[mod.ai] July Spang Robinson Report summary

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.