Computer Technology Corporation Research Articles

Creating a 30-Million-Rule System: MCC and Cycorp

Hard-won discoveries led to early expert systems (ESs) successes, then overhyping, and then disillusionment. The bottleneck was infrastructure: limited expressivity representation languages, inefficient inference engines, inadequate ontologies, as well as lack of common-sense, general theories of the world, and argumentation and context mechanisms. At Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation and then at Cycorp, we have systematically codified much of the “obvious” knowledge of the world that one rarely articulates since “everyone” of course already knows it. Lack of that solid infrastructure limits AIs' trustworthiness: they make mistakes no human would make, and they cannot explain their reasoning. This is the story of my ESs experience and how 50 years of lessons learned led my team to steadily and successfully construct an enormous knowledge-based system that avoids such brittleness.

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND CYC

Since 1984, it is enormous work going on for the accomplishing of the project Cyc (‗Saik‘). This work is based on knowledge of ―Artificial Intelligence‖ which is developed by the Cycorpcompany and by Douglas Lenat at MCC. It‘s a Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation (MCC) part for so long. The dominant aim of Cycorp to develop this system is to just clarify anything in semantical determination rather than syntactically determination of words commands by the machine in which Cyc is installed to do some job. The other objective was in the building of Cyc is to codify, in a form which is usable by the machine, where knowledge‘s millions piece that composes common sense of a normal human or the common sense made in the human brain. Cyc presents a proprietary schema of knowledge representation that utilized first-order relationships. The relationships that presents between first-order logic (FOL) and first-order theory (FOT). After a long time, in1986, Cyc’s developer (Douglas Lenat) estimate that the total effort required to complete Cyc project would be 250,000 rules and 350 man-years. In 1994, Cyc Project was the reason behind creating independency into Cycorp, in Austin, Texas. As it is a common phrase that "Every tree is a plant" and "Plants die eventually" so that why by the mean of this some knowledge representing pieces which are in the database are like trees and plants like structures. The engine is known as an inference engine, able to draw the obvious results and answer the questions correctly on asking that whether trees die. The Knowledge Base (KB) system, which is included in Cyc, contains more than one million humans like assertions, rules or commonsense ideas. These ideas, rules, and human-defined assertions are describing or formatted in the language known as CycL. They are based on the predication of calculus and many otherhuman-based sciences, which has syntax similar to that of the language ―LISP‖. Though some extend the work on the Cyc project continues as a ―Knowledge Engineering‖, which represents some facts about the world, and implementing effective mechanisms which are derived after reaching the basic level conclusion on that knowledge. As Cyc include the firstorder logic and first order theory, which exist in some relationship; so it definitely uses and handle some other branches for human-interaction like mathematics, philosophy, and linguistics. However, increasingly, the other aim of Cycorp while developing Cyc is involvingan ability, which is given to the Cyc system that it can communicate with end users, by use of CycL, processing of natural language, and can assist with the knowledge formation process through the machine learning.

TIMELINESMCC's human interface laboratory

Success famously has many parents, and SIGCHI is no exception. A strong paternity claim can be made by Bill Curtis, who garnered funding and organized ACM's sponsorship for the Gaithersburg conference in 1982, during which plans to form SIGCHI were announced. The successful and unexpectedly profitable Gaithersburg meeting provided the model for the first CHI conference, which convened in Boston in December 1983. In this column, Bill discusses his subsequent involvement with the Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation. This research enterprise, largely forgotten today, was highly influential in the 1980s, hiring and providing visibility to HCI researchers, many of whom remain active. From 1986 to 1989, I was one of the occupants of that unusual building in Austin, Texas, where the fourth-floor management comprised mainly former intelligence-agency employees, while many researchers on the floors below were there in part to avoid working on Reagan-era Strategic Defense Initiative ("Star Wars") projects. As Timelines editor, I would like to thank Richard Anderson and Jon Kolko for their unwavering support and assistance, and for the inspiration provided by their dedication to and outstanding stewardship of this magazine.---Jonathan Grudin

