Thursday, May 19, 2005
The next generation knowledge tools
Two communications from Dr Richard Ballard, Founder of
Knowledge Foundations, with foot notes
by Paul Prueitt, and links to additional comments that might be made by
BCNGroup members
Second communication à [80]
(short section moved from bead [79])
To be safe all my codes go up to the 10^38th power available in 64 bit machines. The same code can be recompiled easily for 10^616th power, if we ever get to 2048 bit busses, but having more ideas than atoms in the universe may be overkill. And this technology and science scales, not in the phoney way databases claim to scale (demanding unchangable, pre-defined schema).
What is the business value of being able this year (2005) or next(2006) to start capturing everything known. Between 1990-2002 our projects established and tested methodologies that could capture the entire modeled content of books at $5000-7000 each (then throw book away). Then we used this to capture the force structure content of Navy budgets 1991-1993 for the Chief of Naval Warfare, OP-07. Then the T&E Capabilities of 19 bases for NAWC-0; Electronic-Warfare Threats Knowledge Base for DMSO and PMA 208; Requirements for JAST -> Joint Strike Fighter; Avionic Simulation architectures for F/A-18, F-22, F-14; S&T Knowledge Base for ONR; Planning Models for CVN-77; then programmed High-speed (500fps) Optical Digital Image camera and SONNET transfer (10 gigabits/sec) to Terabyte RAID storage management system to photograph missile - missile intercepts at White Sands (in use now), just to test parts of Mark 3 backend. We test marketed this concept to Fox Sports for Football and car racing and to the movie industry for studio lighting. They can strobe all possible lighting setups at 500 fps, while the actors perform one take. Thereafter the editors can choose frame by frame the lighting they like best.
The future declarative processors will use a comparable process to compare and choose between all possible solutions to any problem -- huge IP values here as cpu disappears or becomes coprocessor to dpu. That is the Intel connection in our business plans.
This was all Advanced Engineering for us, but sponsors thought it was just a plain old contract deliverable. We have not got any money yet for R&D, they liked the product and did not care how we did it. It was that that made us invisible to R&D agencies, not secrecy. Our tools have been openly licensed, since 1976 (yes, there was a Mark 0 too, Paul). Mark 0 was used by 23 universities and 44 micro-based software publishing companies and related shops at IBM, CDC, Atari, Apple, Radio Shack (1976-1985). Mark 1 was built originally to provide Atari with a subject independent fiction shell. The Strategic Defense Command ultimately finished it as a Battle Management GUI for testing strategies of active defense (lasers & Brilliant pebbles) against full POET Soviet nuclear attack threat 500,000+ objects.
We find the talk about not being mature more than a little funny. All of this competed head to head with 200 or more competitors. Virtually all of it was done via teaming projects. We provided the technology no one else in the world could provide. Our teammates had customers asking for capabilities no contract could provide -- with us suddenly they could.
Unisys offered our platform with State Department approval to the Defense Ministers of Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and UAR as a system for capturing all their defense plans. We have talked with SAIC for several projects: DOE Yucca Mountain Legal Summaries, Los Alamos Knowledge Capture of Atom Bomb Construction. Generally SAIC must wait for customers to generate RFP and contract requirements so they can hire and fire accordingly. We provide complete contract concept and firm fixed Statement of Work without RFP, no one knows how to generate RFPs for something they have never imagined. Our SOW give them clear approaches, schedules, deliverables, options to stop or accelerate, every quarter. Our approach has generated new signed contracts within 24 hours (PMA 205), SAIC proposals need to be turned on by their customers first and that may and does take forever.
I can bring you copies of all of this, if you want to consider teaming. Our interest is technology transfer to you. You keep your customer -- and gain a new business line. That is the deal that has let us pick and choose the projects we like for 20 years.
Write and give me a heads-up on what you all might like to talk about.
Dick