Communicating freely
Thoughts on how we can all talk a little easier, and how that can make life better.
Visiting South Birmingham LUG
The other day I attended a meeting of the South Birmingham Linux User Group. The meeting was held in Birmingham University in the school of computer science, and I found it a pretty comfortable setting. After all, this is the university where I did my MA.
On the day I attended there was a special talk by Professor Aaron Sloman on Artificial Intelligence. More specifically, Aaron was speaking about POPLOG and POP11, an AI development environment and the language it uses. From a technological perspective, it was a fascinating lecture.
POPLOG allows you to develop AI applications using an incremental compiler. This means it has some of the speed advantages of compiled code like C, but the flexibility of instant redevelopment and redeployment we would normally associate with interpreted languages like Java. The coolest feature was to watch Aaron writing changes to the code, seeing it compile almost instantly, and execute cleanly.
For AI development, the instant compile and execute model is particularly useful. It allows researchers to pro-actively adapt their applications to reach their overarching design goals. Because the end product of code design is compiled, it’s faster than interpreted languages, but it’s not as inflexible as tradition code.
POPLOG is not a new product. It’s been around for decades, and was even a commercial product in the nineties. It provided the original engine for a data-mining product called Clementine (the product is now ported to C++ and Java instead of using the original POP11 code). It’s a powerful system, especially for its target field, and it’s released under an open source license (Xfree86 1.0).
Hey, let’s not beat around the bush. Not everything is lovely in POPLOG land. The development environment of POPLOG looks dated. Being based around the command line instead of providing a graphical IDE makes it a bit scary for programming idiots like me. There are also problems getting POPLOG to run on all the Linux distributions. But I saw it in action, and I was impressed.
You can get instructions to help you install and run POPLOG on Debian and Ubuntu at the POPLOG main page. Best of all, there is an effort on sourceforge to develop OpenPOPLOG."
After the big talk, we wandered to Staff House and let down our hair. There was a really interesting mix of people attending, including some school students. I was impressed with those guys, and rather chuffed to hear that their school is running Red Hat! It looks like Windows is not everywhere, after all.
Hopefully I’ll make it along to future meetings. This one was certainly educational! Meanwhile, if you are anywhere near Birmingham (UK), do drop by one of the SBLUG meetings. The website is here.