I.B.M. ENLISTS SOFTWARE AID

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00998R000100050020-1
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 3
• Document Creation Date: December 23, 2016
• Document Release Date: December 20, 2012
• Sequence Number: 20
• Publication Date: September 20, 1986
• Content Type: MEMO

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EX
IOAPANY NEWS
THE NEW YORK TIMES, ?
14 u . 114- 141 1q)'(v
~a
E.B.M. Enlists Software Aid
3-Year Study
-'At Universi
By DAVID E. SANGER
Special to The New York Times
PHILADELPHIA, Aug. 13 - The
i rjernational Business Machines Cor-
poration today announced `a three-
year multimillion-dollar project in
artificial intelligence with Carnegie-
Mellon University, as part of what the
company called "a major new I.B.M.
initiative" in advanced software.
Under the terms of the agreement,
I.B.M. will provide equipment and fi-
nancing for Carnegie-Mellon re-
searchers developing "expert sys-
tems" that attempt to simulate
human reasoning and draw conclu-
sions, along with longer-range work
in speech recognition and robotics.
While I.B.M. said it would not have
exclusive access to the results of the
research, company executives at-
tending the annual meeting of the
American Association for Artificial
Intelligence here said they expected
those results would become part of
I.B.M.'s future software products.
.The move appears to be part of a
Major shift within I.B.M., which has
t pditionally been weak in applica-
tions. software, programs that per-
form specific tasks for computer
users. Artifical intelligence, a set of
programming techniques that gen-
erally make computer systems easier
to use and capable of performing
many jobs without human interven-
tion, are considered essential to that
effort. They also use an extraordi-
nary amount of computing power and
memory, meaning the prospect of
additional hardware sales.
'Something of an Awakening'
"There is something of an awaken-
ing under way at I.B.M.," said Raj
Reddy, head of Carnegie-Mellon's
robotics institute and a leading au-
thority in artificial intelligence.
"Four or five years ago, when you
mentioned artificial intelligence,
I.B.M. shrugged its shoulders."
I.B.M. executives here said that
within the last year the company had
created an artificial-intelligence
project office that reports directly to
I.B.M.'s management committee,
with unusually broad responsibility to
integrate new techniques in I.B.M.
products. In coming months, the com-
pany is expected to bring out its first
commercially available expert sys-
tems, primarily programs designed
for banks, insurance companies and
manufacturers.
"Strategically, this is now a very
high priority for us," said Herbert
Schorr, who is directing I.B.M.'s arti-
ficial-intelligence initiative. ..It
should enable us to attract a new set
of users - like loan officers or insur-
ance underwriters - who can re-
trieve facts off their computers, but
get little analysis or instruction about
how to apply rules."
Many artificial-intelligence prod-
ucts are "development tools," or pro-
grams that help computer designers
prepare other programs; the use of
expert systems has primarily been
limited to medicine and manufactur-
ing, although an increasing variety of
such systems is coming onto the mar-
ket.
Much of the most promising tech-
nology is still in university laborato-
ries, notably at Carnegie-Mellon, the
Massachusetts Institute of Tech-
nology and Stanford University.
Thus, companies are forming al-
liances with those institutions, espe-
cially because it is relatively inexpen-
sive to transport software from the
laboratory to the marketplace.
Under the agreement announced
today, I.B.M. will provide Carnegie-
Mellon with about $5.5 million in com-
puter equipment and will negotiate
contracts for individual studies in ar-
tificial intelligence. The equipment is
primarily the PC/RT, an engineer-
ing and scientific computer intro.
duced earlier this year that I.B.M. be-
lieves particularly well suited for ar-
tificial-intelligence applications.
Two years ago I.B.M. was stung by
charges that a pact with Carnegie-
Mellon to help develop the PC / RT
bound the university to secrecy
agreements that many academics
called unethical. In today's announce-
ment, it was careful to say the project
would be "open research."
"Carnegie-Mellon will own the soft-
ware it develops and is free to publish
whatever it wants," said John C.
Daily, who heads the company's Aca-
demic Information Systems unit.
"We will share in the results, but we
will not have exclusive access."
i
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/12/20: CIA-RDP90-00998R000100050020-1
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