Franz Allegro Common Lisp Meets Demand for High Performance Artificial Intelligence in Big Data Applications

Allegro CL 10 Gains Parallel Memory Management to Power Complex, Mission-critical Applications that are Robust, Extensible and Easy to Evolve

OAKLAND, Calif. — October 7, 2015 — Franz, Inc., an early innovator in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and leading supplier of Common Lisp (CL) development tools and Semantic Graph Database technology, today announced Allegro CL 10, which includes key performance enhancements now available within the most effective system for developing and deploying applications to solve the problems in the field of Artificial Intelligence.

“Demand for faster, more intelligent and scalable applications is increasing with the Big Data onslaught that is impacting applications in traditional AI industries like National Defense, but also in Life Sciences, Manufacturing and Financial Analytics,” said Dr. Jans Aasman, CEO of Franz Inc. “The complexity of today’s software applications and the explosion of data size is pervasive. With Allegro CL 10, machine intelligence developers now have a high performance tool to scale their applications and deliver innovative products to market.”

Interest in Artificial Intelligence has surged recently. According to CB Insights data, venture capital investments in companies developing and commercializing AI-related products and technology have exceeded $2 billion since 2011.

“Common Lisp remains one of the best languages for Artificial Intelligence applications, its flexibility enables rapid experimentation and deployment”, said Professor Ken Forbus, Walter P. Murphy Professor of Computer Science at Northwestern University. “Today’s Lisp compilers are robust and flexible allowing development entirely within Lisp or in combination with other languages. For example, our CyclePad system for helping engineering students learn thermodynamics is written entirely in Allegro CL. Similarly, our sketch understanding system, CogSketch, which is a novel platform for both cognitive science research and education is primarily written in Allegro CL with two modules in C.”

Allegro CL is a powerful, dynamic Artificial Intelligence development system that is especially well-suited for enterprise-wide, machine intelligence development. Now applications with billions of objects are made easy with Allegro CL 10, the industry’s leading Common Lisp based development environment. Allegro CL 10 delivers parallel memory management capabilities including parallel garbage collection and fast memory recycling.

“Allegro CL 10 confirms Franz’s commitment to providing a leading Common Lisp platform,” said Jason Cornez, CTO, RavenPack. “The upgrade path is completely smooth and the under-the-hood improvements, especially in the garbage collector, make it a worthy successor to what remains one of the best environments for developing and delivering amazing software.”

“Financial professionals rely on RavenPack for its speed and accuracy in analyzing large amounts of unstructured content. RavenPack’s clients use news analytics to enhance returns, reduce risk or increase efficiency by systematically incorporating the effects of public information in their models or workflows.” stated Dr. Aasman. “Allegro CL’s new capabilities will continue to facilitate Ravenpack’s low latency text and sentiment analysis that they deliver as a real-time data feed.”

“Allegro CL 10 with AllegroCache continues to deliver performance improvements that facilitate the success of our products with the U.S. Dept of Defense,” said Glenn D. House Sr., President 2Is Inc., “Lisp is the ideal implementation vehicle for our machine learning algorithms and large scale, parallelized stochastic simulation product sets. We are delighted with the Garbage Collection enhancements in Allegro CL 10.”

“2Is is the leader in logistics decision support and price analytics enterprise systems that have demonstrated tens of millions of dollars in reduced total cost of inventory ownership for the military and OEM supply chain,” added Dr. Aasman. “2Is applications have been repeatedly proven under multiple DOD Test and Evaluation contracts and Allegro CL 10 will continue to facilitate 2Is successful deliveries.”

New Key Features and updates in Allegro CL 10:

• Parallel Global Garbage Collection
• New Payback Analysis for optimized Global Garbage Collection
• Precise Garbage Collection of stack slots for fast memory recycling
• Touchscreen and Alpha blending on Windows in Common Graphics
• API generator builds Lisp interface functions from information in Java class libraries
• Various Source Level debugging improvements
• Plus over 700 enhancements and updates, see the Release Notes for the details

About Lisp

Lisp is one of the first high-level programming languages and still in widespread use today. Lisp was originally created as a practical mathematical notation for computer programs and quickly became the favored programming language for artificial intelligence (AI) research. The most widely known general-purpose Lisp dialects are Common Lisp and Scheme. Allegro CL is the Common Lisp language developed and sold by Franz Inc.

About Franz Inc.

Franz Inc. is an innovative technology company with expert knowledge in developing and deploying Graph Search solutions. AllegroGraph, Franz’s flagship, high-performance, transactional, and scalable Graph Database, provides the solid storage layer for powerful Enterprise grade NoSQL solutions. AllegroGraph’s Activity Recognition capabilities provides a powerful means to aggregate and analyze data about individual and organizational behaviors, preferences, relationships, plus spatial and temporal linkages between individuals and groups.

For additional Franz Inc customer success stories please visit:

• AllegroGraph – http://franz.com/agraph/success/
• Allegro CL – http://franz.com/success/

Franz’s Professional Service team is in the business of helping companies turn Data into Information and Information into Knowledge. We combine Data, Business Intelligence, and Analytics consulting services under one roof for our customers.

Franz, an American owned company based in Oakland, California, is committed to market-driven product development, the highest levels of product quality and responsive customer support and service. Franz customers include Fortune 500 companies in the government, life sciences and telecommunications industries. Franz has demonstrated consistent growth and profitability since inception. For more information, visit franz.com.

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