Software Engineering, Artificial Intelligence and Expert Systems for High Energy and Nuclear Physics

An example of the growing need for frontier physics experiments to make use of frontier technology is in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and related themes. By AI we are referring here to the use of computers to deal with complex objects in an environment based on specific rules (symbolic manipulation); to assist groups of developers in the design, coding and maintenance of large packages (software engineering); to mimic human reasoning and strategy with knowledge bases to make a diagnosis of equipment (expert systems) or to implement a model of the brain to solve pattern recognition problems (neural networks). These techniques, developed some time ago by AI researchers, are confronted by down-to-earth problems arising in high-energy and nuclear physics. However, similar situations exist in other "big sciences" such as space research or plasma physics, and common solutions can be applied. The magnitude and complexity of the experiments on the horizon for the end of the century clearly call for the application of AI techniques. Solutions are sought through international collaboration between research and industry.