Early on, the Alvey IKBS programme was planned with major
initiatives being taken in certain areas (Logic Programming,
Declarative system architectures etc).
By 1985, nearly all the funds had been committed
and the effort was put into getting the projects underway, supplying
equipment, monitoring etc.
Informatics was involved in the issuing of research grants,
the associated computing infrastructure, and the main support activities:
Coordination of Research Themes:
the IKBS research programme was divided into themes - Expert Systems,
Intelligent Front Ends, Intelligent Computer Aided Instruction, Inference,
Natural Language, Image Interpretation and Declarative System Architectures.
In each of these, industrial and academic coordinators were appointed and charged
with the formation of research communities around the topics.
This was done by organising workshops, Bill Sharpe set up the organisation
and was active in its running, issuing theme newsletters,
identified research requirements of Alvey demonstrators etc.
Logic Programming Initiative:
recognising the UK lead in Logic Programming, the IKBS Directorate at
the beginning of 1985 created a special initiative in Logic Programming
with a series of workshops aimed at creating a single balanced programme
of relevant research projects. Bill Sharpe launched the programme and it was in an advanced
state when he left Informatics. The programme
consisted of a range of projects investigating Prolog development environments,
better logic programming languages etc. It related to the IKBS architecture
programme part of which was developing hardware appropriate to logic programming
paradigms.
Workstations:
in addition to the VAX and GEC infrastructure, more than 60 SUN and 22 Whitechapel workstations were purchased
with Informatics providing support, benchmarking new models, adding communications and fileserver support etc.
Later, some Orions and 7 ICL Series 39 machines were added.
IKBS SUNs waiting to be tested, software loaded and shipped, 1986
Software:
SIGAI, run by Cliff Pavelin and Tony Cox, was responsible for setting the software standards.
Contracts were set up for:
NIP, the New Implementation of Prolog, was completed at Edinburgh and used by 60
groups on Vax, Sun, Pyramid computers and the
Atlas-10
Prolog support at Edinburgh
Lisp support at Edinburgh
Two POPLOG developments contracts including POPLOG support by Sussex and Systems Designers. The
Lisp sub-system was changed to Common Lisp. The system was used by 30 groups.
A set of Prolog benchmarks based on those from Portland State University
was developed called the Alvey Prolog Benchmarks
Lisp developments at Bath
KRSTL, Knowledge Representation System Trials Laboratory, at Edinburgh, to enable academic and industrial researchers to
gain access to advanced Knowledge Representation toolkits
Cprolog, XLISP, and Quintus Prolog were ported
to the VAX, SUN and Whitechapel. OPS5 was implemented on the VAX.
Portable Common LOOPs (PCL) and Kyoto Common Lisp were added later.
Standards:
Tony Cox and later Charlie Kwong were members of the BSI Prolog standards working group, IST/5/l7
and contributed to the ISO working group SC22 WG17.
Charlie was also involved with the Built-In Predicates (BIP) sub-committee
(what predicates and their behaviour were to be included in Standard Prolog)
Monitoring:
Martin Dunn organised the monitoring officers for all the IKBS projects.
The Monitoring Officers were contracted to ensure that projects
involving substantial DTI funding (often projects costing a few Mpounds and involving several
industrial and academic partners) are
properly managed and achieve technical targets.
Martin Dunn had the job of monitoring the Monitoring Officers. In projects where no DTI funds
were involved, industrial uncles were appointed
to steer the project in the direction of industrial relevance.
Research Area Clubs
Informatics set up the research area Clubsin Knowledge Based Systems, Logic Based Environments and
Declarative Architectures (
Other Awareness Activities:
Informatics ran the IKBS mailshot (sent out bi-monthly to over 470 researchers).
An electronic Bulletin Board was set up.
An on-line version of the AI Tools Catalogue was set up.
Research Clubs
Architecture Club
The Club consisted of 23 projects. Projects range from the large FLAGSHIP project (the
most expensive Alvey project) to the relatively modest. The first meeting of the Club was
held on 3 June 1986 at the Institution of Civil Engineers in London. Some 45 people attended.
Colin Haley of ICL was the Chairman and Martin Dunn of Informatics was secretary.
In 1987,
the Club worked on establishing a suite of benchmarks for new architectures.
Special Interest Groups
were established in Knowledge Manipulation Engines, Systems Architecture on Silicon and
Parallel Declarative Systems.
Knowledge Based Systems Club
John Smith was Secretary of this Club.
A two-day meeting of the Club was
organised in January 1986 at Milton Hill House, near Abingdon
with 60 participants from 21 projects. A second 2-day meeting took place at St Anne's
College, Oxford in January 1987 and another in January 1988.
Logic Programming Club
Robert Worden (Logica) was
Chairman and Cliff Pavelin acted as secretary.
Steve Torrance of Middlesex Poly) was appointed as Logic Programming
coordinator.
About 15 workshops were organised each year.
POPLOG Stand at the Alvey Conference, Sussex, 1986
Cliff was responsible for the
IKBS/Architectures exhibition; this meant planning the layout, organising the exhibitors,
loaning SUNs, organising photographers etc. (Tony Rush from Scientific Admin gave invaluable
help). JWS organised the KBS club session and BGB the Logic programming club.
They both were official rapporteurs as was also CKYL in an Architecture session.
CKYL was also responsible for configuring the SUNs loaned from RAL.
In 1987, Cliff was responsible for the
IKBS/Architectures exhibition; including planning the layout, organising the exhibitors,
loaning SUNs, organising photographers etc.
