IEEE-NNC Standards

[Mary Lou Padgett]

IEEE-NNC Standards Committee Report

It is the purpose of this column to update you on this activity and to
invite you to participate in forthcoming meetings.  At its June meeting
the IEEE Standards Board formally approved the Project Authorization
Requests (PAR's) submitted by the Working Group on Glossary and Symbols
and by the Working Group on Performance Evaluation, so those two groups
now have their "marching orders." The NNC Standards Committee had a
series of fruitful meetings in conjunction with the Baltimore IJCNN.
Progress made by the various working groups is detailed below.

FUTURE EVENTS

* IJCNN Beijing, Nov. 1-6, 1992
A panel discussion and/or workshop will be conducted by Mary Lou Padgett
early in the meeting.  The formation of an international glossary and
symbology for artificial neural networks will be discussed.

* SimTec/WNN92 Houston, Nov. 4-7, 1992
There will be a Standards Committee Meeting on Friday, Nov. 6, in
conjunction with this conference.  Paper competition awards will be
announced.  Dr. Robert Shelton of NASA/JSC is conducting the Performance
Measure Methodology Contest and Prof. E. Tzanakou of Rutgers is
conducting the Paradigm Comparison Student Paper Contest.

* IEEE-ICNN and IEEE-FUZZ 1993 San Francisco, March 28 - April 1, 1993
A come-and-go meeting of everyone interested in standards will be held
on Sunday, March 27 and individual working group meetings will take
place on Monday and Tuesday evenings, March 28 and 29.

* Proposed New Activity
It has been proposed to form a working group to draft a glossary for
fuzzy systems.  An initial meeting to that end will take place in San
Francisco on March 27 and 28, in conjuction with the conference.  Please
contact either of the undersigned if interested in participating.

Over 400 people and companies are on the interest list for standards.
If you would like to be included, please contact Mary Lou Padgett.


WORKING GROUP REPORTS:

WORKING GROUP ON GLOSSARY AND SYMBOLS
Chair:  Mary Lou Padgett, Auburn University

The Working Group on Glossary and Symbols submitted the following PAR,
which has been approved by IEEE as a formal project for the group.  A
voting group will be constructed in the near future.

Project Title:
Recommended Definition of Terms for Artificial Neural Networks

Scope:
Terminology used to describe and discuss artificial neural networks
including hardware, software and algorithms related to artificial neural
networks.

Purpose:
The subject of artificial neural networks is treated in a wide variety
of textbooks, technical papers, manuals and other publications.  At the
present time, there is no widely accepted guide or standard for the use
of technical terms relating to artificial neural networks.  It is the
purpose of this project to provide a comprehensive glossary of
recommended terms to be used by the authors of future publications in
this field.

Status Report:

The glossary being developed should be usable by everyone interested in
neural networks, so a simple basic structure is desirable.  The draft
glossary proposed by Russell Eberhart meets this requirement, with some
modifications.  To help insure that the finished product is usable and
still specific enough to help in specialized areas, Glossary Special
Interest Group Chairs have been appointed.  The exact scope of their
groups will be discussed in San Francisco.  Eventually, representation
from all major neural networks thrusts and geographic areas should be
included.  People from academia, industry and government in all areas
should be represented.  The first Glossary SIG Chairs are:  Patrick A.
Shoemaker, NOSC; Dale E. Nelson, WPAFB; and Emile Fiesler, IDIAP.  The
glossary will be structured in a modular form, with basic elements
coming first, followed by more specialized subsets.  Your input is
respectfully requested!


WORKING GROUP ON PERFORMANCE METHODOLOGY
Chair:  Robert Shelton, NASA/JSC

The Working Group on Performance Methodology met at the Baltimore IJCNN
to discuss their newly approved project and formulate an agenda.

Project Title:
Guidelines for the Evaluation of the Speed and Accuracy of
Implementations of Feed-Forward Artificial Neural Networks.

Scope:
Artificial neural network implementations which implement supervised
learning through minimization of an error function based on the sum of
the squares of residual errors.

Purpose:
Since 1986, a large number of implementations of the feed-forward
back-error propagation neural network algorithms have been described
with widely varying claims of speed and accuracy.  At present, buyers
and users of software and/or hardware for the purpose of executing such
algorithms have no common set of bench-marks to facilitate the
verification of vendor claims.  The working group proposes to fulfill
this need by assembling a suite of test cases.

