sire@srv.PacBell.COM (Sheldon Rothenburg) (05/30/90)
In article <1990May21.165517.29866@hri.com>, rolandi@sparc9.hri.com (Walter Rolandi) writes: > > How many neural nets are actually in production, regardless of application, > either in medicine, finance, manufacturing, ---anything? > Are folks really applying neural nets in any profitable way? I didn't save the poster's comment, but someone referred to an SAIC developed, neural network based baggage checker as a successful application of neural nets. It does use neural nets to analyze the results of gamma ray bombardment of the air traveller's luggage. It looks for evidence of minute quantities of "escaping" nitrogen which fit the profile of plastic explosives. The NY Times discussed the commercial viability of this system in a recent business technology section. It was mandated last year for purchase and installation at 40 US Airports by the FAA. There has been no compliance. The airlines and the airports do not want to foot the bill for these van-sized, $1M units. The units would require passengers to wait longer and airports are frequently short of space. There is reportedly also the issue of an unacceptable number of false positives. The most egregious common error was mistaking the nitrogen release from women's high heel shoes for plastic explosives. This has allegedly been rectified. Six units were purchased by the US Government. They are the only purchasers so far. The machines are in use in London's Heathrow, New York's Kennedy, and one other airport (I think it was Miami's). So---this is not an unqualified success. My understanding is that much of the successes are in classification types of domains (signal detection) with the kind of military application that would not be widely publicized. Note who funds this research, largely DARPA, ONR etc. Whew! This was longer than I expected. I hope it was helpful. Shelley te
jack@cs.glasgow.ac.uk (Jack Campin) (06/06/90)
sire@srv.PacBell.COM (Sheldon Rothenburg) wrote: > rolandi@sparc9.hri.com (Walter Rolandi) writes: > > Are folks really applying neural nets in any profitable way? > I didn't save the poster's comment, but someone referred to an SAIC > developed, neural network based baggage checker as a successful application > of neural nets. It does use neural nets to analyze the results > of gamma ray bombardment of the air traveller's luggage. It looks for > evidence of minute quantities of "escaping" nitrogen which fit the > profile of plastic explosives. [...] > The machines are in use in London's Heathrow [...] There was a brief flurry of newspaper headlines two weeks ago about an expensive plastic-explosive detector in use at Heathrow that had turned out to be incapable of detecting Semtex except in multi-kilogram quantities (many times the amount needed to destroy an aircraft). The airport was getting rid of it. Do we have the same machine? -- -- Jack Campin Computing Science Department, Glasgow University, 17 Lilybank Gardens, Glasgow G12 8QQ, Scotland 041 339 8855 x6044 work 041 556 1878 home JANET: jack@cs.glasgow.ac.uk BANG!net: via mcvax and ukc FAX: 041 330 4913 INTERNET: via nsfnet-relay.ac.uk BITNET: via UKACRL UUCP: jack@glasgow.uucp