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From: tomh@proxftl.UUCP (Tom Holroyd)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.neural-nets
Subject: Re: Neural Nets???  BUMBLE-BEE!
Message-ID: <838@proxftl.UUCP>
Date: 30 Sep 88 14:14:40 GMT
References: <551@epicb.UUCP> <9332@swan.ulowell.edu>
Reply-To: tomh@proxftl.UUCP (Tom Holroyd)
Distribution: comp.ai.neural-nets
Organization: Proximity Technology, Ft. Lauderdale
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In article <9332@swan.ulowell.edu> sbrunnoc@hawk.ulowell.edu (Sean Brunnock) writes:
>  Having attended the INNS conference and trying out many of the exhibitor's
>products firsthand, I am not impressed with what is commercially available
>in terms of neural network products and programs.
>
>  I believe that most of the products at the conference can be categorized
>into three groups: books, programs to allow people to build neural networks,
>and handwriting analyzers.

Hmm.  I sort of liked Excalibur's Savvy system that did recognition of
photo-id badges in real time.

There were a lot of books there.  There were also many systems designed to
help others design NN products.  But there was a lot more there than just
handwriting recognition.  Several other types of recognition were featured.
Process control was also common.  Robotics experts there said that NN's
would play a major role in industry in the coming years.

>But Nestor's handwriting analyzer, after five days of training
>by various attendees of the coference, gave me a response of "re11o"
>after I wrote "hello".

Like you said, after five days of training.  Some of that training included
random garbage.  I watched a guy train it to respond to smiley faces, some
with triangular heads.  Correctly trained systems are being readied for
real-word chores like recognizing the hand written numbers on checks
and credit card receipts (Nestor, BancTec, AmEx).

There are already several mortgage and loan analysis programs on the market
(Nestor, Adaptive Decision Systems).

What I came away with was a healthy respect for the speed with which many
groups have gone to market, and the wide range of applications.

Building a bee will probably require special parallel hardware, tho.

Tom Holroyd
UUCP: {uflorida,uunet}!novavax!proxftl!tomh

The white knight is talking backwards.