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POPX@vax.oxford.ac.uk POPX at vax.oxford.ac.uk
Thu Jul 5 06:07:04 EDT 1990


FROM:                                                     Jocelyn Paine,
                                  Department of Experimental Psychology,
                                                       South Parks Road,
                                                         Oxford OX1 3UD.

                                              JANET: POPX @ UK.AC.OX.VAX

                                        Phone: (0865) 271444 - messages.
                                                 (0865) 271339 - direct.


               *******************************************
               *                                         *
               *   POPLOG USERS' GROUP CONFERENCE 1990   *
               *                                         *
               *            JULY 17TH - 18TH             *
               *                                         *
               *                 OXFORD                  *
               *                                         *
               *******************************************


Why am I posting news about a Poplog conference to the neural net
digests? After all, Poplog is an implementation of Pop-11, Prolog, Lisp,
and ML - all very conventional and symbolic AI languages. Well,
following from work done by David Young at Sussex, you can now buy from
Integral Solutions Limited (Poplog's commercial distributors) the
"Poplog Neural" package. This allows you to design neural nets of
various kinds; display them graphically using Poplog's windowing system;
build fast production versions; and integrate what you've designed with
existing code written in Pop-11, Prolog, Lisp, or ML.

So if you need to build a mixed net/symbolic program, Poplog is well
worth considering. And you get the convenience of a rather nice
development environment for your nets; plus the four languages I've
mentioned, a built-in editor, a window manager, and the object-oriented
"Flavours" package.

If you want to find out more about Poplog Neural, and Poplog in general,
this year's User Group conference, PLUG90, is the place to do it. We
still have places left at PLUG90, and can accept bookings if made
quickly. The conference will be held in Oxford on the 17th and 18th of
July; accomodation is provided in Keble College, and talks themselves
will be in Experimental Psychology. Registration will open at 11 am on
the 17th, with the conference proper beginning at 2; it will close at
about 4 on the 18th. There will be a rather good conference dinner on
the night of the 17th (main course: duck in lime and ginger sauce).                  

The price is #75 to members of PLUG and #95 to non-members (#15
non-residential without dinner; #37 non-residential with dinner).

Integral Solutions Limited, who distribute Poplog commercially, has
generously paid for three free places. These will be offered
to academic members of PLUG who have not attended a PLUG conference
before, and who have difficulty raising funds. All three are still
available.


                                  ~~~~~

This is the provisional list of talks:

"Poplog Neural",
Colin Shearer, Integral Solutions Ltd. (30 mins)
    A demonstration of ISL's new neural-networking system.
    It's implemented in Poplog, does its number crunching in Fortran,
    and allows you to build and test nets by drawing on a window.
    Fully interfaceable with Pop-11, Prolog, Lisp and ML.

"Pop9X - The Standard",
Steve Knight, Hewlett-Packard Labs. (1 hour)
    Gives a review of the BSI standardisation process and
    the progress of the Pop standard - the language YOU will be
    writing soon (ish).

"Assembly code translation in Prolog"
Ian O'Neill, Program Validation. (30 mins)
    State of the art assembly language translation in Prolog.

"THESEUS: a production-system simulation of the spinning behaviour of
an orb-web spider",
Nick Gotts, Oxford University Zoology Department. (30 mins)
    As well as giving a demo, Nick will talk about his experiences
    of using AlphaPop: Theseus runs on a Macintosh.

"MODEL: From Package to Language",
James Anderson, Reading University. (1 hour)
    A six year old software package for model based vision
    goes up in flames under the heat of self-criticism - to be replaced
    by a language.
    TALK INCLUDES VIDEO PRESENTATION

"GRIT - General Real-time Interactive Ikbs Toolset",
Mark Swabey, Avonicom. (30 mins)
    Mark will talk about GRIT, but also about his experiences (nice
    and otherwise) of Poplog as a development environment.

"IVE - Interactive Visual Environment"
Anthony Worrall, Reading University. (30 mins)
    The software environment that beat the pants off MODEL
    (based on MODEL and PWM and quite a lot of other things besides.)
    TALK INCLUDES VIDEO PRESENTATION

"Embedded Systems",
Rob Zancanato, Cambridge Consultants. (30 mins)
    Poplog for embedded systems - especially MUSE for designing
    real-time controllers. We hope to have a demo of one such self-
    contained system.

"Doing representation theory in Prolog",
John Fitzgerald, Oxford University Maths Department. (30 mins)
    Representation theory is part of the study of (mathematical)
    groups. Prolog copes surprisingly well with such a geometric
    topic.

"Building User Interfaces with Flavours",
Chris Price,
Department of Computer Science, University College of Wales. (30 mins)
    Object-oriented user-interface design, using Poplog's OO flavours
    package and window manager.

"TPM - a graphical Prolog debugger",
Dick Broughton, Expert Systems Limited. (1 hour)
    Dick will show how a debugger should be designed: with TPM, you can
    display Prolog proof trees as trees, rewind and fast forward
    execution, zoom in and out, watch the "cut" prune branches, and
    generally do everything you can't do with 'spy'.

"Processing of Road Accident Data",
Jiashu Wu, UCL Transport Studies. (30 mins)
    UCL use Poplog for an EMYCIN-based expert system which advises
    on accident blackspots, taking 'raw' accident data from
    incident reports. They like Poplog because it's an "open
    system": its jobs include fuzzy matching, stats, and handling very
    big databases.

"Faust - an online fault-diagnosis system",
David Cockburn, Electricity Research and Development Centre. (30 mins)
    (to be confirmed)

"Design for testability",
Lawrence Smith, SD Scicon. (30 mins)
    (to be confirmed)
    A system for advising the users of CAD packages on loopholes in
    testability.

Something on the future of Poplog
Integral Solutions. (1 hour)
    (details awaited)


                                  ~~~~~

And this is the provisional timetable:     

Accomodation is provided  in Keble College, Parks  Road, Oxford. Luggage
can be left there from mid-day on the 17th.

The  conference  itself  will  be  in  the  Department  of  Experimental
Psychology, South Parks Road.


July 17th
---------

Registration and coffee:    11:00 - 12:30
Lunch:                      12:30 -  2:00
Talks:                       2:00 -  3:30
Tea:                         3:30 -  4:00
Talks:                       4:00 -  6:00
(Depart for Keble).

Keble bar opens from 6 to 11 pm.
Dinner starts at 7.


July 18th
---------



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