tohoku oil. Fanac plans to build an intelligent robot integrating three-dimensional vision and touch sensors. Matsushita is developing a LISP machine with over 50 times the power of a VAX 8600. Expertelligence is selling an application builder for the Macintosh for non-programming users. Applied Expert Systems (APEX) has laid off a number of employees. They are selling a system to help financial institutions expand client relationships. Digitalk has announced a new release of Smalltalk/V. Extensions provide EGA capabilities, multiprocessing, DOS call features and music. Teknowledge reports revenues of $10,867,7000 for the latter half of 1986. Symbolics will be financing Whitney/Demos, a Los Angeles-based developer of computer graphics and animation technology. Symbolics will be getting marketing rights to various in-house programs of Whitney/Demos and will be providing them with various graphic workstations Europeans spent $200 million on expert system development. Ovum sells a complete report on European expert system development for $495.00. Halbrecht associates predicts a great deal of senior and mid-level turnover of AI professionals. ___________________________________________________________________ Review of the Sixth International Workshop on Expert Systems and Their Applications (Proceedings).