The US is increasing small-contractor set-asides from 20% to 23% of federal contracts, or an increase of $6B/year (on $200B in government spending). All solicitations over $25K are now posted on the Web as well as in Commerce Business Daily, and contractors can register on the Web for the Small Business Administration's database of firms seeking government work. The government also holds regional seminars on how to become a federal contractor. . [Dallas Morning News. SJM, 16Oct97, 4C.]

NASA is creating a biocomputation center at the Stanford University School of Medicine, to apply virtual reality and other advanced computational techniques to medical domains. Jody Sumrall, (650) 723-7897. [Educom Update, 01Nov97.]

Stanford is also getting $3.2M from Intel, as part of a $90M Technology for Education 2000 grant program. This is in addition to $41M/year that Intel gives to higher education. The company is looking for innovative applications that will take computers beyond the engineering and computing labs. [Michelle Levander, SJM, 30Oct97, 1B.] (An advantage of industry grants is that they need not be limited to US institutions.)

NSF's Major Research Instrumentation Program (MRI) will distribute about $50M this coming year, for new state-of-the-art, high-cost research instrumentation and for development of next-generation instrumentation. Proposals are due 30Jan98. . [Maria Zemankova , dbworld, 31Oct97.]

NSF's Division of Information, Robotics & Intelligent Systems (IRIS), within the Directorate of Computer and Information Sciences and Engineering (CISE), will soon be renamed the Division of Information and Intelligent Systems (IIS). Its Database and Expert Systems program will become Information and Data Management (IDM), and the Information Technology and Organizations (ITO) program will be renamed Computation and Social Systems (CSS). [Maria Zemankova , dbworld, 29Oct97.]

This year's NSF deadlines include: Professional Opportunities for Women in Research and Education (POWRE), 09Dec97; Integrative Graduate Education and Research Training Program (IGERT), 15Dec97; Instrumentation and Laboratory Improvement, 14Nov97; Centers of Research Excellence in Science and Technology (CREST), 01Dec97; Software Engineering and Languages, 18Nov97; Networking and Communications Research, 01Dec97; Experimental Software Systems, 16Dec97; Computing Systems Research (formerly Microelectronic Systems Architecture), 01Nov97 target; Design Automation (formerly Design, Tools, and Test), 01Nov97 target; Experimental Systems, 01Nov97 target; Signal Processing Systems (formerly Circuits and Signal Processing), 01Nov97 target. [NSF Bulletin, Nov97.]

NSF is seeking a new program director for its NSFNeT program in the Division of Networking and Communications Research and Infrastructure (NCRI). 1-2 years (initially). Contact Dr. George Strawn . [NSF Bulletin, Nov97.]

Ed McCracken has resigned as CEO of Silicon Graphics, but will remain as chairman. The company is struggling to change from high-end graphics workstations to server computers. [SJM, 30Oct97. EduP.] (They've been squeezed at the bottom end by Pentium-based workstations and at the top end by Sun and others. It's been a lot easier to scale PCs up to workstation performance than to reduce the cost of high-end computers, mostly due to business factors such as market share and cash flow.)

Steve Jobs has decided that he does not want to stay on as Apple's permanent CEO. [Miranda Ewell, SJM, 05Nov97, 1C.] (He might stick around as chairman of the board, though.)

CEO Robert Palmer says that Digital plans to become a hardware services and consultancy company, similar to Electronic Data Systems Corp. They will continue to make computers with Alpha and Intel chips, but they've sold their Alpha fab line to Intel. [WSJ, 30Oct97. EduP.]

NewApps is a software download service organized around new releases for each day. (There were 31 on 29Oct97.) An archive is also available. Downloading is free, as are many of the applications. Each is described with a one-line summary. . [, alt.comp.software.tools, 30Oct97.]

Download Warehouse offers 3,500 name-brand programs for immediate access. No boxes, no diskettes, no shipping and handling charges. (And no hardcopy manuals, I presume.) , or for some special deals. [SJM ad, 19Oct97, 3F.]

Businesses are using Web rings to help users find sites related to a theme. The webring.com directory lists 18K rings (linking 200K sites), up from 1K rings in January. [IBD, 26Sep97. EduP.]

Digital's AltaVista home page at has been usurped by . Browsers looking for "altavista" will resolve to the latter one first. There you'll find advertising banners, a quick search form that links to the real AltaVista page, and a disclaimer that "AltaVista Technology, Inc. is not affiliated with ... the AltaVista Internet Search Service." [16Oct97.] (Damn parasites.)

Universal Method Composition Planner (UMCP): HTN planning algorithm, in Lisp.

UNIWORD: "concept language" for multilingual machine translation.

aiNLP: CLIPS-based NLP support for text/Internet applications.

ActiveX Genetic Programming Control with sample application.

CodeWarrior Discover Programming Edition 2: Java/C/C++/Pascal environment for Mac and Windows 95/NT.

MATLAB/Virtual Reality integration demo from Terasoft.

Transom Jack 1.2: human modeling for CAD/CAM.

Book: Foundations of Neuro-Fuzzy Systems, by Nauck, Klawonn, and Kruse.

Book: Readings in Agents, ed. by Huhns and Singh.

Proceedings: AAAI Ô97.

The "Mersenne Twister" random number generator has a period of 2^19937-1, and generates 32-bit random numbers with good distribution properties "up to 623 dimensions." Code is available from or <.../mt19937b-int.c> (for the integer-valued version). . [Stephen Stanhope , gann-list, 27Oct97. Bill Park.]