Emerging multigigahertz digital and mixed-signal integrated circuits targeted for military applications: dependence on advanced electronic packaging to achieve full performance

A revolution is occurring in several device and integrated circuit technologies (silicon CMOS and its extensions such as silicon germanium and silicon on insulator [SOI] and the so-called III-V compound semiconductors including indium phosphide and gallium arsenide), as well as in solid-state sensors such as infrared detectors enabled by the new materials and devices. These new components are being used to enhance the performance of many systems, and even to create systems never before available, of present interest to the U.S. Department of Defense and of likely near-term interest to parts of the commercial electronics industry such as the landline, wireless, and satellite telecommunications industry. These new components require advanced electronic packaging that does not restrict or degrade their performance. Unfortunately largely due to commercial cost pressures, research in and small-lot manufacture of high-performance packaging though still feasible and not lacking for good ideas for possible enhancement, are no longer being actively pursued either by the principal U.S. government agencies (e.g., DARPA, Air Force), by the commercial electronic packaging industry, or by commercial consortia such as the Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation (defunct as of June 2000), Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC), or Sematech Inc. This paper discusses recent examples of high-performance components and integrated circuit technologies and describes how they are being exploited in new or upgraded systems. Advances in packaging technology that will be required to support the new integrated circuits are also described. In conclusion, several possible approaches are reviewed by which the United States can regain momentum in the development of performance-driven packaging technologies.

The Organization of Research Corporations and Researcher Ability

This paper analyzes the formation of Research Corporations as an alternative governance structure for performing R&D compared to pursuing in-house R&D projects. Research Corporations are private for-profit research centers that bring together several firms with similar research goals. In a Research Corporation formal authority over the choice of projects is jointly exercised by the top management of the member firms. A private for-profit organization cannot commit not to interfere with the project choice of the researchers. However, increasing the number of member firms of the Research Corporation reduces the incentive of member firms to meddle with the research projects of researchers because exercising formal authority over the choice of research projects is a public good. The Research Corporation thus offers researchers greater autonomy than a single firm pursuing an identical research program in its in-house R&D department. This attracts higher ability researchers to the Research Corporation compared to the internal R&D department. The paper uses the theoretical model to analyze the organization of the Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation (MCC). The facts of this case confirm the existence of a tension between control over the choice of research projects and the ability of researchers that the organization is able to attract or hold onto.

Application of game theory in government strategies for industrial collaborative research and development

The author shows that game theory can be instrumental in helping formulate appropriate governmental strategies to support industrial research and development (R&D) collaborations among competing firms. The author proposes several guidelines and approaches that are based on a simple model which is derived from game theory. It is shown that to assist industrial firms in reaching collaborative agreements, which is normally a very difficult task because of the conflicting interests and the great technological uncertainties involved, governments should concentrate their managerial support on facilitating the negotiation process by providing protocols and third-party consultation. Governments should also, if they have credibility and competence, propose collective goals and lead firms into working together under a government-designed framework. The author argues that because relationships in collaborative R&D programs are very costly to establish and are very specific to participants, partners may want to pursue cooperation in other endeavors once they have amassed satisfactory collaborative experience. The author discusses the ways in which the proposed guidelines and approaches are reflected in the experiences of some wellknown collaborative R&D programs, such as the Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation (MCC) and SEMATECH in the US, the Alvey program in the UK, and the Very-Large-Scale Integrated-Circuit (VLSI) program in Japan.

