E1AR0002@SMUVM1.BITNET (07/18/86)
Summary of Spang Robinson Report July 1986, Volume 2, No. 7 (Emphasis on AI and Parallel Procesing) Advanced Decision Systems is using the Butterfly for AI development. They are developing a SCHEME using message passing for the Butterfly. They are developing an expert system to balance work loads and manage faults. The system works well on about 10 nodes but past these points, the system performance does not continue to improve as processors are added. It also takes 20 minutes to reboot the machines. Oak Ridge National Laboratories has been using the NCUBE for machine vision research. NASA is using a FLEX/32 parallel machine to develop an expert system shell and an expert system to predict sun spot activity. CLIPS will run on the FLEX/32 and is an OPS5-like system written in C. In the sun spot sytem, the expert system part of the application will run on the Symbolics with the math part running on the FLEX using parallelism. LUCID is developing an implementation of parallel LISP under subcontract to Stanford. The work is starting on a newly purchased Alliant Computer Systems. Cray Research has some proprietary AI projects in its Applications department. ELXSI is looking for a client who needs AI on mainframe class of machine. It also is looking for a vendor to port AI language to ELXSI. Encore Computers and Masscop has active programs to produce AI languages. The Kemp-Carraway Heart institute is doing image analysis of echo cardiograms using fuzzy logic. It has developed a FLOPS product in which rules can fire in parallel and eliminates the need for "truth maintenance" when rules do not have to be executed sequentially. The system uses fuzzy logic with an OPS-5 syntax. One Forth researcher claims to have designed a 1 million logical inference per second expert system on the Novix NC4000 Forth engine (a $150.00 chip). __________________________________________________________________________ News section Carnegie Group has signed an agreement with Hewlett-Packard to offer its Knowledge Craft expert system shell on the HP 9000 Model 320. Lisp Machines has made 18 changes to their machine to improve reliability. They will have an AVP processor that will be twice the speed of their current processor. They are also working on a LISP chip and on improvement of the development environment for non-LISP machines. Intellicorp has doubled its direct sales force and has established a VAR relationship with AMOCO corporation. TI has sold 1000 Explorer work stations of which 200 are in universities. A key reason for Burroughs recent merger with Sperry is Sperry's AI activity.