Dr. Charles Forgy
Production Systems Technologies - CTO
Sparkling Logic - Strategic Advisor

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Charles is the CTO of Production Systems Technologies and a Strategic Advisor to Sparkling Logic. Charles has been involved with rule engines for decades.  In the mid
1970’s he developed the Rete algorithm while a Ph. D. candidate at Carnegie-Mellon University.  After graduating in 1979, he remained at Carnegie-Mellon on the research faculty, where he was co-principal investigator of a DARPA-funded project to develop special hardware for rule engines.  In 1983, he co-founded Production Systems Technologies (PST) to continue research and development of rule engine technology. The primary business of PST is to customize and license rule engines for embedding in large systems.  At PST he developed the more efficient Rete-II and Rete-NT versions of the Rete algorithm, as well as a parallel rule engine for handling high volume and high velocity data.

Charles met his future wife, Diana, while at Carnegie-Mellon. 
Charles and Diana still live in Pittsburgh, PA.  They have three children and two grandchildren.
Recent years have seen major advances in the expressiveness of rule languages.  By taking advantage of these new capabilities, developers can write rules that are both easier to understand and easier for the rule engines to process.  

In this talk, I will show examples of rules written in the older style
alongside equivalent rules written in the new style.  Measurements made of a typical rule engine running these rules will be presented.  The results will show that the new features can sometimes make huge differences in the efficiency of programs. While the examples will be in a specific language (OPSJ) these capabilities are in fact available in many languages today, so the techniques shown are quite general.