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From: sir@PacBell.COM (Sheldon Rothenberg)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: ** Some impressions on AAAI-90 **
Summary: Some other impressions
Message-ID: <2205@pbhyg.PacBell.COM>
Date: 8 Aug 90 18:47:51 GMT
References: <665@babcock.cerc.wvu.wvnet.edu>
Organization: Pacific * Bell, San Ramon, CA
Lines: 52

In article <665@babcock.cerc.wvu.wvnet.edu>, siping@cathedral.cerc.wvu.wvnet.edu (Siping Liu) writes:
> I met with a few acquaintances from other organizations in AAAI-90
> and we talked about our impression on this conference. They have
> been to nearly all of the previous AAAI annual conferences
> and they told me it is no longer a great event as it used to be from
> the numbers of attendants and the papers submitted. I expected a
> larger exibition but it turned our that many main vendors were missing.
> Does anyone care to comment on this? 

I am still sorting my opinions out on this conference, having been to only
one other (IJCAI '89). Ronald Brachman, in his talk on the Future of 
Knowledge Representation talked about the increasing specialization of
presentations and bemoaned that this increasing narrowness of effort
was excluding many fine papers which bordered on several areas, e.g.
planning and representation or machine learning. 

The attempt to put together the AI on-line sessions to draw those
interested in real-world applications got strong criticism from the
attendees to whom I talked other than the ART presented "Six Companies
reveal the Results Of Expert Systems Successes."

The commercial part of the show was much less impressive. People are spending
less to promote their products. There appears to be a pervasive feeling
that AAAI attracts many faculty and students who do not have money to 
spend, so why push too hard at this vendor show. DEC was the slickest, 
Bolesian the most sexist, with a model in a toga handing out roses (this
display, whose backdrop had columns and was supposed to remind you of
a Roman temple) to indicate its classic nature. IBM was the most underplayed,
trying to show off applications rather than sell hardware or their
tools. DEC's focus, as was Apollo's and Gensym's and Nexpert's to some
degree was to show off applications, some of which were very impressive.
DEC had a stunning environmental system which it developed for the
minister of the interior of the German state of Baden-Wurtenberg (sic).
Andersen Consulting showed off some flashy demos in KEE and Gensym's G2.
The German system was written, by the way, in Lisp and Mercury, a European
shell.

The new products which garnered the most attention were by Intellicorp:
Kappa, the PC shell developed by Megaknowledge and ProKappa, a product
they developed for the workstation market. It looks like ProKappa will
give Nexpert a strong run for the money and will eventually supplant 
Kee. It is object oriented, is fast, looks slick, and avoids the Lisp
syntax that kept KEE from mass usage.

This is getting long so I'll cut here and may post some more. Also note the
relative absence of connectionists, who now have their own conference.
Suspect the same process is already underway with robotics and vision
folks.

I too would like to hear the impressions of others...

Shelley