Hybrid connectionist systems in research and teaching

There is a tremendous world-wide interest in the development of the theory and application of artificial intelligence (AI) and related techniques both in tertiary institutions and in industry. This paper presents a brief survey of overseas AI teaching programs together with a review of the teaching program in the University of South Australia. In addition, post-graduate projects undertaken by the Knowledge-Engineering Systems Group (KES), and sponsored by the Defence, Science and Technology Organisation (DSTO), are discussed. These involve expert systems, neural networks, fuzzy logic and genetic algorithms. It is shown by using a classical exclusive-OR problem that it is useful to use hybrid techniques which offer fast convergence in optimization problems. Although much of this work is still at an early stage, sufficient progress has been made to demonstrate the merit of using AI and related techniques to help create solutions to these problems