I had the privilege of moderating a chat between Dr Charles Forgy, the inventor of Rete, and Carlos, my dear friend and co-founder of Sparkling Logic, also known for inventing Blaze Advisor in a previous life.
What I liked most in the talk was the candid nature of the discussion. It was the first time I believe we saw Charles opening up on stage; but there was some very serious take-aways too. Beyond the perspective of my colleagues on the lessons learned of the past, it was fascinating to hear both of them agree on the disruptive times we are going through right now, with some nuanced perspectives of course.
I will not go through the whole series of questions here but let me describe the format to help you make sense of the slides. After a quick round of questions to get Charles and Carlos comfortable with the chat, we discussed the various waves of technology disruption. I was looking for their insight as to what was happening back then and why it changed the face of artificial Intelligence, business rules and decision management successively. Then we talked about the most recent trends with Big Data, Cloud, mobile and all those things that have initiated the recent reshape of the computing industry.
We closed the session with a quick fire drill. The most interesting controversy here was the clash between our titans discussing the most unusual usage of the technologies they have developed. I let you weight in…
Charles once visited a customer that said they used OPS/J in a nuclear facility. Charles questioned whether it was a good idea to do that… The customer immediately reassured him: “oh… it is just a small reactor!”
Carlos discovered the incredible complexity of product design configuration with the usage of rule technology for bra design!!! Per his recollection, there was a lot of physical, fashion and cultural consideration that made it an interesting puzzle.
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If you answered “other”, you have to describe it as a comment to this blog!
You can find the abstract here. The slides showing the successive waves of technology disruption are there:
Sparkling Logic: rule technologies inside out: http://www.slideshare.net/cmatignon
The Rules Fest organization taped the conversation. I hope that they will release the video soon for our collective enjoyment.
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