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AIList Digest Volume 4 Issue 089
AIList Digest Tuesday, 15 Apr 1986 Volume 4 : Issue 89
Today's Topics:
Bibliography - Recent Articles #4
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Date: WED, 10 JAN 84 17:02:23 CDT
From: E1AR0002%SMUVM1.BITNET@WISCVM.WISC.EDU
Subject: Recent Articles #4
%A Richard L. Wexelblat
%T Editorial
%J SIGPLAN Notices
%V 21
%N 3
%D MAR 1986
%P 1
%K AI03 AA17 Queens Problem H03 ADA
%X SIGPLAN is having a contest to determine the
best solution for the N<=8 Queens problem using
concurrency in ADA in a substantive manner.
Deadline for submissions is June, 1986.
%A Scott Mace
%T Ansa Upgrades Paradox, Drops Copy Protection
%J InfoWorld
%V 8
%N 11
%D MAR 17, 1986
%P 3
%K Paradox AA09 H01
%X Ansa software announced upgrades to its system and has dropped
copy protection
%T Resources
%J InfoWorld
%V 8
%N 11
%D MAR 17, 1986
%P 17
%K AI01 H01 Cahners Publishing Company Users Group Expert Systems Strategies
%X The New York IBM PC Users Group has announced a special interest
group for Expert Systems. The meetings are held March 25. For more info
contact NYPC, Suite 614, 30 Wall Street, 10005 (212) 533 NYPC. Cahners
Publishing Company produces a newsletter called Expert Systems Strategies.
Charter rate is $207, regular rate is $247. Address is Cahners Publishing
Co. P. O. Box 59, New Town Branch Boston, MA 02258 (617) 964 3030
%A Cornelius Willis
%T The Problems with AI
%J InfoWorld
%V 8
%N 11
%D MAR 17, 1986
%P 20
%K Insight 1 Level Five Research AI01 T03 H02 AT14 AT12
%X The director of marketing for Level Five Research writes that the
reason that artificial intelligence has not been embraced by corporate
MIS directors is that the charges for Lisp machines and knowledge engineers
are way too high. He also claims that his product, Insight 1, is
"the most widely used knowledge engineering tool in the world."
%A Peggy Watt
%T Ansa Move Woos Corporate Users
%J ComputerWorld
%D MAR 17, 1986
%V 20
%N 11
%P 1+
%K H01 AA09 Paradox Ashton-Tate AT04
%X Ansa Software's Paradox has been approved by only about two dozen
large-account evaluators. In November and December, they sold 1,449
copies against 13,156 copies of Ashton Tate's DBASE products. In January,
it was 813 copies of Paradox against 6,154 copies of DBASE. Ansa
is investigating the micro-to-mainframe data base file exchange.
%A Douglas Barney
%T AI-Based Financial Systems Allocates Assets Based on Goals
%J ComputerWorld
%D MAR 17, 1986
%V 20
%N 11
%P 6
%K H02 AI01 AA06 First Financial Planner Services Plan Power Xerox personal
planning
%X discussion of First Financial Planner Services, Plan Power which
is an expert system that performs personal
financial planning. It has 6000 rules.
%A Elisabeth Horwitt
%T AI Integration Gets a Shot in the ARm as Vendors Link Products
%J ComputerWorld
%D MAR 17, 1986
%V 20
%N 11
%P 47+
%K Harvey Newquist Symbolics H03 SNA Texas Instruments Explorers Gould
LMI SUN Apollo AT16
%X Symbolics has announced a link to IBM mainframes via SNA.
Flavors Technology brought out a high speed bus to bus link between
Lisp Machine, Inc. machines or Texas Instruments Explorer's.
and Gould, Inc. superminicomputers. It costs $36,000.
Texas Instruments plans to integrate their Explorer with SUN and
Apollo.
%A Eric L. Schwartz
%A Bjorn Merker
%T Computer-Aided Neuroanatomy: Differential Geometry of Cortical
Surfaces and an Optimal Flattening Algorithm
%J IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications
%D MAR 1986
%V 6
%N 3
%P 36-44
%K AA10 AI08
%X describes the mapping of the visual field on the visual cortex
of the monkey
%T Apollo, TI to TIE Network, Workstation
%J Electronic News
%V 32
%N 1593
%D MAR 17, 1986
%P 18+
%K SUN LMI Flavor Common LISP Compact Lisp Machine H02 AT02 AT16
%X [Much of the material in this article was reported
recently elsewhere in AILIST; only new stuff is in this abstract]
Apollo will be selling a $3,500 Common Lisp. The link between
Apollo and TI will be made using Apollo's Open Systems Tookit
and TI's Flavor package. Apollo also hopes to use TI's single
chip LISP machine. LMI's marketing director said that it is
has always been the position of his company that Lisp machines
and LISP cannot survive alone. He predicted that alignment of
TI, SUN and Apollo will not affect LMI. Furthermore, he predicts
that the single chip LISP machine development effort at TI
will take at least 12 months.
