During my office relocation project I’ve started sorting, purging and scanning files from my archive. As I look back I’ve been on or lead lots of interesting projects. I’ve been fortunate to have the trust of many brilliant mentors and executives, such that they gave me projects to challenge me or I was too foolish to say no. Either way its been a great education and most likely shaped me into the creative thinker and researcher I am today. This afternoon’s excavation brought to the surface one of my favorite projects which most likely started my journey thinking about language, enterprise as a biological organism, and eventually to the digital nervous system. I think around that time I presented my Enterprise Linguistic –a Factor in CIM paper.
The project was a stretch assignment my mentor at IBM, Mike Kutcher, gave me based upon the group technology scheduling ad routing project I had built as Rockwell prior to joining IBM. I was fascinated by the though of using various dialects or languages to solve specific engineering / manufacturing problems. At that time Darpa and the Mantech program was still in operation. Mike had volunteered me as principle investigator to come up with a neutral manufacturing language. That brought me I contact with many brilliant people at IBM Research and around the corporation; Dr. David Grossman, Ricardo Conti, and Dr. Arno Schmackpfeffer to build an intelligent factory; one that would he its devices talk with each other to understand product requirements and determine how to manufacture the product itself. The components I worked on was the creation of various parts of the device control, scheduling and manufacturing operation descriptions in a man-machine sensible form. This eventually lead me to meeting John Sowa of conceptual graphs renown. The POC was a success, but unfortunately research directions at Darpa changed so we never went forward with the full scale pilot.
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