The Department of Trade and Industry’s Smart Systems for Decision Makers initiative

The Smart Systems for Decision Makers (SSDM) initiative was recently announced by the UK Department of Trade and Industry (DTI). Its goal is to promote awareness of, and uptake of, smart systems in the business community. The programme takes a broad view of ‘smart systems’ and explicitly includes expert systems, neural nets, genetic algorithms, data mining, and new developments such as fuzzy neural computing. This initiative comes at an important time for the smart systems field. Although AI systems are increasingly common in commercial use, this success is little recognized within the business community as a whole, which appears to be at best unaware of AI and at worst hostile to it. The reasons for this are beyond the scope of this report, but the implications for the field are worrying: while this attitude remains widespread, the field faces an uphill struggle. It was therefore welcome news when the SSDM initiative was announced, with the aim of spreading the use of smart systems throughout the UK business community. The implications of success in this awareness programme extend well beyond national boundaries, and the prospects for growth in the smart systems field worldwide are enormous. A doubly welcome feature of the initiative is a significant absence. The initiative is not about funding pure research in the field; it is about encouraging the development of practical systems and views smart systems as being already sufficiently mature and robust to be commercially usable today. To have a major government department view the field in this way is a considerable encouragement, and also a considerable compliment to the researchers and practitioners who have been working in this area.