[mod.ai] Canadian Artificial Intelligence/ September 1986

E1AR0002@SMUVM1.BITNET (10/10/86)

Summary No. 9

Report on current budget and increase in dues

The Dalhousie Business School got a Sperry Explorer Lisp Machine
and a copy of KEE.  They are developing a system to manage foreign
debts and plan an estimator for R&D projects, intelligent computer
aided instruction and auditing.

Xerox Canada has set up an AI support work

Logicware has been acquired by the Nexa Group

British Columbia Advanced Systems Institute will be set up to do
research on AI, robotics, microelectronics.

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Two assessments on the Japanese Fifth Generation project:

ICOT is developing AI systems for fishing fleets, train control,
microchip design, natural language transition.  There are 600 researchers
working on fifth generation projects and 600 on robotics.

1986-1988 funding is 102 billion yen and 1982-92 funding is 288 billion.

The English to Japanese system will require post-editing and applies
standard techniques.

The Japanese have abandoned 'Delta', their parallel inference engine
is 'gathering dust'  They alledgedly threw 'hardware engineers' into
a Prolog environment for which they 'had no background or interest'

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Report on Natural Language Understanding Research at University of
Toronto

Reviews of Bertholt Klaus Paul Horn's "Robot Vision"
Theoretical Aspects of Reasoning About Knowledge: Proceedings of the 1986
Conference