From: orville%weyrich@tnet.com (Orville R. Weyrich)
Subject: Re: AI Winter Refugees
Reply-To: tnet.com!weyrich!orville
Organization: Weyrich Computer Consulting
Date: Sun, 30 Aug 92 01:20:46 GMT

In article <x+an!9a.vere@netcom.com> vere@netcom.com (Steven Vere) writes:
>
>o what were the causes of AI Winter?

General economic downturn and in some cases general-purpose hardware/
software improving faster than AI software due to mass-market funding.
That's what happened to LISP machines, for example.

>o why has AI gone out of fashion in the US industrial sector?

I don't know that it has -- but it is like one leg of a stool -- pretty
useless without a couple more. For example, I am migrating a database
for a client from an IBM mainframe to a UNIX platform. Part of the migration
involves extracting as much information as possible out of a free-text
field in one of the input files and stuffing it into half a dozen other
fields in  the output files. Guess what? It is a job for natural language
processing, and guess what? People learn how to do that in AI classes.

But I would not have the job if I couldn't ALSO do C and UNIX.

I think that there is a lot of AI being done in industry -- but it is just
a part of an application. People don't say "let's develop something 
foxy like, for example an AI application." They say "hey look! some AI
techniques are useful in solving this problem that we have."

>o stories of AI professionals or recent graduates who are or have been
>  unemployed or underemployed due to AI Winter;

One company I worked for had a R&D project to develop a reverse engineering
tool using Prolog, theorem proving, and expert system technology. Since
their bread and butter was an IBM mainframe 4GL  they were hit hard by 
marketplace disenchantment with IBM mainframes and they were
unable to sustain the AI R&D project to fruition. They considered the
AI-oriented reverse engineering project to be the future hope of the 
company. When the company went under, I was one of the last to go, and the 
AI project had not had time or adequate funding to become a product. The
Japanese bought some rights to the technology, so it may still be alive 
somewhere in Japan. But the point is, the AI project was not dropped because
it went out of fashion, it was held up as the future generation as far
above the water as possible by its drowning father, but the father succumbed
before the child could be saved.

>o alternative career paths followed by AI Winter refugees.

While looking for my next position I focused on improving my C/UNIX skills
because they are becoming the lingua-franca of industry. I am now doing
AI using those C/UNIX skills. 

>
>   Countervaling views  are welcome, but please be prepared to explain
>the following phenomena: near-zero employment opportunities advertised
>in AI Magazine and similar forums; near-zero recruiting at recent AAAI
>conferences; major  declines   in  attendance at AAAI   over the  past
>several years.

Declines in attendance -- personally I have not gone to ANY conference
that required me to travel for the past several years -- travel budgets
have suffered major declines. If AAAI has suffered more than others, then
which others?

Near-zero recruiting? AI is still leading edge stuff and companies are 
not launching new leading edge (i.e. highly R&D oriented) projects in the
middle of a depression (err... 'economic downturn' :-) They don't need
new people with AI as their only skill -- they are struggling to keep 
funding for existing projects.

I checked and don't see much in the way of employment opportunities advertised
in Dr. Dobb's either. Last time I looked in Communications of the ACM
and in IEEE Computer Magazine, there were jobs advertised in all disiplines,
including AI, but the quantity was much less than I remember seeing in the
past. Perhaps you might give some comparative statistics for the
percentage and absolute number of jobs advertised in AI in such a general
forum. Personally, I consider myself to be an AI person, but if I am looking
for a job, I think CACM and IEEE Computer, not AI Magazine. Perhaps advertisers
think likewise.




orville

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Orville R. Weyrich, Jr.                          Weyrich Computer Consulting
Certified Data Processor                       POB 5782, Scottsdale, AZ 85261
Certified Systems Professional                      Voice: (602) 391-0821
Certified Computer Programmer                Internet: orville%weyrich@tnet.com
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Newsgroups: comp.ai