The Alvey Programme was a British government sponsored research programme in information technology that ran from 1984 to 1990. The programme was a reaction to the Japanese Fifth Generation project, which aimed to create a computer using massively parallel computing/processing. The programme was not focused on any specific technology such as robotics, but rather supported research in knowledge engineering in the United Kingdom.[1] It has been likened in operations to the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and Japan's ICOT.