Adaptive and intelligent systems applications

Computational intelligence, whose major technologies are artificial neural networks, fuzzy systems, evolutionary computing, and probabilistic methods, has recently emerged as a strong field in research efforts world wide. Tekes (Technology Development Centre), a financing organization under the Finnish ministry of trade and industry, launched in 1995 a five-year technology programme “Adaptive and intelligent systems applications” l , whose purpose is to develop working applications of computational intelligence in co-operation between Finnish research groups and industry. The plenary talk will be based on the results of this programme, as well as reported European and world-wide activities in the field. Some cases of the author’s own research projects are covered as well. The Tekes programme consists of company consortia projects, separate product development projects, and research projects. At present, there are 16 company consortia projects or product development projects and 5 research projects going on. These 21 projects are being partially financed by about 80 commercial enterprises. During the programme 15 product development projects have been finalized thus far. A number of new patent applications have been made and more than 10 new companies have been founded. The key application technologies are neural networks and fuzzy systems, and the largest application areas are industrial control, monitoring, diagnostics, and finance. The annual budget has been about 30 million mk, equivalent to 5 million Euro. In the intermediate evaluation of the programme it was estimated that the turnover in the years 1996-2000 would be FIM 300-350 million (USD 60-70 million) and that the process and quality savings in the same period would be over FIM 100 million (USD 20 million). Companies can utilise the results of the research projects to develop even more challenging applications to new promising markets. Finnish academic research groups have been involved in basic research on some of these techniques for more than two decades. This is largely due to the pioneering work of prof. Teuvo Kohonen of Helsinki University of Technology which started in late 60’s. This work has concentrated on associative memories, artificial neural networks, unsupervised learning, and pattern recognition. Perhaps the