Technology report: PHAROS: Business adviser

The Single European Market is both the single largest opportunity and the single largest threat to face European companies in the 1990s. The survival of many companies will depend on how well they address these opportunities and react to these threats. First, they need to understand the Single Market issues and legislation, but expertise in these areas is expensive and rare. Many organisations, particularly smaller ones or those affected by the recession cannot afford to pay for this experience.This paper describes PHAROS, an Expert System which advises small to medium sized companies on how changes in Single European Market and Environmental legislation will affect their business. PHAROS was developed by National Westminster Bank and Ernst & Young Management Consultants. To date, PHAROS has cost over £2 million to develop and distribute.PHAROS achieved international acclaim when it was presented at the American Association of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) 1992 conference as one of the most Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence. PHAROS was also a medal winner in the 1992 British Computer Society Awards.     

Endpaper: FRPOLY: A benchmark revisited

The FRPOLY Lisp performance benchmark [3] was based on a circa-1968 piece of code for computing powers of polynomials. We address two questions: (a) What algorithm would you use if you really wanted to compute powers of polynomials fast? and (b) Given that Common Lisp supports many types of data structures other than the simple lists used for the benchmark, what more efficient representations might be appropriate to use for polynomials?     

双加权 L p 范数RPCA模型及其在椒盐去噪中的应用

鲁棒主成分分析（Robust principal component analysis，RPCA）模型中秩函数和 L 0 范数的求解是非确定性多项式（Nondeterministic polynominal，NP）难问题，凸近似模型的求解通常会导致过收缩。本文结合加权方法和 L p 范数提出了一种基于双加权 L p 范数的RPCA模型，利用加权 S p 范数低秩项和加权 L p 范数稀疏项分别对RPCA框架中的低秩恢复问题和稀疏恢复问题进行建模，使其更接近秩函数和 L 0 范数最小化问题的解，提升了矩阵秩估计和稀疏估计的准确性。为了验证模型性能，本文利用图像的非局部自相似性，结合相似图像块组的低秩性与椒盐噪声的稀疏性，将双加权 L p 范数鲁棒主成分分析模型应用于去除椒盐噪声过程中。定量与定性的实验结果表明，本文模型性能优于其他模型，同时奇异值过收缩分析也表明本文模型能够有效抑制秩成分的过度收缩。     

Anecdotes: Magnavox and Intel: An Odyssey

Today we have high-resolution videogames connected to our television sets, but let us reflect on a pioneering system in this field from 30 years ago. As an Intel applications engineer in 1976, my job (Mazor) was to find new customer applications for microcomputers and to translate customer needs to chip designers like Peter Salmon, who used our technology to solve customer problems. Analog integrated circuits (ICs) were prominently used in the entertainment products, but digital circuits were just making their debut particularly with digital readouts for time, station, and counters.     

Bookisms:

In this issue we review three books, two of which deal with knowledge and knowledge management and the third deals with the many collaboration techniques coming to market. The first two are solid works by people who are leaders in the field, including Laurence Prusak, coauthor with Tom Davenport of the most widely read Knowledge management book (Davenport and Prusak, 1995) published in the United States (see review in Volume 15, No. 3, Summer 1998 issue of ISM) and Ikujiro Nonaka (1991) from Japan who wrote the original knowledge management article in Harvard Business Review. The third book, Wikinomics, by Don Tapscott and coauthor, praises collaboration developments from Wikis to MySpace and beyond, written in a breathless, advertising style that may not appeal to everyone.     

Bookisms:

In this issue we review three books, two of which deal with knowledge and knowledge management and the third deals with the many collaboration techniques coming to market. The first two are solid works by people who are leaders in the field, including Laurence Prusak, coauthor with Tom Davenport of the most widely read Knowledge management book (Davenport and Prusak, 1995) published in the United States (see review in Volume 15, No. 3, Summer 1998 issue of ISM) and Ikujiro Nonaka (1991) Nonaka, I. 1991. The knowledge creating company.. Harvard Business Review, : 96–104. November-December). [Google Scholar] from Japan who wrote the original knowledge management article in Harvard Business Review. The third book, Wikinomics, by Don Tapscott and coauthor, praises collaboration developments from Wikis to MySpace and beyond, written in a breathless, advertising style that may not appeal to everyone.