leff@smu.UUCP (Laurence Leff) (05/08/88)
Spang Robinson Report on Artificial Intelligence
Volume 4, No. 4, April 1988
Lead article is on Expert system applications and MIS.
There is a discussion on how MIS people can avoid the high costs of
"knowledge engineers," CASE tools, the use of low end systems and
availability of tools for mainframes.
* Expert Systems never eliminated employees
* Cultural issues
* Problems in using COBOL to do the job
Blue Cross, claim analysis system reduce the time to evaluate a claim
from two weeks to fifteen-30 minutes. 145 out of 155 claims were
handled by a medical review system.
Also provided is a table of some applications with
information such as whether the
systems paid for themselves, barriers overcame and software:
Blue Cross - claims analysis and medical review
Data General - MIS department
DEC - order handling
McDermott Corporation - used Bachman Re-engineering tool set
Northern Telecom - Engineering Change Manager
Provident Life - Credit Union loan analysis
Shearson Lehman - Bachman Re-engineering tools
Oil Company - Two Engineering Application
________________________________________
IEEE Conference on Artificial Intelligence Applications Review.
There were 620 attendees consisting of people developing commerical
AI applications. Complaint was lack of technical content.
Session on expert system project failures showed "cultural planning"
and "focus on real business planning rather than on technical experimentation"
necessary to avoid failure
________________________________________
Carnegie Group of Pittsburgh and Texas Instruments have announced an expert
system shell for troubleshooting com plex machine failures and process
planners. The development enginee runs on Explorer with capability
to translate applications to C or IBM PC/AT.
________________________________________
Shorts:
Integrated Analytics sells Market Mind which alerts traders to
significant trading patterns. It is written in C.
AI Corp has announced "KBMS" available by June 1. It supports IBM
mainframes including MVS, VM, CICS, TSO, IMS, CMS, DB/2 and SQL/DS.
Cooperative Technology is a new start up that offers management consulting
to custom software development. It is headed by William Turpin who
developed the Personal Consultant Series from TI.
DEC announced that in its network and communications products division,
AI integration has generated a 300 percent increase in revenues, a 20 percent
rise in gross profit margins and a 285 percent increase in product
reliability.
Lucid will be bundled with KEE on 80386 and Wisdom Systems' Concept Modeller.
Nihon will be giving Symbolics a million dollars in funding for
the development of a system based on the Ivory chip.
Anza is now selling a diskette-based bibliographic reference list
for neural networks.
John McDermott has left Carnegie Mellon University to go to DEC.