1- To maximise the scientific output of the project, it is necessary to have well 
trained key persons stay on after spending their assigned period in the project (ap-
proximately 4 years) while, in contrast, to maximise the industrial benefits of the asso-
ciated companies technology transfer, through experienced personnel transfer, should 
occur regularly. The policy used in the project, as far as the authors are aware, was 
something in between; most of the key persons stayed in the project while some left 
the project after their assigned period. 

2- To fix a project period is extremely counter-creative and correspondingly counter 
productive as regards to the scientific output of the project. It is better in scientific 
endeavours to organise projects into stages, where the financing of the next stage is 
conditional on the progress made in the previous one, and to set the goals of the next 
period depending on the progress of the previous one, and possible changes in the en-
vironment of the project. This would make projects more flexible, and responsive to 
unexpected changes within the project and its surroundings. Moreover, if a project, 
under a fixed time constraint, has some concrete technological goals to achieve, a size-
able portion of its late period will inevitably be spent in pure development efforts, 
thus missing some opportunities of fundamental advances in the state of art during 
this late period. It is again the view of the authors, that the ICOT project, during its 
initial and intermediate period, played an important role in advancing the state of art 
towards achieving the goals of the project, while the last 4 years were mostly spent in 
developing the prototypes of the technology envisioned at the intermediate phase. 

3- A scientific research project would benefit from open cooperation with other 
researchers and research organisations, while an industrial project is normally closed 
for competitiveness reasons. The ICOT project was more a scientific project than an 
industrial one in this respect, but not entirely. One important obstacle in this case is 
that most of the software developed by the project was on proprietary hardware which 
effectively prevented other researchers from sharing the results of the project, and re-
sulted in the missing of opportunities that would otherwise have occurred through early 
feedback and valuable evaluation reports from other researchers. ICOT tried to rem-
edy this problem by distributing some of its hardware to other research organisations 
but such hardware was not in fact effectively used for different reasons. Exchange of 
software among researchers is a very important factor in improving the quality of the 
research produced by any computer science research organisation. MITI lately released 
the software of the project in the public domain, but this should have happened earlier. 

Scientific achievements of ICOT 

On the positive side 
Initially at the start of the project there was a clear worldwide trend to use dedicated 
machines for AI, and knowledge intensive applications. ICOT responded successfully 


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