Company - Our Research Heritage - Empiricom Technologies Ltd

The ideas underpinning Empiricom’s technology were originally explored during a collaborative research project in the late 1980’s between the UK Government, the UK’s leading IT companies at that time and a number of leading universities. This research initiative was known as the Alvey project. This project had been set up by the UK Government in response to efforts in Japan to develop so called "fifth generation computer systems" (FGCS).

The FGCS project was an initiative by Japan's Ministry of International Trade and Industry, begun in 1982, to create a "fifth generation computer". It aimed to create an "epoch-making computer" with supercomputer-like performance and usable artificial intelligence capabilities. The term "fifth generation" was intended to convey the notion of the system being a leap beyond existing machines.

Computers using vacuum tubes were called the first generation; transistors and diodes, the second; integrated circuits, the third; and those using microprocessors, the fourth. Whereas previous computer generations had focused on increasing the number of logic elements in a single Central Processing Unit (CPU), the fifth generation, it was widely believed at the time, would instead turn to massive numbers of CPUs for added performance. The primary fields for investigation from this initial project were:

Inference-based computer technologies for knowledge processing
Computer technologies to process large-scale data bases and knowledge bases
High performance workstations
Distributed functional computer technologies
Super-computers for scientific calculation

So ingrained was the belief that parallel computing was the future of all performance gains that the Fifth-Generation project generated a great deal of apprehension in the computer field. After having seen the Japanese take over the consumer electronics field during the 1970’s, and apparently doing the same in the automotive world during the 1980’s, the Japanese in the 1980’s had acquired a reputation for invincibility. In response, parallel projects were set up in the US (the Strategic Computing Initiative, "SCI", and the Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation, "MCC"), in England (the Alvey project), and in Europe (the European Strategic Program of Research in Information Technology, "ESPRIT", and the European Computer Research Centre, "ECRC"). Combined, these projects represented the biggest collaboration between government, industry and academia approach that the World has ever seen.

At the end of the ten year period the Japanese project had spent over 50 billion yen (about US $400 million at 1992 exchange rates) and was terminated without having met its goals. Interestingly however, despite this apparent failure, many of the approaches envisioned in the Fifth-Generation project, such as logic programming distributed over massive knowledge-bases, are now being re-interpreted in current technologies and underpin many of the IT growth stories of this decade. For example, The Web Ontology Language (OWL) employs several layers of logic-based knowledge representation systems, while many flavours of parallel computing proliferate, including multi-core architectures at the low-end and massively parallel processing at the high end. In other words, this huge research effort in the 1980’s paved the way for many tangential leaps in computing technology that have been experienced in recent years and continue to be commercially exploited.

In the UK, the Alvey project focussed on five areas:

VLSI (very large scale integration) technology for microelectronics
Intelligent Knowledge Based Systems (IKBS) or Artificial Intelligence (AI)
Software Engineering
Man-Machine Interface (included Natural Language Processing)
Parallel processing

In the six year duration of the program, 198 collaborative projects were supported with each project averaging a 2 to 3 year lifetime. A very large number of firms were involved with this national program as well as academic institutions and government research laboratories. In all, 115 firms, 68 academic institutions and 27 government labs participated. Most projects involved only a small number of these organizations, typically 3 to 5. This extensive collaboration was unprecedented in the UK, whose IT industry was extremely fragmented when compared to other nations such as Japan or the U.S. Over the 6 year lifetime of the program, the government provided £200 million to Alvey of the total of £350 million.

One of the bigger collaborative efforts was around Intelligent Knowledge Based Systems. This involved a consortium comprising ICL, Logica, the DSS and the Universities of Lancaster, Liverpool, Surrey and Imperial College London. Rick Turner, the Founder and CEO of Empiricom, was seconded to this project from ICL. The subject of the project was knowledge-based decision support within a legislation based organisation, and as part of the research a number of knowledge acquisition techniques were examined. It was here that Rick and colleagues originally tested the nascent philosophical ideas underpinning what would later become Empiricom.

Like in Japan, the Alvey project failed to achieve its commercial objectives but it left a rich seam of research ideas which others were later to exploit. Most famously, the work carried out in Cambridge on Bayesian logic as part of the Alvey project subsequently led to the research that was spun-out as Autonomy under Dr. Mike Lynch. Autonomy remains the only UK University spin-out to reach £1bn in value. Conceptually, it is believed that the technology underpinning Empiricom could eventually grow to a similar value to that of Autonomy.