Asia
The AAAI 1992 Spring Symposium Reports
The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence held its 1992 Spring Symposium Series on March 25-27 at Stanford University, Stanford, California. This article contains a summary of the symposia that were conducted: Artificial Intelligence in Medicine, Cognitive Aspects of Knowledge Acquisition, Computational Considerations in Supporting Incremental Modification and Reuse, Knowledge Assimilation, Practical Approaches to Scheduling and Planning, Producing Cooperative Explanations, Propositional Knowledge Representation, Selective Perception, and Reasoning with Diagrammatic Representations.
Applied AI News
The Lockheed Corp. (Calabasas, CA) to reduce operator stress in such a Engineers at Southwest Research and AT&T (New York, NY) have signed situation. The system is now in use by work on a neural network system. ERAAM (Malakoff, France) has developed and route planning systems are Tractor manufacturer Caterpillar the Traffic Data Management among the systems being developed. Rosh Intelligent Systems Inc. (Needham, developed with Carnegie Mellon or rejecting orders referred by its Lam The system will eliminate neural network chip. Inc. (San Jose, CA), to read virtually The neural network listens offices nationwide.
A Conversation with Marvin Minsky
Minsky, Marvin L., Laske, Otto
The following excerpts are from an interview with Marvin Minsky which took place at his home in Brookline, Massachusetts, on January 23rd, 1991. The interview, which is included in its entirety as a Foreword in the book Understanding Music with AI: Perspectives on Music Cognition (edited by Mira Balaban, Kemal Ebcioglu, and Otto Laske), is a conversation about music, its peculiar features as a human activity, the special problems it poses for the scientist, and the suitability of AI methods for clarifying and/or solving some of these problems. The conversation is open-ended, and should be read accordingly, as a discourse to be continued at another time.
Autonomous Mobile Robot Research at Louisiana State University's Robotics Research Laboratory
The Department of Computer Science at Louisiana State University (LSU) has been involved in robotics research since 1992 when the Robotics Research Laboratory (RRL) was established as a research and teaching program specializing in autonomous mobile robots (AMRS). Researchers at RRL are conducting high-quality research in amrs with the goal of identifying the computational problems and the types of knowledge that are fundamental to the design and implementation of autonomous mobile robotic systems. In this article, we overview the projects that are currently under way at LSU's RRL.
Robot Planning
Research on planning for robots is in such a state of flux that there is disagreement about what planning is and whether it is necessary. We can take planning to be the optimization and debugging of a robot's program by reasoning about possible courses of execution. It is necessary to the extent that fragments of robot programs are combined at run time. There are several strands of research in the field; I survey six: (1) attempts to avoid planning; (2) the design of flexible plan notations; (3) theories of time-constrained planning; (4) planning by projecting and repairing faulty plans; (5) motion planning; and (6) the learning of optimal behaviors from reinforcements. More research is needed on formal semantics for robot plans. However, we are already beginning to see how to mesh plan execution with plan generation and learning.
International Workshop on Processing Declarative Knowledge
The International Workshop on Processing Declarative Knowledge was held in Kaiserslautern, Germany, from 1 to 3 July 1991. The workshop was intended as a forum for the presentation of new approaches to processing declarative knowledge, the discussion of procedural versus alternative paradigms, and the issues concerned with efficient processing of realistic knowledge bases. Demonstrations of implemented systems were also announced.
AAAI 1991 Fall Symposium Series Reports
The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence held its 1991 Fall Symposium Series on November 15-17 at the Asilomar Conference Center, Pacific Grove, California. This article contains summaries of the four symposia: Discourse Structure in Natural Language Understanding and Generation, Knowledge and Action at Social and Organizational Levels, Principles of Hybrid Reasoning, Sensory Aspects of Robotic Intelligence.
Functional Categorization of Knowledge: Applications in Modeling Scientific Research and Discovery
The central thesis of my dissertation (Kocabas 1989)1 is that in complex systems, descriptive and definitive knowledge can be organized into functional categories; this categorization provides clarity and efficiency in representation and facilitates the integrated use of various methods of learning. I describe a formalism for organizing knowledge into such functional categories and some of its implementations. In this formalism, descriptive scientific knowledge is classified into seven categories. The categorization formalism allows complex propositions to be analyzed into their simple constituents; in turn, these constituents can be maintained in their categories. They can then be combined using a simple transformation function to form complex constructs such as frames and schemata. The methodology facilitates the implementation of knowledge-level methods of learning such as similarity-based learning, explanation-based learning, and conceptual clustering. It simplifies the identification and resolution of conflicts in knowledge systems.