Tally statistics for the SGI Lavarand system (using a bank of Lava Lamps to generate random number seeds) can be found at . [Craig W. Reynolds , genetic-programming, 29Oct97. Bill Park.]

Specialty solvers for PC-based Excel spreadsheets include (as of a year ago) Axcelis Evolver; Frontsys Premium Solver, ; New Light Industries Generator (genetic algorithms); Ward Systems Genehunter (genetic algorithms); Symbolic Systems Genetica; Palisade Best Fit (probability distributions); LINDO What's Best (linear optimization), ; Heizer/Baarns Best Answer; Decisioneering Crystal Ball (Monte Carlo simulator); Logix Magestic; Exatech XSolver (simulated annealing); and Interval Solver, . Some of these may have Mac versions now. You can find more information from SciTech International or Baarns Publishing. [Stan Hadley , comp.apps.spreadsheets, 28Oct97.]

SPSS Inc. will be discontinuing development of SPSS for Macintosh. DeltaGraph 4.04 for Macintosh will continue development, with 5.0 due in the 2nd half of 1998. SYSTAT 5.21 for Macintosh is two releases behind SYSTAT 7.0 for Windows, and an upgrade project ran into trouble when the company doing the port was acquired by another. SigmaPlot 5.01 for Macintosh is actually several releases behind SigmaPlot 4.0 for Windows (and is closer to SigmaPlot 2.0 for Windows), and users are advised to transition to DeltaGraph. [Joel York , comp.soft-sys.stat.spss, 27Oct97.]

Neural networks in commercial applications, with links to providers, are listed at . [Simon Monk , comp.ai.neural-nets, 29Oct97.] (One application is odor or aroma analysis.)

Hundreds of companies have been developing robust, "intelligent" sensors for the food industry, to escape cyclical industries such as petroleum or declining markets such as shipbuilding. Food companies are embracing process automation partly because it's hard to find apprentices for skilled baking professions. Sensors now monitor sweetness, viscosity, moisture, color, temperature, etc. Formerly it might take over half an hour to get a quality-control lab report, but modern sensors give real-time warning of any process changes -- thus paying for themselves quickly. Many sensors even monitor and report on their own performance. None can match human taste perception, though. [NYT. SJM, 04Nov97, 1C.]

The book "Fuzzy Logic & NeuroFuzzy Applications Explained" (Prentice Hall, $39) offers a math-free discussion of about 70 recent commercially successful applications of fuzzy logic. [Christiane Melcher , comp.ai.fuzzy, 27Oct97.]

To get fuzzy expert systems to optimize their rules automatically, try Bart Kosko's Fuzzy Associative Memory (FAM). This is a combination of fuzzy and neural net implementations based on the Bidirectional Associative Memory (BAM). A good book to start with would be Rao & Rao's "C++ Neural Networks & Fuzzy Logic, 2nd ed." (M&T Books, $40). Another approach is the "Combs method," described in James Andrews' "Taming Complexity in Large-Scale Fuzzy Systems," PC AI magazine, May97, . [Christopher McKinley , comp.ai.fuzzy, 29Oct97.]

Some good references on finite state machines (automata) for fast natural language parsing include , , , , and . Bruce Watson maintains a page of links to more general work, for computational linguistics, asynchronous circuit simulation, indexing, protocol verification, etc., at . Two workshops on implementing automata have pages at and . Peter Ludemann's company () claims an efficient lexicon implementation that fits millions of words in 200K-300K and runs at speeds competitive with hash table lookup. [, comp.compilers, 26Oct97.]

Martin Volk has collected Web links to interactive online tools for English or German computational linguistics and natural language processing. He included concordancing, but excluded simple dictionary lookup. . [, comp.ai.nat-lang, 24Oct97.]

nwcl is a new discussion and mailing list of the North-West Centre for Linguistics (founded by UMIST and the Universities of Lancaster, Manchester, Salford, and Wales Bangor). Send a "join nwcl your name" message to . [, new-lists, 28Oct97.]

TecHabla is a Spanish-language discussion of speech technology (tecnologia del habla), including speech recognition, speaker identification, speech synthesis, and natural language understanding. Send a "sub techhabla your name" message to . [Javier Macias-Guarasa , NEW-LIST, 16Sep97.]

The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy and related links can be found at . [Amnon Till , gsunet-l, 03Apr97.]

A good starting point on philosophical issues of AI is the Artificial Intelligence White Papers site at . [Hans Stanislawski , comp.ai.philosophy, 01Nov97.]

J. of Interest Group in Pure and Applied Logic is a hardcopy and electronic journal on such topics as proof theory, model theory, recursion theory, type theory, nonclassical logics, nonmonotonic logic, numerical and uncertainty reasoning, logic and AI, foundations of logic programming, logic and computation, logic and language, and logic engineering. , or to register for the e-journal. [Hans Olbach , newjour, 23Oct97.]

The Proceedings of the Friesian School is a non-peer-reviewed e-journal of philosophy in the tradition of Leonard Nelson's Abhandlungen der Fries'schen Schule, Neue Folge, plus the critical philosophy of Immanuel Kant. . [Kelley L. Ross , newjour, 23Oct97.]

The Vaidix site is for study and interpretation of vedas, ancient scriptures that dealt with psychology, philosophy, psycho-somatic relationships, logic, poetry, grammar, etymology, music, physiology, medicine, phonology, etc. Vaidix will explore vedic inclusion of modern research concepts such as neuro-fuzzy rule sets as an "operating system for the brain." . [, comp.ai.alife, 28Oct97.]

-- Ken