leff@smu.UUCP (Laurence Leff) (07/18/88)
Date: Tue, 12 Jul 88 20:06 EDT From: Laurence Leff <smu!leff@uunet.UU.NET> To: ailist%ai.ai.mit.edu@uunet.UU.NET Subject: Spang Robinson AI Report, Vol. 4, No. 5 Spang Robinson Report on Artificial INtelligence, May 1988, Vol. 4, No. 5 Lead article is on AI and telecommunications Bell Atlantic of Morgantown,WV sells a C based expert system development tool called LASER. The earliest telecom expert systems were in diagnostic, maintenance of switches, cables and trunks. New adventures are in planning, network management, and help-desk systems. Ameritech is working with Bellcore to develop an "Intelligent Network project." Illinois Bell has developed SLEEK to configure subscriber lines and NetDesk to respond to serviceneeds. BBN uses DesigNet internally to prototype customer networks. Network Equipment Technologies is developing a product to do real time diagnostic andmonitoring of private long-distance networks. The centerfold is a table of telecommunications applications, listing nature of product, hardware, cost to develop, etc. _________________________________________________________________________ The next article is about the marketing of pre-built expert systems. Right Writer and Gramentek II (grammar and style checkers) use expert system technology, sold 100,000 copies each and have not been sold as expert systems. ___________________________________________________________________________ The next article is on Symbolic Math Systems Symbolics is porting Macsyma to run under Gold Hill Common Lisp. There have been several delays. Wolfram, developer of SMP, is releasing Mathematica, a new symbolic math system. The manual is being sold by Addison-Wesley and runs on Mac +, not on MS-DOS, perhaps on other systems. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Training: Neurocomputing System/ Expert Systems They give the MIT product, Explorations in Parallel Distributed Processing: A Handbook of Models, Programs and Exercises which consists of a lab manual and two disks for $27.50. It is "unquestionably the best learning tool wehave found so far in this area. We give this solid MIT product two thumbs up." 3,300 copies were sold in thefirst seven weeks. Fifteen thousnad copies of Explorations in the Microstructure of Cognition have been sold. Gold HIll Computers announced AXLE for $1995. It comes with a stand-alone introductory tool plus an expert system development tools. The latter requires GoldWorks. It also needs a PC/AT with five to seven megabytes of extended memory and 7.5 to 11 meg of available hard disk space. Gold Hill is eight million in revenue, 11,000 customers and is 38th largest software firm. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Shorts: Dialog Designer allows users to generate Macintosh Dialog systems and generates LISP code. It works with Perl Lisp and is sold by Coral Software. ((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((( Technology Applications sells Keystone which is a development and delivery tool with a format compatable to Kee. Runningon 286 or 386, it costs $4,000. Perceptics sells Knowledge Shapers which converts rules into decision trees to improve efficiency. It then generates C or Ada code and costs $5,000. It is aimed at developers requiring high speed, e. g. vision and real time. Symbolics now sells Joshua $15,000 expert system development and delivery Concordia $10,000 document developer Statice $10,000 object oriented database Symbolics expects in three years that 40%of their revenue will be software. Symbolics Third quarter revenue $17.4 million, net loss of 4.8 million. Intellicorp - Third quarter Net loos of $269,000 Teknowledge Revenue 3.5 million Losses 1.1 million MCC is now abandoning four years of LISP code for VLSI CAD due to performance problems. Work will be redone in C on Sun Workstations Transform Logic quarterly had 1.5 million revenue, .6 million net loss. Itis a competitameter with Bachman. It does COBOL automatic programming. Gold Hill will port GoldWorks to the Sun 386i. Chestnut Software has released dBLISP a tool to interface dBASE III to Golden Common Lisp (cost $295 without source, $495 with source) NLI's Datatalker (natural language-database interface) is now on the Sun386i. Texas Instruments sells Procedure Consultant which uses fault trees and a visual interface similar ot expert systems. Sells for $495.00. Hecht Nielson Neurocomputers got $50,000 to identify battlefield problems and to design a neurocomputer. Intelligent Technology Group and Starwood Corp will sell INtelligent Portfolio Manger. Computer Sciences Corporation STAR*LAB has released an expert system to help software development. It runs under Smalltalk/V286 and costs $15,000 first copy, $1000 each additional copy.