Re: heterogeneous DBs
phayes@cs.uiuc.edu
Message-id: <199309131711.AA01616@dante.cs.uiuc.edu>
Sender: phayes@dante.cs.uiuc.edu
Date: Mon, 13 Sep 1993 12:14:11 +0000
To: sowa <sowa@turing.pacss.binghamton.edu>
From: phayes@cs.uiuc.edu
Subject: Re: heterogeneous DBs
Cc: interlingua@ISI.EDU, ai-prez@das.harvard.edu
Now now John, you mustn't let your personal animosities transfer
into your professional judsgements. Without wanting to start
a quarrel, I really should correct the following, in case anyone were to
think it was true:
>... As you can see from the recent
>AAAI meetings, attendance is way down, the commercial companies
>are pulling out of the exhibits, and the people with real applications
>who need standards are staying away in droves.
>
>So KIF and CGs will become a standard for commercial database and
>CASE tools, but not for AI. The whole AI field will dry up and
>blow away in purity and innocence without any standards at all.
In fact, AI is booming in the commercial world, but its often not being
called 'AI', because this world runs on fashions, and they never last for
more
than a few years. AI was hot news a few years ago, but now its OOP
and fuzzy logic that is expected to produce miracles. In a few more years
it will be something else. Meanwhile, AI research is moving along smoothly
and
successful AI applications are making or saving millions of dollars.
Attendance at the AAAI national meetings is not 'way down'. Compared to
other
similar meetings - most of which have suffered some shrinkage recently -
AAAI attendance profile is actually higher than the norm. This years was
about what we expected. And you should pay attention to other things,
such as attendance at the AAAI Spring and Fall workshops, before concluding
that the field will 'dry up and blow away'. AI is here to stay, whatever
it is called.
Pat Hayes
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