E1AR0002@SMUVM1.BITNET (Leff, Southern Methodist University) (08/21/87)
Summary of Spang Robinson Report on Artificial Intelligence August 1987, Volume 3, No. 8 "AAAI-87: Underwhelming" is the front page leader. This title is expounded upon by the statment, "There was little research, or product drama to speak of; no blockbuster announcements or revolutionary changes. ... Almost uniformly, products presented were reiterations and refinements." Teknowledge revealed that the time between initial contact and final sale went from six to twelve months. There is also a section on suggestions for future AAAI conferences. Four hundred people attended the neural network tutorial. (?(?(?(?(?(?(?(?(?(?(?(?(?(?(?(?(?(?(?(?(?(?(?(?(?(?(?(?(?(? Carnegie Group: A Company in Transition Carnegie Group will announce the appointment of a new president, Dennis Yablonsky. He used to be president and Chief Operating Officer at Cincom. Carnegie group has a relationship with CMU to serve as the technology transfer outlet for applied computing research. Carnegie Group will now be selling Knowledge Craft in a series of modules. The company is still unprofitable, it is declaring a positive cash flow. Some of its's projects include a) system to automate the design of digital circuits b) a system for assembly path programming c) a shop planning and scheduling system for Boeing d) a forger shop scheduler for Ellwood City Forge Co. e) an autombobile troubleshooting diagnostic system that will be deployed across Ford Motor's system car dealership network. f) a telemarketing system g) a system for a financial insitutution to analyze English language news stories, financial statements and bank telexes. &^&^&^&^&^&^&^&^&^&^&^&^&^&^&^&^&^&^&^&^&^&^&^&^&^&^&^&^&^&^ SHORTS (including announcements at the AAAI-87) TI now has a $1900 utility to convert a Personal Consultant Plus expert ssytem to one that is embedable in C and runable under UNIX. Keystone is an expert system can port applications built on Intellicorp's 2.1 to a 286 for delivery. Expertelligence's Prototyper puts an object or Smalltalk like structure around Lisp. Knowledge Garden exhibited a tool that uses hypertext and expert systems. Knowledge maker is a an $99 inductive-rule generating system that geneerates rules for KnowledgePro, Insight 2+, M.1 and Micro Expert. If/then is a $70.00 expert system that runs on top of Lotus. (A product review for this is also in this Spang Robinson Report.) Intellicorp has announced a ten percent reduction in staffing and declared that it will report a substantial loss for the quarter and fiscal year ending June 30, 1987. Teknowledge will be selling several products under a Copernicus architecture including a development Facility, deelivery facility, database integration system, COBOL integration system and TeKSolutions Applicatin Pakcks. Artificial Intelligence Corporaiton has formed a consortium of corporations to develop an expert system shell for IBM mainframes. APEX has a Computed Text program that generates end user reports from Common LISP products. Lucid Common Lisp will be ported to HP's 9000 Series 300 and 800 computers. Aion and Arthur Anderson will jointly deelop a high-performance version of Aion's application expecution system. MSA Advanced Manufacturing Inc. has signed an agreement allowing it to use Aion products to develop manufacturing expert systems. Primefax of San Antionio, TX will be developing repair support software. Nihon Digital Equipment Corporaiton will be distributing Artificial Intelligence Technologies' AIT Lisp TOOLKIT. Sun and Schlumberger will be jointly developing AI software for the SUNS. Sun introduced a Symbolic Programming Environment for its Sun 3 and Sun 4 workstations that will provide the powers of a dedicated LISP system while remaining a general purpose work station. Inference Corporationa nd Lockheed-California have introduced a system to audit medical claims. Symbolics has introduced a software package that enable susers to deliver applications packages on its work stations. Gensym Corporation unveiled a real-time expert system for process control applications. Prices start at $36,000. BBN Advanced Computers has a LISP for its Butterfly parallel processing system costing $12,000. Quantun InKNOWvations Corporation is sellling a knowledge-base environment for 386 based machines and includes a relational database. Bookman Consulting introduced a system to assess the technical knowledge and proficiency of computer programmers. -[-[-[-[-[-[-[-[-[-[-[-[-[-[-[-[-[-[-[-[-[-[-[-[-[-[-[-[-[-[ New Bindings Teknowledge named Peter Weber new president and executive officer. Michael P. Coleman, formerly vice president of Marketing and sales and McDonnell Douglas Computer Sales was named IntelliCorp vice president of marketing and sales. Spencer Leyton was named vice president of business development for Symantec Corporation of Cupertino, CA. Was vice president of sales and business development at Borland International. Randy J. Raynor is manager of development for Inference Corporation (was vice president of product development at UCCEL)