Collaborative research as a function of proximity, industry, and company: a case study of an R&D consortium

Collaborative work among researchers at US Universities, industry, and federal laboratories is increasingly advocated in the globally competitive marketplace. Reliable and meaningful measures of such collaboration have been sparse. This study uses a bibliographic search of published, co-authored research papers to analyze collaboration patterns among researchers at one of the nation's oldest, largest, and most complex R&D consortia, the Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation (MCC) and its shareholders, other industry participants, universities, and federal laboratories. The data indicate that, in terms of a defined population of published research articles, MCC researchers have collaborated more frequently with academic than with corporate researchers and more often with nonshareholder than shareholder organizations. MCC is located in Austin, Texas. Geographic proximity has played a role in the consortium's collaboration with universities only for the local research university, The University of Texas at Austin. Proximity has not been an important factor in corporate collaboration, with the consortium. Among MCC shareholders, collaboration has varied by type of industry, while universities have played an important linking role between MCC and industry. R&D expenditures per employee for member companies are inversely related to the frequency of co-authorship of articles with MCC researchers. Collaboration of MCC shareholders with international researchers has been fairly frequent, given that MCC is closed to foreign membership.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>

Technology Transfer in Consortia

Research consortia in the United States have proliferated over the past decade. By the beginning of 1992, over 250 consortia had registered with the U.S. Government under the National Cooperative Research Act (NCRA) of 1984. The Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation (MCC) in Austin, Texas, was one of the first consortia to register under the Act. This article describes my first-hand experience in heading up the function in the Computer Aided Design (CAD) Program--one of MCC's original four programs. While much has been written about MCC in the general and business press (1,2,3,4), and researchers from the University of Texas at Austin and the IC2 Institute have postulated several theories based on their extensive surveys and interviews with MCC staff and shareholders(5), this is one of the few papers describing MCC from an insider's perspective. In a recent article in Issues in Science and Technology (6), my associate Jack Bremer and I described five lessons that consortia must learn in the 1990s if they are to be successful. Those lessons are: 1. Maintain a coherent strategic vision. 2. Choose problems that have significant payoffs. 3. Optimize communication with members. 4. Make a continual process. 5. Strengthen membership commitment. While all five lessons are vital to consortium management and members, lessons 3 and 4 are particularly important if consortia are to realize the potential leverage that their supporters often cite. As I shall explain later, understanding these two challenges may lead to a new model of consortia for the 1990s that overcomes the shortcomings of earlier collaborative efforts. PREDICTED VS REAL PROBLEMS I have been involved with U.S. consortia (as a consultant, manager, strategic planner, or journalist) for over a decade, and have visited with officials of Japanese consortia, including the former director of the VLSI Program and administrators of the Fifth Generation Computer Systems Project, on three occasions. During this period, I have discussed the merits and drawbacks of consortia with technologists and managers in many organizations who were already members of consortia or considering participation. Originally, many observers predicted that consortia in the U.S. would fail for three reasons: 1. Competitors in domestic markets would not cooperate, even in the face of foreign competition supported by foreign-government-sponsored consortia. 2. The concept of pre-competitive research was too ill-defined, and would not result in meaningful results. 3. Consortia participants would not assign their best people to the venture, so the resulting would not be first-rate. While there is some truth to each of the above predictions, numerous examples from personal experience contradict those predictions. By and large, the competitor cooperation syndrome is a non-issue. Only when a participant's particular product line or manufacturing process comes into play, do competitive stresses emerge, and several successful mechanisms have been used to diffuse those pressures. Pre-competitive research, often called generic research, has been well understood for many years, and does not limit the usefulness of results so long as the is at least taken to the prototype stage. Finally, while it has been true that companies usually and understandably assign non-critical researchers to a consortium, company assignees in MCC's case made up only a small percentage of the overall staff (less than 15 percent as of mid-1990). If the above-postulated problems with consortia in the U.S. are red herrings, then what are the real problems? There are three: 1. The consortium, and especially its members, may treat technology transfer in too narrow a sense, leading to a situation in which the lies fallow after it becomes available to participants. …

