The Alvey Programme was a

British government His Majesty's Government, abbreviated to HM Government or otherwise UK Government, is the central government, central executive authority of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

Background

During the early 1980s, Japan invited the United Kingdom to become a part of the Fifth Generation Project. In October 1981, a Department of Industry mission to Japan consisting of academics, civil servants and business representatives explored collaboration opportunities and attended the Fifth Generation conference. Informed by negotiations between ICL and Fujitsu conducted to "ensure the survival of ICL", suggesting that collaboration would only be possible in "very specific areas agreed upon by individual companies", it was concluded that an emulation of the Japanese approach would be preferable to any attempt at participating in the Japanese programme. In response, a committee was created and was chaired by John Alvey, a technology director at

British Telecom BT Group plc (formerly British Telecom) is a British Multinational corporation, multinational telecommunications holding company headquartered in London, England. It has operations in around 180 countries and is the largest provider of fixed-li ...

. The report generated proposed a different course of action to the Japanese initiative and became the basis for the UK's rejection of the Fifth Generation and the creation of its own Alvey Programme. The programme's fundamental goal was the improvement of the advanced information technology in the UK to address the declining performance of this sector. It operated in 1984 until 1990. Alvey was not involved in the programme itself. The main focus areas of the Alvey Programme were as follows: * Advanced Microelectronics and VLSI * Intelligent Knowledge Based Systems (IKBS) or

Artificial Intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is the capability of computer, computational systems to perform tasks typically associated with human intelligence, such as learning, reasoning, problem-solving, perception, and decision-making. It is a field of re ...

(AI) *

Software Engineering Software engineering is a branch of both computer science and engineering focused on designing, developing, testing, and maintaining Application software, software applications. It involves applying engineering design process, engineering principl ...

* Man-Machine Interaction (including

Natural Language Processing Natural language processing (NLP) is a subfield of computer science and especially artificial intelligence. It is primarily concerned with providing computers with the ability to process data encoded in natural language and is thus closely related ...

) Alongside these areas, the provision of a communications infrastructure was a component of the programme. Various areas of endeavour were incorporated into the main focus areas. For example,

systems architecture A system architecture is the conceptual model that defines the structure, behavior, and view model, views of a system. An architecture description is a formal description and representation of a system, organized in a way that supports reasoning ...

, specifically parallel processing, featured in the VLSI endeavour.

References

* Brian Oakley and Kenneth Owen, ''Alvey: Britain's Strategic Computing Initiative'',

MIT Press The MIT Press is the university press of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), a private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The MIT Press publishes a number of academic journals and has been a pioneer in the Open Ac ...

, 1990. {{ISBN, 0-262-15038-7 * Chris Rigatuso, Takeshi Tachi, Dennis Sysvester & Mark Soper
''Collaboration between Firms in Information Technology''
Berkeley, EE 290X Group G. * Richard Tyler, The Daily Telegraph, Feb 9th 2010

1984 establishments in the United Kingdom 1990 disestablishments in the United Kingdom History of artificial intelligence History of computing in the United Kingdom Research and development in the United Kingdom Research projects