%A Richard H. McSwain
%A Robert W. Goutld
%T Taking the Fatigue Out of Fracture Surface Analysis
%J Metal Progress
%D MAR 1986
%V 129
%N 4
%K AA05 Metallurgy Failure Analysis AI06 striation Fourier
Transform
%X Describes use of the Fourier transform method to analyze
the fracture surface of a material failing from fatigue.
[When a material is repeatedly subjected to changes in
stress, it may fail from fatigue. This is even true when
the maximum load is well below the limit which would cause
failure if it was applied in a steady state condition. When
this happens, a characteristic striation appears on the
fracture surface. This can be viewed with Scanning
Electron Microscopy or even with the naked eye or magnifying
glass. LEFF]
%A Barry Meier
%T Robot Subs Begin to Surface as Versatile Exploration
Tools
%J Wall Street Journal
%D MAR 7, 1986
%V 78
%N 46
%P 19
%K Deep Ocean Engineering Company
International Submarine Engineering Ltd.
AA03 AI07 AA18 AA19 GA04
%X Describes some uses and research therein for robot
submarines:
Canadian Oceanographers will use one to hunt for oil
below the icecap. It will be dropped through
a hole in the ice 1000 miles from the North Pole.
It will then navigate in a grid like pattern in
a ten square mile area mapping the bottoms. Sonar
will help the sub avoid icebergs. The thing is being
build by International Submarine Engineering Ltd.
.sp 1
R&D exists in applications
of submarines to prospecting, repair of oil installations,
perform rescue and recovery missions, and engage in
spying.
Work is done on developing sensors based on sound,
AI systems to help robots react to currents and fiber
optics for exchange of data with mother ships.
Deep Ocean Engineering Company has developed a system
of sensors to detect the weight and composition of
objects under water. They are using tones to inform
the operator of what the robot has in its arms.
They are also perfecting AI to the point that submarines
can be free-swimming. NASA is funding some of this work
since they hope to apply the results to space travel.
%T Advertisement
%J BYTE
%D APR 1986
%P 284
%V 11
%N 4
%K Solution Systems TransLisp T01 H01 AT01
%X Lisp for IBM PC for only $75.00 It is a 230+ function
subset of Common Lisp and has MSDOS interface and graphics.
(Solution Systems also sells the BRIEF editor
%T Star Wars Divides A Campus
%J BusinessWeek
%D March 10, 1986
%P 82-86
%N 2936
%K Carl Hewitt MIT
%X Discusses reactions of MIT people to SDI funding
Carl Hewitt has decided to apply for SDI funding.
The AI Lab at MIT received 55 percent of its 8 million
dollar budget from the defense department.
%A Michael Lesk
%T Writing to be Searched: A Workshop on Document Generation Principles
%J SIGIR Forum
%V 19
%N 1-4
%D WINTER 1986
%P 9-14
%K Cucumber Information Knowledge Systems AI02 A08 AA14
%X "It is now possible to design full-text retrieval systems that
accept conventional docuements and questions in natural English, and then retrie
ve
documents ofr passages from documents that probably answer the questions."
Cucumber Information
Systems and Knowledge Systems, Inc. sell such systems.
A high degree of grammatical variation does not seem important to produce
natural effects in short paragraphs (as evidenced by Karen Kukich's
stock market report generator)" "Syntax is much less important
for retrieval than semantics; you need to know what the words mean more
than you need to know their relationship." "Editing manuals to make
them suitable for machine translation, requiring simple translation, has
turned out to make them better in the original language as well."
%A Susanne M. Humphrey
%T Automated Classification and Retrieval Program: Indexing Aid Project
%J SIGIR Forum
%V 19
%N 1-4
%D WINTER 1986
%P 16-17
%K AA14 AI02 AA01
%X Lister Hill Center of the National Library of Medicine is
developing this system to generate indices consistent with
those normally used by MEDLINE. They are using a frame based system.
%A Frank Tansey
%T Guru's Power Cuts Out the Competition
%J Infoworld
%V 8
%N 12
%D MAR 24, 1986
%P 14
%K AI01 AA09 AA06 university administration residency T03 H01 AT17
%X This is a review of GURU, an expert system tool that interfaces
with MDBS's Knowledge Man. It supports up to 3000 rules, forward
and backward chaining, inexact reasoning. The system also includes
a text processor, graphics, spreadsheet, graphics and telecommunications.
The system received a rating of 5.8 out of 10 with very good
for performance and ease of use, satisfactory for documentation and value,
It takes 1700 pages of documentation to describe the system.
.sp 1
As of much interest as the review itself are the two systems that were
two expert systems developed using GURU described in this review.