Introduction to object-oriented databases

Introduction to Object-Oriented Databases provides the first unified and coherent presentation of the essential concepts and techniques of object-oriented databases. It consolidates the results of research and development in the semantics and implementation of a full spectrum of database facilities for object-oriented systems, including data model, query, authorization, schema evolution, storage structures, query optimization, transaction management, versions, composite objects, and integration of a programming language and a database system.The book draws on the author's Orion project at MCC, currently the most advanced object-oriented database system, and places this work in a larger context by using relational database systems and other object-oriented systems for comparison.Won Kim is Director of the Object-Oriented and Distributed Systems Laboratory at Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation (MCC) in Austin, Texas.Contents: Introduction. Data Model. Basic Interface. Relationships with Non-Object-Oriented Databases. Schema Modification. Model of Queries. Query Language. Authorization. Storage Structures. Query Processing. Transaction Management. Semantic Extensions. Integrating Object-Oriented Programming and Databases. Architecture. Survey of Object-Oriented Database Systems. Directions for Future Research and Development.

ES‐Kit: An object‐oriented distributed system

AbstractThis paper describes the design, implementation, and performance of ES‐Kit, a distributed object‐oriented system being developed by the Experimental Systems Project at the Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation. The operating system consists of a kernel and a set of Public Service Objects which dynamically extend the functionality of the kernel by providing several traditional operating system services when required by application objects. Applications for the ES‐Kit environment are written in GNU C++ and do not require additional language primitives for distributed execution. Initial performance results from a representative set of applications indicate that the object‐oriented paradigm provides a powerful solution to distributed programming.

Key variables in technology transfer: A field-study based empirical analysis

Research and development (R&D) consortia represent a new organizational form which highlights barriers and clarifies solutions to efficient and timely technology transfer. Using interview, archival, and survey data collected on one of the nation's oldest and most prominent R&D consortia, the MCC (Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation), this study refines and contributes to established technology transfer theory by suggesting that four variables—communication interactivity, cultural and geographical distance, technology equivocality, and personal motivation—are central to technology transfer processes within and between organizations. Research hypotheses are presented in terms of a Technology Transfer Grid which depicts different combinations and managerial implications of the four variables.

New Directions for Industrial R&amp;D Consortia

Vertically linked teams are simultaneously one of the newest and one of the oldest approaches to making research consortia more productive--new in the sense they are just beginning to receive top-level Washington attention as a means of achieving international competitiveness and old because the idea is rooted in the established practice of leading technology companies to work closely with a selected list of qualified vendors to achieve superior quality. Nonetheless, this growing attention represents opportunity to formalize these vendors-customer relationships and enable the United States to maintain its technological leadership in the face of growing foreign competition, in the opinion of Robert M. White, Under Secretary for Technology in the Department of Commerce. Just as horizontal consortia evolved over the past decade to enable companies to pool their resources and tackle the ever-increasing costs of basic research, White, who holds a Ph.D. in physics from Stanford, believes the time has come to take the next step and accelerate the process of bringing products to the marketplace by implementing this research in a vertical direction. There is no consensus within industry at this time that the idea is a panacea for all that ails American research, but initial efforts by the Commerce Department and others are being watched closely. prototype of the horizontally organized research consortium is Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation. MCC was established in January 1983 in Austin, Texas, by 16 computer and semiconductor companies (now up to 56) to cooperate on basic research and then to compete during the development, production and marketing phases of product life cycles. Now, under the aegis of White's office, the prototype of the vertical organization of the future is taking shape. It is evolving out of the National Program for the Superconducting Electric Power System of the Future, and it exemplifies the Bush Administration's top priority goal of achieving international competitiveness. idea of vertical teaming arrangements is simple in principle, White explained at this year's Industrial Research Institute annual meeting in Tucson, Arizona (RTM, July-August 1991, p. 2). is a strategic partnership program which will help business explore the possible benefits arising from efficient pre-competitive forms of collaboration, he told the group. is in distinction to horizontal consortia, such as MCC as it was originally conceived, but involves teams made up of noncompeting companies throughout the process of innovation, manufacturing and marketing, he added. In interview with Research-Technology Management following the IRI annual meeting, White amplified on two reasons why he is convinced the times are propitious to take this next step: First, it's not really new; second, it won't take any special legislation. The advantage is that it's something we can do today, he said. White described the concept as an outgrowth of quality management ideas...of close cooperation among suppliers, manufacturers and customers. He cited the examples of Motorola and Xerox, which have pioneered the idea of working closely with their vendors--even to the point of reducing the total number of vendors--in order to maintain tighter controls over quality. The advantage over a horizontal consortium is that you're not dealing with competitors, and this alleviates antitrust concerns, White continued. I don't think any (new) legislation will be needed for vertical consortia. This latter point, antitrust legislation, has been a sticking point in previous attempts to achieve much-needed cooperation at the expensive front end of a product's life cycle--and thus stay competitive with Japanese and other foreign competitors, who have virtually unlimited access to U.S. academic basic research--without falling afoul of the Administration's implacable hostility to anything that smacks of Japanese-style industrial policy. …

