After three years and 26 editions of the Engineering Computing Newsletter, it is time to say goodbye to the editor, Sheila Davidson. Sheila has decided to take early retirement from SERC and I would like to take this opportunity to thank her for her work in producing the Newsletter. She has seen it through some difficult times, during which she has consistently improved the standard.
The new Editor, Terry Mawby and his assistant Rachel Miles, have been looking over Sheila's shoulder as she has been putting together this edition. I am confident the ECN will maintain the standard set by Sheila and we wish her a long and happy retirement.
This £3M Universities Funding Council's Programme was announced in the September 1991 edition of the November issue (34), and good progress has already been made.
(Economic and Social Research Council) ESRC are donating £60,000 over two years from April 1992 and, to date, support from commercial bodies can be valued at £250,000.
With added support from IXI to Edinburgh University's X-Windows project, training materials for MOTIF X- programming will now be produced.
RAL have been offered funding to produce training materials derived from the training courses they currently run on Fortran to C Conversion and LATEX.
Two projects which will provide training materials in the Networking area have been approved. Newcastle will be working on network training materials for user support staff and Exeter will be adding to the provision of networking courses and training materials on the technical aspects of installing and managing networks.
NISS Bulletin Board (H7B) will contain further details of the new projects and the updated X-Windows project.
The following products are now available:
At a recent Initiative workshop proceedings were initiated towards the establishment of a Multimedia User Group and a Guide User Group which will be open to all interested parties in the UK higher education sector. Anyone interested in the Multimedia User Group should contact: Dr Peter Davies, Life Sciences, Nottingham University.
Anyone who wishes to be involved with the Guide User Group should contact: Dr Dave Baty, Biomedical Sciences, Dundee University.
Work on the next edition of the CHEST Software Directory has begun, and updated information about the software products is currently being collected. The updates are assimilated into the online versions of the Directory (on NISSPAC and NPDSA) as soon as they have been processed.
CHEST is currently involved in negotiations for centrally funded agreements on the following products:
An offer for PV-Wave has recently been agreed, and a deal on Papyrus (bibliographic system) awaits final confirmation. Other products including MicroEXST AT, Medline (dataset), and Corel Draw are also being considered.
Discussions are under way concerning the renewal of a number of deals such as Uniras, SAS, SPSS (ie post 1993), and AMT.
Following further negotiations Micrografx Ltd have announced significant reductions in their prices to education which are now:
A CHEST -guide discussion list has been set up to coincide with the recent deal for GUIDE authoring software.
The NISS Gateway (which can be called with a simple call niss command from a PAD prompt) offers a straightforward route to a number of online services. The hardware capacity of the Gateway has recently been doubled and this has helped accommodate the additional traffic generated as a result of the growing number of services accessible via this facility. The number of calls through the Gateway is now around 12,000 a month.
UK services on the Gateway now include:
The European services available are
We hope to add a number of US Information Services to the Gateway in the near future.
Information on NISSBB encompasses a range of interests. Section K (conferences and training courses) has recently been reorganised, and new Sections which have been added include a regularly updated list of Hewlett Packard ex-demo equipment offered for sale to the HE community; and details of the projects set up under the national Information Technology Training Initiative (see also front page). Other new Sections are also planned in response to requests from groups within the community mailnisS@swurcc if you wish to have information added to the Bulletin Board.
A medium term objective remains the development of a new software base for NISSBB. This will enable us to make improvements to the user interface and will also mean that the Bulletin Board interacts more effectively with other information services.
The incorporation of the ESRC Data Archive records onto NISSPAC is under way. The addition of copies of SUN's Catalyst catalogues is also planned although it seems that SUN may not continue to produce this material in the future.
SUN Microsystems have donated a SPARCServer II to NISS at Southampton, and the migration of the NISSPAC service to this platform is under way. The new hardware, combined with an upgrade to the STATUS E2 software underlying NISSPAC, will allow the introduction of additional functionality and an improved user interface to the service.