The first was a system to assist in determining residency status
of students
for the California Universities for the purpose of determining
tuition. The final expert system was judging cases with the
experience of a person with six months to one year in
evalulating such matters. The system was already able to
impress people in the field with only fifty rules.
They also wrote an expert system to do personal financial planning.
This took 300 rules and embodied the entire expertise of the
person writing the software.
.sp 1
[I read elsewhere that MDBS has sold $6,000,000 of these packages
since they came out. They cost $3,000 each. MDBS is known
for Knowledge Man, probably the most powerful relational
data base for micros. Keep in mind that InfoWorld tends
to downgrade systems if they weren't written so as to be used
by people lacking knowledge or aptitude for computers and
thus most readers of AILIST would have a higher opinion of the
package than 5.8 out of 10. LEFF ]
%T Chairman Resigns From Automatix
%J Electronic News
%D Mar 24, 2986
%V 32
%N 1594
%K AT16 AT11 AI07
%X Philippe Villers resigned as chairman of robotics maker
Automatix. Automatix has yet to turn a profit and lost $5,594,000
in 1985 and $14,193,000 in 1984.
%A Michael Bucken
%T Symbolics Starts VAR Program for 36-BIT Processing Systems
%J Electronic News
%D Mar 24, 2986
%V 32
%N 1594
%K AA04 H02 AT16
%X Symbolics has signed its first VAR contract with ICAD which
is developing an engineering design software package. 40 percent
of Symbolics customers are using the system for applications other than
artificial intelligence. The system has sold about 2000 processors.
%A Criag Stedman
%T Management Seeking GCA Robotics Group
%J Electronic News
%D Mar 24, 2986
%V 32
%N 1594
%K Industrial Systems Group AT16 AI07
%X The management of the robotics division of GCA Corporation
is trying to arrange a leveraged buyout. The division has lost
10 to 15 million dollars on sales of about $35 million.
%A Tony Baer
%T Finding the Titanic
%J Mechanical Engineering
%V 108
%N 3
%D MAR 1986
%K Jason Angus control chattering ARGO submersible salvage
underwater AI06 AI07
%X One of the problems in underwater vision is backscattering
from the light source of suspended particles. A good way of
fighting this problem is to mount the light source away from
the camera. The new lighting system on the Angus has yielded readable
images of areas about as large as a city block. A system called
Jason is being developed that will mount in the ARGO submersible.
This system will be self-propelled and have its own manipulator arm.
However, it is NOT going to need artificial intelligence [Emphasis mine,
Leff]
%A J. Houseley
%T Getting a Grip on Sensors
%J IEEE Spectrum
%V 23
%N 4
%D APR 1986
%P 8
%K tactile sensors AI07 AT12 AT13
%X This is a comment by an article by Paolo Darlo and Danilo De Rossi
of August 1985 on the subject of using tactile sensors in gripping
objects in robotics. In a human being picking up an egg, the
human being would apply enough force to prevent the weight of
the egg from deflecting it. In gripping a hammer, friction between
the hammer is used. There is a comment on the role of learning in
applying the right amount of force to adjust for the change when
the hammer impacts the nail. (There is also a response by
the author.
%T Advertisement
%J Byte
%D MAR 1986
%V 11
%N 3
%K AT03 H01 T03 AA18 AT01 Thunderstone Corporation Clarity Software
Comprehension Logic-Line
%X Add for Thunderstone Corporation's Logic Line 1 ($250), Logic-Line
2 ($400.00) and Comprehension ($75.00) for the IBM PC It is not clear
from the advertisement what LOGIC-LINE1 and LOGIC-LINE2 actually do.
Comprehension is supposed to enable a person to diagnose their
weakness in a given discipline. Some quotes from this advertisement:
"Our success has effectively stompted the mortal spit out of the brain
damaged geeks whose rancid cells have been polluting the gene pool of
legitimate AI professionals." "LOGIC-LINE1, a major breakthrough in
sub-cognitive mathematics, distills the DNA/RNA like analog to any
writer's thought processes. It allows you to search any textbase for
actual concepts and inference patterns unique to that writer. In
other words, even though Einstein may never have had a single thought
about ecology, you can apply his thinking patterns to solving
ecological problems!" "And at its highest level? You just might use
Thunderstone tools to save the free world, again. That's right:
Again! LOGIC-LINE 2 began with the mathematics of possibilistic
analysis and recursion (developed by men like Alan Turing and Norbert
Weiner) that directly led the Wellington College team to breaking the
German naval codes in World War II."
%A Melissa Calvo
%T Japanese Firms Granted License by Compuserve
%J InfoWorld
%P 14
%V 8
%N 8
%D FEB 24, 1986
%K Network Information Forum Nissho Iwai Corporation machine translation AI02
%X Fujitsu announced an English to Japanese translator which works
at 60,000 words per hour.
Compuserve and Network Information Forum plan a database exchange which
might use this translation software.
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End of AIList Digest
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