Accelerating Technology Transfer in R&amp;D Consortia

Since the passage of the National Cooperative Research Act in October 1984, more than 150 R&D consortia have filed with the U.S. Department of Justice. Some of the more prominent U.S. consortia are the Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation (MCC) and SEMATECH in Austin, Texas, the Software Engineering Institute in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the National Center for Manufacturing Sciences in Ann Arbor, Michigan, the Semiconductor Research Corporation in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, the Biotechnology Research and Development Corporation in Peoria, Illinois, the Software Productivity Consortium in Herndon, Virginia, and the Center for Advanced Television Studies in Boston, Massachusetts. These consortia cover a range of emerging technologies including telecommunications, microelectronics, semiconductor manufacturing, biotechnology, software engineering, transportation, and superconductivity. They are composed of 1,157 business, government and academic organizations. Data on 902 of the business organizations in the IC(2) Institute's consortia database shows that 843 are U.S. companies and 42 are foreign firms. The balance are state and Federal government agencies, U.S. and foreign universities, and other consortia. The table below lists the U.S. firms involved in six or more consortia. While consortia vary in organizational structure, technological emphasis, funding mechanisms, and personnel make-up, they all share one abiding issue which relates to their purpose for being formed the transfer of technology to their member companies in an efficient, timely manner. Technology transfer is the application of knowledge. It involves any geographical shift of technology (ideas as well as physical products): person-to-person, group-to-group, or organization-to-organization. There are two fundamental aspects to the transfer process. First, the technology must be created or discovered. Second, it must be expeditiously transferred to and used by the appropriate receptor. The second aspect is proving to be at least as challenging and certainly more controversial than the first. R&D consortia pose unique management challenges and they represent a new type of organizational form for several reasons. Consortia are often composed of companies (i.e., shareholders) that seek mutually beneficial cooperative research while remaining competitors in the marketplace. They are thus often composed of personnel from radically different corporate cultures. In addition, shareholder members present different managerial priorities, policies and procedures. As a result, companies often participate in a consortium for different and sometimes conflicting reasons. Within any single consortium, different research programs, utilizing different research methodologies are commonly being pursued simultaneously. Consortium managers and researchers are thus separated from shareholder organizations by a variety of professional, technological, strategic, and cultural barriers. Although they may be less pronounced, similar barriers to technology transfer exist between the R&D laboratory and the production and marketing departments of a single firm, or between corporate R&D and a firm's divisions. This paper takes the position that lessons learned about technology transfer in a consortium are important for firms trying to effect the timely transfer of technology from the research bench to the marketplace. These lessons provide useful insights on practical ways to speed technology transfer across the functional departments of an organization. Methodology An applied management model for technology transfer has been developed from a year-long study of the Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation (MCC), a major, for-profit, U.S. R&D consortium that was established in 1983. From January to May 1989 in-depth interviews were conducted with managers and scientists at the consortium and with shareholder representatives. …

4940085 Fluid heat exchanger for an electronic component : Richard D Nelson, Omkarnath R Gupta, Dennis J Herrell assigned to Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation

