Prolog Jobs?

[Anthony Gatlin]

I currently develop for my "day job" primarily in C# and JavaScript, but I really love Prolog and am very interested in using it in a professional setting. From everything I read, it seems like most of the A.I. and machine learning work these days centers around Python and R. I don't see a significant amount of activity in the Prolog community. (I am not saying it isn't there. I may just be looking in the wrong place. That is part of the motivation for this post.)

 I would simply like to ask the following questions.

1) Is Prolog still being used for "new development" in industry or academia, or is it simply a wonderful language whose star is fading?

2) Are there actually decent jobs/contract projects available that include Prolog as either a primary or secondary development tool?

3) If one wanted to find an opportunity involving Prolog, what might be the best places to look?

4) What other skills besides pure Prolog knowledge would companies or organizations that hire Prolog developers generally find most attractive?

Any guidance or insights are much appreciated.

Thank you in advance for sharing your thoughts.

Anthony

[Dan]

Hi Anthony, 

I would as well be very interested in knowing about this more. 

I am currently developing a symbolic AI tool (also known as GOFAI) in Prolog as part of a new venture I hope to start (its currently self-funded). I chose Prolog for a number of reasons, including the declarative and relational programming style possible in Prolog, and SWI-Prolog for its robustness, very friendly community, and large library of add-ons, including for web programming and the semantic web.

Eventually, I would wrap the tool into a rest API and/or Python to make the tool more generally accessible. 

Daniel

[Fabrizio Riguzzi]

Hi Antony,

various companies use prolog

https://kyndi.com/blog/building-global-partnerships-at-kyndi/

http://www.xsb.com/

http://interprolog.com/contacts/

http://logicalcontracts.com/

Prolog is still used very much in academia

https://www.cs.nmsu.edu/ALP/iclp2018/

http://ilp2018.unife.it/

http://cplint.eu/

I am sure other members of the list can add pointers.

Fabrizio

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[Fabrizio Riguzzi]

another company

http://coherentknowledge.com/

[Jan Burse]

I wish there were more AI fonds, but for Europe by some
googling I did yesterday (I only spent 1-2 hours) there is
only some crude Allianz Global Artificial Intelligence

https://de.allianzgi.com/de-de/unsere-fonds/allianz-global-artificial-intelligence

If one checks their portfolio one finds positions such as
Splunk, Inc. (sic!) in it.If there were more AI fonds, there were
more non-accademic money around, and there were more
non-accademic jobs around. In as far another strand of

investment goes twards the AI hardware sector, there
was an interesting article few days ago:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/14/technology/artificial-intelligence-chip-start-ups.html

But to participate in such a money market, companies would
need need to transform into stock companies where shares of
the company can be quickly bought and sold.

[Jan Wielemaker]

On 15/01/18 23:06, Anthony Gatlin wrote:
> I currently develop for my "day job" primarily in C# and JavaScript, but
> I really love Prolog and am very interested in using it in a
> professional setting. From everything I read, it seems like most of the
> A.I. and machine learning work these days centers around Python and R. I
> don't see a significant amount of activity in the Prolog community. (I
> am not saying it isn't there. I may just be looking in the wrong place.
> That is part of the motivation for this post.)

Work is this direction is mostly happening around YAP Prolog and mostly
in the life sciences arena AFAIK. Fabrizio has collected a lot of this
stuff for SWI-Prolog on http://cplint.ml.unife.it/

IMHO we should not start to compete with R and NumPy. Prolog is not
suitable for this, but to some extend this also holds for R and NumPy,
both doing all the real work mostly in C. Technically this would also
suit Prolog. I see little hope we can successfully compete and there
isn't that much point in doing so. It is way easier to provide good
interfaces to these tools. We have that for R (three of them). Prolog is
particularly good at integrating data from multiple sources using
multiple structures (RDBMS, RDF, XML, ...).

We have a case study on data analysis running on SWISH, using Prolog to
abstract away from the raw data, R for statistical analysis, clustering
and producing charts and Prolog again for dealing with graphs. Would be
great to show, but unfortunately the underlying data cannot be
published. Search for "SWISH datalab" and you'll find some of the
publications.

> I would simply like to ask the following questions.
>
> 1) Is Prolog still being used for "new development" in industry or
> academia, or is it simply a wonderful language whose star is fading?

That is a really hard question. I can only talk for SWI-Prolog; I
notably have little clue what happens around SICStus and other
commercial systems. SWI-Prolog is definitely used for new projects,
mostly initiated by startups. Unfortunately, with few exceptions, this
work is usually secret. Next, there are quite a few one/couple of people
businesses using it. There are also some big compagnies using it, though
I think mostly in R&D. This is probably comparable to academic usage.

I've seen a number of startups starting with Prolog and moving to
something else as the business grew due to demands from investors and
lack of qualified Prolog programmers. That is a pity and probably
technically not necessary. Some also claim is was for Prolog that they
managed to open up their market in time with modest resources.

> 2) Are there actually decent jobs/contract projects available that
> include Prolog as either a primary or secondary development tool?
> 3) If one wanted to find an opportunity involving Prolog, what might be
> the best places to look?

These seem related. There seems to be a problem for Prolog programmers
finding jobs as well as for projects to find Prolog programmers :(

> 4) What other skills besides pure Prolog knowledge would companies or
> organizations that hire Prolog developers generally find most attractive?

I guess that is very diverse. I see projects in finance, natural
language, testing, life sciences, robotics, configuration and I'm sure
I'm missing domains. Some are almost entirely Prolog. Most combine
Prolog with other languages where the mechanisms used for combining and
the languages used are diverse. What could be the shared non-Prolog
knowledge required? I can't think of much besides the general skills any
programmer needs.

Cheers --- Jan

> Any guidance or insights are much appreciated.
>
> Thank you in advance for sharing your thoughts.
>
> Anthony
>

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