leff@smu.UUCP (Laurence Leff) (10/19/88)
Summary of Spang Robinson Report on Artificial Intelligence,
September 1988, Volume 4, No. 9
Lead article is on AAAI-88 report.
AT AAAI-88
Apollo, Apple, Data General, DEC, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Sun Microsystems,
Texas Instruments (only one third of thos emarketing AI technologies
or applications were there)
TI now has Explorer II Plus and Exploer III Plux LX
Explorer MP, 16-slot processor, new release of Personal Consultant +
Symbolics introduced MacIvory which combines Genera software and Mac II.
System costs $21900 for a system with one megabyte of memory and 300 megabyte
disk.
Integrated Inference is selling a Peripheral Processor Unit that
has a SM45000 Microprogrammable Inference Processor which
costs $9,950 to $39,950.
DEC will jointly market KEE from IntelliCorp and
Knowledge Craft from Carnegie Group. They also will be selling VAX
Decision Expert (based on GE's GEN-X) and NEXPERT OBJECT.
Intellicorp is promising KEE on the IBM mainframe by December.
it is now being beta tested and will sell for $98,000.
Sun has six per cent of its business in AI. They have 130 AI products
in their Catalyst third party program. ENVOS will be selling the following for
SUN workstations
Xerox's AI Development environment
LOOPS
ROOMS
Flexis, manufacturing cell design
Factories to model a complete factory line.
ENVOS is a Xerox spinoff which is partially owned by Xerox.
Data General will be joint marketing Gold Hill Computers GoldWorks on its
MV family.
Information Builders, known for FOCUS, has acquired Level 5 Research
and developed an interface between their respective products.
Neuron Data will work with Teknowledge to provide consulting and training.
Tree Age Software has produced a system that helps the constructionof
decison tables. It allows equations to be attached to the node and
in calculating the probable financial outcome of a course of decisions.
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Common Lisp
Common LISP comiittee accepted a working group report on a Common Lisp
Object Ssytem. The informaiton is in Object-Oriented Programming
in Common Lisp.
Gold Hill is now selling a student version of Common Lisp for $49.95
and will be upgraded to include CLOS.
They are waiting for an upgrade of Portable Common Loops to
include CLOS compatability.
________________________________________
Neural Networks
Cognitive Software introduced a neural networking product for the Macintosh.
It uses the Levco transputer boards.
Brainmaker is a $99.95 product for Neural networks
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Shorts:
TI will be adding to SPARC proprietary features of LISP machines
such as tags memory management and garbage collection.
Professor Larry Lidsky has developed a commercial product that schedules
maintenance and issues the requisite daily work orders in nuclear power
plants.
DEC will be cutting AI activities due to general business conditions.
Symbolics had June 30, 1988 year end revenues of $81,339,000
with a net loss of $46,036,000. "Symbolics is looking for further
funding and may fact the alternative of liquidation."
Palladian Software of Cambridge released version 2.0 of its Operations Planner
which assesses the impact of changes on a PC based system.
It now has assembly modeling capability and label tailoring.
IBM's network Management system supports an IBM Knowledge Tool interface
to allow network management to be put into the system.
Gensym introduced the G2 network which supports cooperating expert systems
for distributed applications operation in real time.