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Sunday, July 31, 2011

The Hubble and Enterprise Planning

I have been reading Eric J Chaisson's Book: The Hubble Wars, a detailed view of the launch and operation of the Hubble Space Telescope. My background is in astrophysics, so the details of goals and scheduling ring true. My later career dealt with optimizing the large scale enterprise so some of Chaisson's descriptions of the Hubbell team using AI techniques to direct performance remind me of those heady intelligence times in the late 80s and early 90s. The shuttle is over now, but the Hubble is still there and there is still much need for doing things quickly and well in the enterprise. He writes about an environment written for the Hubble: . "Science Planning Intelligent Knowledge Environment. (SPIKE) a neural net, Lisp language based algorithm that includes the latest and sundry kind of smart software, expert systems and artificial intelligence techniques..... " We could use more of that kind of advanced help today. I am now taking closer look at what Spike did.

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