Agenda:

Forward Propagation Only

The following will comprise a forward propagation system to which the
standard will apply.  Such a system will be a 3-layer (input, hidden,
output), fully connected (sequentially i.e. input to hidden to output),
feed-forward neural network.

Cases of varying sizes will be proposed.  In addition, for each size,
there will be at least one "problem" of the following two types.
     A.  Discrete output
     B.  Continuous output.
A "problem" will consist of a set of I/O pairs which the system will be
required to reproduce.  Sequential, portable e.g. C language computer
code will be distributed which emulates the desired network including
nominal weights and customary sigmoidal transfer functions.  The user of
the standard may make use of the distributed code and weight values as
he or she sees fit.  The determination of weights is deemed to be a
"learning" problem and not within the scope of the part of the standard
described here.  Parity problems were proposed as hard cases for the
discrete output test.  Such problems are sufficiently well understood
that weights could be provided without recourse to the use of learning
algorithms.  Character identification was suggested as a second easier
kind of discrete output problem.  The task of providing good test
problems for the case of continuous output was agreed to be
significantly more complex.  It was suggested that mathematical
combinations of algebraic and transcendental functions could serve as
the basic model, but it was agreed that the determination of the
candidate problems for continuous output would require considerable
additional effort.

     Robert Shelton
     PT4, NASA/JSC
     Houston, TX 77058
     P: (713) 483-8110
     shelton at gothamcity.jsc.nasa.gov


WORKING GROUP ON SOFTWARE AND HARDWARE INTERFACES
Chair: Steven Deiss, Applied Neurodynamics

The NNC Working Group on Software and Hardware Interfaces met at the
Baltimore IJCNN.  The group was evenly divided by interest into an ad
hoc Working Subgroup on Software Interface Standards and an ad hoc
Working Subgroup on Hardware Interface Standards.  The overall working
group persists as an umbrella to integrate current efforts and promote
new interface standards activities.  Future meetings are expected to
discuss PAR submission along with the technical issues.

The Software Group got off to a fast start in Baltimore and several
meetings were held there.  Ten ANN vendors and 15 labs and companies
expressed interest in the task of formalizing selected data format
standards which would be used to store ANN training sets.  Many vendors
have translation tools for importing data to their own environments, but
many research users find it difficult to share data because of use of
unique data formats and paradigm code written early on to accept their
nonstandard formats.  The group reached consensus that a simple standard
training data format is needed, several were discussed, and it was felt
that the task was manageable.   For further information concerning this
project contact:

    Dr. Harold K. Brown
    Florida Institute of Technology
    Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering
    Melbourne, FL  32901-6988
    Phone: 407-768-8000 x 7556
    Fax:   407-984-8461
    Email: hkb at ee.fit.edu

The Hardware Group discussed related work on hardware standards that was
carried out under the IEEE Computer Society Microprocessor Standards
Committee and tried to focus on goals for the current group.  In 1989 A
Study Group was formed under the auspices of the MSC to evaluate
Futurebus+ (896) and Scalable Coherent Interface (1596) for
applicability to NN applications.  The group recommended a hybrid
approach while recognizing the longer range potential of a NN specific
interface and interconnect standard.  The present group chose to focus
on 'guidelines' for utilization of existing standards for NN
applications.  It was the consensus that the NN community may not yet be
ready for a real NN hardware interface standard since this is such an
active area of reseach, however, work toward the evolution of such a
standard would appear to be timely.  For further information about this
project or about other areas where interface standards might be
appropriate contact:

    Stephen R. Deiss
    Applied Neurodynamics
    2049 Village Park Wy, #248
    Encinitas, CA  92024-5418
    Phone: 619-944-8859
    Fax:   619-944-8880
    Email: deiss at cerf.net

Thank you for your support of the IEEE-NNC Neural Networks Standards
Committee.  Please continue to interact with all of the working groups
to help us grow in positive directions, and provide service to the
entire community.  SEE YOU IN SAN FRANCISCO, if not before!

Sincerely,

Professor Walter J. Karplus            Mary Lou Padgett
Chair                                  Vice Chair
IEEE-NNC Standards Committee           IEEE-NNC Standards Committee
UCLA, CS Dept.                         Auburn University, EE Dept.
3723 Boelter Hall                      1165 Owens Road
Los Angeles, CA 90024                  Auburn, AL 36830
P: (310) 825-2929                      P: (205) 821-2472 or 3488
email: karplus at CS.UCLA.EDU             email: mpadgett at eng.auburn.edu