The continuing collaboration with ASK (in Germany) on issues concerned with information exchange has now widened to include the Spanish organisation CSIC (Council for Scientific Research), and is gradually assuming a more pan-European aspect. NISS staff have also been working closely with colleagues in Europe to draft an EC proposal for funding for a collaborative project under the Libraries Programme entitled "The Development of a European Multi-Lingual Software Catalogue.
The Inter-University Training Committee (IUTC) was formed in Autumn 1990 to provide advice and support for training in IT within the university community. Each University Computer Centre has an IUTC correspondent who is expected to play an active role in the activities of the IUTC, as well as being responsible for disseminating information concerning IUTC and related IT activities. This information is targeted at both Computer Centre colleagues and also other people within the university who have an interest in training in IT.
In order to facilitate the information exchange, IUTC has set up a number of electronic mailing lists using the NISP Mailbase software, which was developed at Newcastle University. The mailing lists include:
The IUTC wishes to encourage people with an interest in IT training to join the IT-TRAINING-GEN list, and to become active participants. In particular staff development officers, academics responsible for teaching students the use of computers, and policy makers responsible for formulating IT training strategies are all encouraged to join.
To join a Mailbase list you must have a user name on a computer system which provides electronic mail. You should send an electronic mail message containing the message:
join list first name surname
to the electronic mail address:
mailbase@uk.ac.newcastle
For example, if John Major wished to join the IT-TRAINING-GEN list he would send the command: join it-training-gen John Major Once you have joined the mailing list, you will receive further instructions on how to use Mailbase.
If you have any problems using Mailbase, or you wish to know some more about Mailbase, please contact your Computer Centre Advisory Service. Should you wish to know more about local or national IT training matters, please contact your IUTC Correspondent.
An Evaluation of ProKappa by K R Johnson, AIAI report, AIAI-TR-96, September 1991
This report describes ProKappa, which is a product of Intellicorp. It concentrates on version 1, as version 2 is very recent.
Four members of the staff at AIAI have made use of it for various purposes. We give information about hardware requirements and prices. ProKappa systems development may in general be undertaken by using the powerful developer's interface, which comprises a number of windows, and also involves programming in C and in a special language, ProTalk. ProKappa supports objects, methods, forward and backward chaining rules, and daemons. It can create powerful graphical interfaces and can communicate with external data sources.
We describe a number of problems which we experienced while using ProKappa version 1 and give literature references describing the work we did with it.
Congratulations to Professor Robin Milner, FRS, University of Edinburgh, for winning the A M Turing Award for 1991. This annual award by the Association for Computing Machinery is arguably the most prestigious in the field of computing and is given for the most outstanding contribution to the field.
Robin Milner is only the sixth non-American winner in the Award's 26year history. Other winners include N Wirth who invented the Pascal family of languages and C A R Hoare who invented CSP.
Robin has contributed to many fields of theoretical computer science. His most notable achievements include the development of LCF - the first interactive proof system - and the Calculus of Communicating Systems (CCS). He also led the project which developed the ML functional programming language, the first language to support a polymorphic type system, and which also won the British Computer Society Award for Technical Achievement in 1987.
Work in all of these areas was supported through grants from SERC: Robin is currently in the second year of an SERC Senior Fellowship.
ESPRIT CIM-Europe Conference 1992. The 8th annual ESPRIT CIM-Europe Conference will be held at the Birmingham Metropole Hotel on 27-29 May 1992. The conference is jointly organised by the DTI and the EC.
Under the (ESPRIT) programme, over 250 UK companies and Higher Education Institutes have in the past five years received Community support for collaborative R&D projects, of those with 75 organisations participating in the area of Computer Integrated Manufacturing and Engineering (CIME).
The conference will present the results of some of the ESPRIT CIME projects as well as the results of international work. The key theme will be on CIME implementation costs and benefits.
The application of CIME techniques can offer substantial benefits, such as:
However, considerable care is needed in the selection and application of methods and technologies which are appropriate to an individual organisation.
