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2:26pm on Saturday, 23rd January, 2021:
Anecdote
When I was doing my PhD, there was a government-funded initiative called IKBS ("Intelligent Knowledge-Based Systems"). It was a temporary rebranding of Artificial Intelligence, made necessary because AI had been defunded in 1973 following the Lighthill Report. Only the universities of Essex, Sussex and Edinburgh kept on researching the field in the UK, along with a smattering of people elsewhere working in areas that could benefit from AI but be passed off as natural language research or something else definitely not AI, no siree, definitely not AI.
My particular sub-field of research within AI was Planning. In 1984, Austin Tate at the University of Edinburgh compiled a complete list of everyone in the UK working in the field. He included both academia and industry. I still have this list, although it's heading for the recycling bin as soon as I finish this post. There are 89 names on it in total, although a handful are there twice so the actual total is a little less than that. The document was called the "IKBS Planning Who's Who", but everyone called it the "Planning Oo's Oo" because Austin is from Yorkshire (like me) and as such makes no concessions regarding pronunciation to people unfortunate to have been raised outside the county.
Although 89 doesn't sound all that many, I doubt there are this many people working in Planning in the UK these days.
The explanation can only be that my thesis was so good that it drew a line under the subject.
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