workshop announcement

[Joachim Beer]

    ***************************************************
    *  Workshop on Software & Programming Issues for  *
    *       Connectionist Supercomputers              *
    ***************************************************

                    April 19-20, 1993

			  at

        International Computer Science Institute (ICSI)
                    1947 Center Street
                    Berkeley, CA 94704


                     Sponsored by:

	         Adaptive Solutions, Inc.
	                 ICSI
	              Siemens AG

The goal of this workshop is to bring together connectionist
researchers to address software and programming issues in the
framework of large scale connectionist systems. Scope and
technical theme of the workshop is outlined below. 
Due to space considerations the workshop will be by invitation
only. Interested parties are encouraged to submit a one-page
proposal outlinig their work in this area by January 31.
Submissions should be send to ICSI at the address above or by
e-mail to beer at icsi.berkeley.edu

The increased importance of ANNs for elucidating deep conceptual
questions in artificial intelligence and their potential for
attacking real world problems warrant the design and construction
of connectionist supercomputers. Several research labs have
undertaken to develop such machines. These machines will
allow researchers to investigate and apply ANNs on a scale
which up to now was not computationally feasible. As with other
parallel hardware, the main problem is adequate software for
connectionist supercomputers.
Most "solutions" offer isolated instances which deal only with
a limited class of particular ANN algorithms rather than providing
a comprehensive programming model for this new paradigm.
This approach was acceptable for small and structurally simple
ANNs. However, to fully utilize the emerging connectionist
supercomputers an expressive, clean, and flexible software
environment is called for. This is being recognized by the 
developers of the connectionist supercomputers, and an
intergral part of these projects is the development of an
appropriate software environment. While each connectionist
supercomputer project has unique goals and possibly a focus
on particular application areas, it would nevertheless be
very fruitful to compare how the fundamental software questions
that everybody in this field faces are being approached.
The following (incomplete) list outlines some of the issues: 

      * Embedding connectionist systems in traditional 
	software environments, eg. client/server models
	vs. integrated "seamless" environments.

      * ANN description languages

      * Handling of sparse and irregular nets

      * Facilities for mapping nets onto the underlying
	architecture

      * Handling of complete applications including embedded
	non-connectionist instructions

      * Should there be a machine independent intermediate
	language? What would be the disadvantages?

      * Software issues for dedicated embedded ANNs vs.
	"general purpose" connectionist supercomputers.

      * Graphical user interfaces for ANN systems

      * System support for high I/O rates (while this is
	a general question in comp. sci. there are nevertheless
	some unique problems for ANN systems in dealing
	with large external data sets).