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C00003 00003	This report describes my visit to the  Soviet Union to participate in
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Soviet trip
This report describes my visit to the  Soviet Union to participate in
the  International   Joint  Conference  on  Artificial  Intelligence,
Tbilisi, Georgia, Sept 3-8, 1975.

Partial support was  provided by the  National Science Foundation  in
the form of funds to cover transportation but not food and lodging.

The official  part of the  visit was to  give an invited  tutorial on
"Computer  Vision and Productivity Technology", delivered on the last
day of the conference, Sept 8.  There have been numerous requests for
that review, and a paper will be written, based on that material.


The most important part of  the conference was the chance for contact
with a large group of  Soviet scientists in Artificial  Intelligence,
particularly in my field of vision and robotics.   In the past, there
had  been one  or two  Soviet scientists at  most at  any conference.
There were a large number at the AI conference; a number that I heard
was 200.

What was impressive was the  number of scientists engaged in research
in  scene analysis.   In Kiev, for  instance, there are  12 full time
staff devoted to research in this area.  I did not succeed in finding
out the numbers of researchers in the other major centers of research
in this area,  Moscow, Leningrad,  and Novosibirsk.   By  comparison,
there are 11 full time staff total in scene analysis in the five most
famous  American centers  for AI,  MIT, Stanford,  SRI CMU,  and USC.
There are, of  course, vision  efforts at other  universities in  the
United  States, and  students are  not  counted among  the full  time
staff.   It seems likely that the total effort in the Soviet Union is
larger than in the United States.

The Soviet  efforts in  scene  analysis apparently  began about  five
years  ago and from  private discussions  and from  the level  of the
papers in the  conference, the  Soviet research has  bridged the  gap
during that time.  A harsh view would be that this is good "catch-up"
work.   It might be overoptimistic  to think that the  work in the US
has a substantial lead over that in the Soviet Union.

Most of my time at  the conference was spent with technical  meetings
and private discussions with  Soviet and European vision researchers.
Nearly  all the people  I had hoped  to meet were  at the conference,
from vision, robotics and other AI areas.

In particular,  there were  two meetings  with  a group  of about  10
leading  Soviet researchers.   Several  long conversations  were made
with  V.  Rybak  and  G.Gimelfarb,  Kiev,  B.  Ignatiev,   Leningrad,
N.V.Zavalishin, Moscow, A.Platonov,  Moscow, V. Briabrin,  Moscow, G.
Vainshtein, Moscow, and V.  Stefanuk, Moscow.

After the  conference, I visited N.V.Zavalishin  at the Institute for
Control Problems, Moscow, and V. Stefanuk and others at the Institute
for Information Transmission, Moscow.

	Itinerary


depart for San Jose 530am Sept 1
arrive Moscow 6 pm Sept 2
arrive Tbilisi, Sept 3
IJCAI registration $60
depart Tbilisi, Sept 9
  not on business Sept 10,11
Moscow,       Sept 12
  Institute for Control Problems
  Institute for Information Transmission
depart Moscow Sept 14