Europe's ESPRIT programme
On 28 February 1984 the Council of the European Communities adopted ESPRIT, a five-year programme of research in information technologies from 1 January 1984 with a Community contribution of 750 million ECU. One of its five areas is advanced information processing: expert systems, knowledge representation, inference and learning, pattern recognition.
Why it matters
Research on machine intelligence became a joint undertaking of the Community's states: a project received money only if at least two independent industrial partners from different countries worked in it. The decision called knowledge processing the key to the next computer generation.
Projects are pre-competitive, by contract, as a rule in reply to an open invitation in the Official Journal; the Community normally bears half the cost and the participants the rest. Staff costs may not exceed 4.5 percent of the contribution. The other areas: microelectronics, software technologies, office systems and computer integrated manufacture, and within information processing also architectures departing from von Neumann's to exploit parallelism. The programme was to be reviewed after 30 months or once 60 percent of the sum was committed. L. Fabius signed for the Council as its President; the decision was published on 9 March 1984. What the record does not claim. The word Japan does not occur in the decision, so the record does not say ESPRIT was an answer to the Fifth Generation, though it is placed beside it. How much the programme finally spent and what it achieved, the decision could not know.