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Artificial Intelligence Prepares for 2001

AI Magazine

Artificial Intelligence, as a maturing scientific/engineering discipline, is beginning to find its niche among the variety of subjects that are relevant to intelligent, perceptive behavior. A view of AI is presented that is based on a declarative representation of knowledge with semantic attachments to problem-specific procedures and data structures. Several important challenges to this view are briefly discussed. It is argued that research in the field would be stimulated by a project to develop a computer individual that would have a continuing existence in time.


Machine Learning: A Historical and Methodological Analysis

AI Magazine

Machine learning has always been an integral part of artificial intelligence, and its methodology has evolved in concert with the major concerns of the field. In response to the difficulties of encoding ever-increasing volumes of knowledge in modern AI systems, many researchers have recently turned their attention to machine learning as a means to overcome the knowledge acquisition bottleneck. This article presents a taxonomic analysis of machine learning organized primarily by learning strategies and secondarily by knowledge representation and application areas. A historical survey outlining the development of various approaches to machine learning is presented from early neural networks to present knowledge-intensive techniques.


Knowledge Programming in Loops

AI Magazine

Early this year fifty people took an experimental course at Xerox PARC on knowledge programming in Loops. During the course, they extended and debugged small knowledge systems in a simulated economics domain called Truckin. Everyone learned how to use the environment Loops, formulated the knowledge for their own program, and represented it in Loops. At the end of the course a knowledge competition was run so that the strategies used in the different systems could be compared. The punchline to this story is that almost everyone learned enough about Loops to complete a small knowledge system in only three days. Although one must exercise caution in extrapolating from small experiments, the results suggest that there is substantial power in integrating multiple programming paradigms.


Methodological Simplicity in Expert System Construction: The Case of Judgments and Reasoned Assumptions

AI Magazine

Editors' Note: Many expert systems require some means criticisms of this approach from those steeped in the practical of handling heuristic rules whose conclusions are less than certain issues of constructing large rule-based expert systems. Abstract the expert system draws inferences in solving different problems. Doyle's paper argues that it is difficult for a human expert "certainty factors," and in spite of the experimentally observed insensitivity of system performance to perturbations of the chosen values Recent successes of "expert systems" stem from much Research Projects Agency (DOD), ARPA Order No. 3597, monitored In the following, we explain the modified approach together with its practical and theoretical attractions. The client's income bracket is 50%, can be found (Minsky, 1975; Shortliffe & Buchanan, 1975; and 2. The client carefully studies market trends, Duda, Hart, & Nilsson, 1976; Szolovits, 1978; Szolovits & THEN: 3. There is evidence (0.8) that the investment Pauker, 1978). Reasoned Assumptions (from Davis, 1979) and would use the rule to draw conclusions whose "certainty factors" depend on the observed certainty Although our approach usually approximates that of Bayesian probabilities, accommodates representational systems based on "frames" namely as subjective degrees of belief.


Artificial Intelligence Research at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

AI Magazine

The primary goal of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory is to understand how computers can be made to exhibit intelligence. Two corollary goals are to make computers more useful and to understand certain aspects of human intelligence. Current research includes work on computer robotics and vision, expert systems, learning and commonsense reasoning, natural language understanding, and computer architecture.


Distinguished Service Award: IJCAI 1983

AI Magazine

The award will be presented at the Eighth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, to be held in Karlsruhe, West Germany, from 8 to 12 August, 1983. The IJCAI Distinguished Service Award was established in 1979 by the IJCAI Trustees to honor senior scientists in artificial intelligence for contributions and service to the field during their careers. The Award carries a stipend of $1,000 and covers expenses of the recipient's attendance at IJCAI. This will be the second IJCAI Distinguished Service Award; the first was presented to Bernard Meltzer in 1979. Arthur Samuel is one of the pioneeers in AI.


Artificial Intelligence: Some Legal Approaches and Implications

AI Magazine

Various groups of ascertainable individuals have been granted the status of "persons" under American law, while that status has been denied to other groups. This article examines various analogies that might be drawn by courts in deciding whether to extend "person" status to intelligent machines, and the limitations that might be placed upon such recognition. As an alternative analysis, this article questions the legal status of various human/machine interfaces, and notes the difficulty in establishing an absolute point beyond which legal recognition will not extend.


How to Get the Most Out of IJCAI-83

AI Magazine

When I took on the job of programme chairman of IJCAI-83 the trustees presented me with a list of problems with the way IJCAI programmes had traditionally been organized. Some of these problems had been raised by previous programme chairmen, some by attendees and some been subsequently been raised by me. I have tried to organise the IJCAI-83 programme to solve these problems -or at least some of them, I have been unable to devise a scheme which simultaneously solves all the problems. (I leave this as an exercise for the reader.) My plans converged after consultation with many people in the AI community, including the IJCAI-83 conference committee, and they have that committee's approval. Inevitably this means that IJCAI-83 will be a little different from here-to -fore, and in order for my changes to be also solutions, it is necessary for you, the paying customer, to be aware of these differences and to take advantage of them. The aim of this article is to raise you awareness.


Psychological Studies and Artificial Intelligence

AI Magazine

This paper argues for the position that experimental human studies are relevant to most facets of AI research and that closer ties between AI and experimental psychology will enhance the development of booth the principles of artificial intelligence and their implementation in computers. Raising psychological assumptions from the level of ad hoc intuitions to the level of systematic empirical observation, in the long run, will improve the quality of AI research and help to integrate it with related studies in other disciplines.


Towards a Taxonomy of Problem Solving Types

AI Magazine

Our group's work in medical decision making has led us to formulate a framework for expert system design, in particular about how the domain knowledge may be decomposed into substructures. We propose that there exist different problem-solving types, i.e., uses of knowledge, and corresponding to each is a separate substructure specializing in that type of problem-solving. Each substructure is in turn further decomposed into a hierarchy of specialist which differ from each other not in the type of problem-solving, but in the conceptual content of their knowledge; e.g.; one of them may specialize in "heart disease," while another may do so in "liver," though both of them are doing the same type of problem solving. Thus ultimately all the knowledge in the system is distributed among problem-solvers which know how to use that knowledge. This is in contrast to the currently dominant expert system paradigm which proposes a common knowledge base accessed by knowledge-free problem-solvers of various kinds. In our framework there is no distinction between knowledge bases and problem-solvers: each knowledge source is a problem-solver. We have so far had occasion to deal with three generic problem-solving types in expert clinical reasoning: diagnosis (classification), data retrieval and organization, and reasoning about consequences of actions. In novice, these expert structures are often incomplete, and other knowledge structures and learning processes are needed to construct and complete them.