page_title: Turing Institute
section_title: Research and development
hierarchical_section_title: Turing Institute / Research and development
caption_attribution_description: English: Danny Pearce with the ESA Qualitative satellite model with Hyperlook user interface.
context_page_description: The Turing Institute was an Artificial Intelligence laboratory based in Glasgow, Scotland between 1983 and 1994. The company undertook basic and applied research, working directly with large companies across Europe, the United States, and Japan developing software as well as providing training, consultancy and information services.
context_section_description: The Institute won research funding from the Westinghouse Corporation after it developed a machine learned rule-based system to improve the efficiency of a nuclear power plant. The research funding was used to launch the Freddy 3 advanced robotics project  aimed at studying robot learning and robot social interaction. Barry Shepherd developed much of the Freddy 3 software infrastructure. Tatjana Zrimec used the system to investigate how playing robots could develop structured knowledge about their world  while Claude Sammut used the system to investigate machine learning and control  and helped develop Reinforcement Learning. Ivan Bratko made several visits to the Turing Institute undertaking research in machine learning and Advanced Robotics.
   
   
  The Institute undertook several projects for the US military (e.g. Personnel Allocation for the US Office of Naval Research), credit card scoring for a South African Bank   and seed sorting for Scottish Agricultural Sciences Agency. Other large projects included the ESPRIT Machine Learning Toolbox developing CN2  and Electrophoretic Gel analysis with Unilever.
  In 1984 the Institute worked under contract from Radian Corp  to develop code for the Space Shuttle auto-lander.
  The code was developed with an inductive rule generator, Rulemaster, using training examples from a NASA simulator. A similar approach was later used by Danny Pearce to develop qualitative models to control and diagnose satellites for ESA as well as optimising gas flow in the North Sea for Enterprise Oil. Similar approaches based on pole-balancing automata  were used to control submersible vehicles  and develop a control system for helicopters carrying sling loads.Stephen Muggleton and his group developed Inductive Logic Programming and was involved in the practical use of machine learning for the generation of expert knowledge. Applications included the discovery of rules for protein folding (with Ross King)  and drug design  as well as systems such as CIGOL that were capable of discovering new concepts and hypotheses.
  In 1986, Jim Alty's HCI group won a major ESPRIT 1 contract to investigate the use of Knowledge Based systems in Process Control Interfaces called GRADIENT (Graphical Intelligent Dialogues, P600). (with Gunnar Johannsen of Kassel University), Peter Elzer (Clausthal University) and Asea Brown Boveri) to create intelligent interfaces for process control operators. This work had a major impact on process control interface design. The initial pilot phase report (Alty, Elzer et al., 1985) was widely used and cited. Many research papers were produced  A follow-on large ESPRIT research project was PROMISE (Process Operators Multimedia Intelligent Support Environment) working with DOW Benelux (Netherlands), Tecsiel (Italy) and Scottish Power (Scotland).
  In 1987, the Turing Institute won a project to build a large, scalable, network-available user-manual for 
  S.W.I.F.T. The worldwide-web-like system was launched in 1988. Its success as a global hypertext resource for its users led to SWIFT sponsoring the Turing Memorial series of Lectures.  The close working relationship came to an end, in part, when a key member of the SWIFT team, Arnaud Rubin, was killed by a terrorist bomb on Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie.
  One of the strongest business relationships the Institute had was with Sun Microsystems. Sun funded a series of projects where the key Institute Personnel were Tim Niblett and Arthur van Hoff. Several projects concerned the development of new user-interface tools and environments (e.g. GoodNews, HyperNews and HyperLook).
  HyperLook was written in PostScript and PDB, an ANSI C to PostScript compiler developed at the Institute, and it ran on Sun's NeWS Windowing System. Don Hopkins, while studying at the Turing Institute, ported SimCity to Unix with HyperLook as its front-end.
  Arthur van Hoff left the Institute in 1992 and joined Sun Microsystems where he authored the Java 1.0 compiler, the beta version of the HotJava browser and helped with the design of the Java language.
  Throughout the 1980s, the 
caption: Danny Pearce using HyperLook to help develop a satellite simulation for the European Space Agency in 1988
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