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Date:Mon Aug 2 21:57:03 1999 
Subject:Re: poplog development 
From:Aaron Sloman See text for reply address 
Volume-ID:990802.06 

Luc Beaudoin <SeeTextForReplyAddress@nowhere.com> writes:

> Date: Mon, 02 Aug 1999 17:54:12 GMT
> Organization: Abatis-sys
>
> I'm curious about the status of Poplog now. I understand that it's in
> the public domain.

Sussex university still owns "Poplog" as a trade mark, and they own
the copyright on all the system sources, even though they have made
them freely available, as defined in the installation guide:

    ftp://ftp.cs.bham.ac.uk/pub/dist/poplog/new/install.txt

> 1. Is Sussex still involved in Poplog development? (Presumably the
> funding has dried up...). What has become of the Poplog team members?
> (An e-mail reply would be better for the last question.)

John Gibson recently took early retirement, and is no longer
available to help on any regular basis (though he did fix the linux
implementation so that it worked later versions than Linux 4.2).
Some other members of the old Poplog team are still employed at
Sussex on a variety of different jobs.

There is a limited amount of support for Poplog for local users at
Sussex and ISL and Sussex are still collaborating, though the focus
is not on Poplog development.

> 2. Are there still commercial applications being updated?

I don't know what you are referring to here. There are a number of
commercial applications based on Poplog (mainly either pop-11 or
prolog or a combination), but I don't expect the developers to
announce their intentions.

There are people who plan to develop commercial applications based
on Pop-11 now that the system is freely available. I can't give
details.

> 3. Is Integral Solutions still using it for their data mining
> application?

I believe the core of Clementine is implemented in Pop-11. How long
that will remain the case I don't know. It will not be easy to
replace it with any other language in the short run.

Since you asked your questions publicly I've answered them publicly.
I don't think I have given away any confidences.

I'll add that I am planning (in collaboration with Sussex) a grant
proposal to support some further development and packaging of Poplog
and especially Pop-11, to make it more versatile and to support
teaching and research in AI and Cognitive Science.

I believe that the current research funding climate will not prevent
the results being given away free of charge to all comers, which
used to be difficult with research funding in the UK.

Aaron
===
-- 
Aaron Sloman, ( http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~axs/ )
School of Computer Science, The University of Birmingham, B15 2TT, UK
EMAIL A.Sloman AT cs.bham.ac.uk   (NB: Anti Spam address)
PAPERS: ftp://ftp.cs.bham.ac.uk/pub/groups/cog_affect/0-INDEX.html