4940085 Fluid heat exchanger for an electronic component : Richard D Nelson, Omkarnath R Gupta, Dennis J Herrell assigned to Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation

Technology transfer in multi-organizational environments: the case of R&amp;D consortia

Research consortia represent a new organizational form which clarifies and highlights barriers and solutions to efficient and timely technology transfer. Using interview, archival, and survey data collected on MCC (the Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation), it is suggested that four variables-communication, distance, equivocality, and motivation-are central to technology transfer processes within and between organizations. Managerial implications are presented in terms of a technology transfer grid which depicts different combinations of the variables.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>

Multichip modules for high performance computer applications

Multichip module packaging is evolving to become the dominant packaging approach for high performance computer applications in order to take full advantage of the improvements in speed and level of integration of advanced very-large-scale integrated circuits. This technology uses chip-on-board assembly on very high density interconnect and achieves reduced interconnect length and elimination of one packaging level. In this paper we present the development efforts at Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation in this area which include the following: wafer bumping, multilayer copper/polyimide interconnect, high I/O tape automated bonding, high density connector, and cooling technology.

The Classification of Semantic Relations Based on Primitive Properties

Although much research has been done on the classification of objects (for example, taxonomic hierarchies in biology), there has been little research to date on the classification of semantic relations among objects. This paper describes a method that uses the definitional properties of semantic relations to classify the relations in a manner similar to that used for the classification of nonrelation objects. The classification schema is being implemented in CYC, a frame-based, knowledge representation system under development at the Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation, Austin, Texas [Lenat and Gulla, 1990]. CYC researchers are attempting to encode into a computer common-sense knowledge about the real world, along with mechanisms for reasoning about that knowledge. CYC currently contains more than 5,100 relations (called slots), which are classified loosely according to several different schemes. This paper presents a unifonn classification scheme that is being used to reorganize these slots. The limitations of the scheme are also discussed.

Cooperation in R D

Tensions between competition and cooperation, mediated by government policies, set the conditions under which private firms engage in joint R&D. In general, companies collaborate when the costs of independent efforts are high relative to expected benefits. Characteristic forms of cooperative R&D in the United States, Western Europe, and Japan show a range of government roles from historical confinement by antitrust (United States) to active encouragement (Japan). When the R&D is relatively basic, with time horizons too long to be attractive to companies individually, cooperative projects may make valuable contributions to the underlying technology base. But the more applied the R&, the more likely it is to remain a marginal activity, consisting of projects that individual companies rank second to those pursued with internal resources. Examples such as Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation in the United States, the European Community's ESPRIT program, and Japan's International Superconductivity Technology Center illustrate these patterns.

The Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation

This article offers an interim assessment of the Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation (MCC). It approaches this task from three perspectives: (1) a descriptive review of MCC's origins and development of the National Cooperative Research Act of 1984, under which MCC qualified for limited exemption from the antitrust laws for the purpose of collaboration, as defined, in research and development; (2) an empirical study of what is new and distinctive about MCC; and (3) an assessment of its future prospects as a private corporation and as a de facto instrument of U.S. foreign economic policy. Market and institutional models of the foreign trade arena are employed to aid in the evaluation process, as is McKenna's model of the stages of product creation. MCC's future is viewed as uncertain and controversial, in part because its creation, structures, and goals reflect many of the issues associated with the ongoing debate on the appropriate nature of business-government relations in the United States.

Design by decomposition of multiparty interactions in Raddle87

article Design by decomposition of multiparty interactions in Raddle87 Share on Author: I. R. Forman Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation, Austin, Texas Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation, Austin, TexasView Profile Authors Info & Claims ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering NotesVolume 14Issue 3May 1989 pp 2–10https://doi.org/10.1145/75200.75201Online:01 April 1989Publication History 8citation190DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations8Total Downloads190Last 12 Months2Last 6 weeks0 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my AlertsNew Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteGet Access