The CIM-Europe Conference is a major CIME event which brings together annually international and European practitioners, researchers, and decision makers in the CIME field. The programme consists of a number of plenary and parallel sessions with presentations of papers from selected authors, workshops, and half day industrial visits. There will be keynote addresses from leading industrialists and experts, among them:
The SERC CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) Community Club and the ERCOFTAC UK North Pilot Centre held a one day workshop on Turbulence Modelling for Impinging Flows at UMIST on 30 October 1991, under the excellent chairmanship of Professor BE Launder (UMIST). It was attended by 55 people from industry and higher education. The purpose of the meeting was three-fold:
Professor Launder opened the workshop by outlining to participants some of the aims of the Community Club and the ERCOFTAC Special Interest Group on Turbulence Modelling. He went on to outline reasons for considering the impinging flow problem and explained the format of the workshop. The morning would contain invited presentations concerning the Lyon workshop, while the afternoon would provide an opportunity for computers to present their own results and for a wide-ranging panel session.
Dr W P Jones (Imperial College) made a detailed presentation on the physical processes and modelling issues underlying turbulent impinging flows. He discussed significant features such as flow curvature, fluctuating pressure and wall effects, the viscous sublayer and impinging free jets. He concluded by observing that the as yet unrealised goal was a turbulence model capable of reproducing streamline curvature and wall-reflection-fluctuating influences and jet interaction effects.
Professor M A Leschziner (UMIST) described the experimental arrangements and related specification of boundary conditions for the test cases presented at the Lyon workshop. He explained the experimental techniques used at UMIST and in the USA to collect the experimental data against which the computational results were being compared. The boundary conditions for both the axisymmetric jet and twin jet problems and their computational implementation were discussed at length.
Professor J J McGuirk (Loughborough) presented a synopsis of the computational results presented at the Lyon workshop. Thirteen groups presented results for the axisymmetric jet problem, while only two - UMIST and Loughborough - presented results for the more difficult twin jet problem. Numerical resolution was not a factor in the results. All groups used a fully developed pipe flow at the jet exit, but the treatment of the entrainment boundary differed, which was reflected in the results.
The afternoon session began with reports from the computer groups in the UK. These amplified some of the remarks made in the formal presentations in the morning.
Professor Launder then introduced the round table discussion on the present status and future directions for modelling impinging and colliding flows. He outlined some possible directions for model development, eg an improvement of the eddy-viscosity stress-strain relation and the replacement of the epsilon equation. Before throwing the discussion open, he mentioned some future activities of the Special Interest Group including the Delft Workshop in June 1992 and another workshop at UMIST in 1993.
The panel comprised the invited speakers and Professor H Andersson (Trondheim). The discussion ranged over the possible directions for development suggested by Professor Launder and moved on to look at how existing models are used in industrial applications, refinements of the existing test cases and ways in which the research can be progressed. The chairman then brought a lively discussion and excellent meeting to a close.
A copy of the presentations at the workshop can be obtained by contacting me. Included in these proceedings is the computers' information from the Lyon workshop and a transcript of the panel discussion.
The steering committee of the AI in Engineering Community Club are organising a one-day symposium on New Horizons in Artificial Intelligence in Engineering. It will be held at Rutherford Appleton Laboratory on Thursday, 9 April 1992. The symposium will be one of two to be organised within the current year and will provide an opportunity for academics to hear reports from a wide range of topics at the frontier of the development of Artificial Intelligence techniques for engineering applications.
A provisional programme has been established that includes recent academic research and leading-edge industrial applications. The academic topics will include:
whilst the industry-based speakers will report on the use of causal models for fault diagnosis on spacecraft, temporal reasoning for air traffic control and approaches to enterprise model-ling to improve the efficiency of engineering operations.
This provides an almost unique snapshot of recent advances in AI in Engineering within the UK. It therefore presents a real opportunity, either for active researchers to become aware of other work or for those seeking new research directions to be exposed to some of the current developments.
The symposium is free to UK-based academics.
