Bolt Beranek and Newman June 1981 was the closing date for the receipt of votes) The people listed below have been elected by the membership of the AAAI to the offices as indicated. AAAI Annual Meeting The election was special in several ways, in order to complete the initialization of officers and periods of tenure. The annual meeting of the AAAI will be held during the Both a president (for 1981-82) and a president-elect (who will IJCAI-RI meeting in Vancouver. The meeting will be held on serve as president for 1982-83) were elected. The IJCAI business president-elect would be on the ballot, however, no presidentelect meeting will also be held during the same period.

R1 is a rule-based program that configures VAX-11 computer systems. Given a customer's purchase order, it determines what, if any, substitutions and additions have to be made to the order to make it consistent and complete and produces a number of diagrams showing the spatial and logical relationships among the 90 or so components that typically constitute a system. The program has been used on a regular basis by Digital Equipment Corporation's manufacturing organization since January of 1980. R1 has sufficient knowledge of the configuration domain and of the percliarities of the various configuration constraints that at each step in the configuration process, it simply recognizes what to do; thus it requires little search in order to configure a computer system.

This is the first presidential address of AAAI, the American Association for Artificial Intelligence. In the grand scheme of history of artificial intelligence (AI), this is surely a minor event. The field this scientific society represents has been thriving for quite some time. No doubt the society itself will make solid contributions to the health of our field. But it is too much to expect a presidential address to have a major impact. So what is the role of the presidential address and what is the significance of the first one? I believe its role is to set a tone, to provide an emphasis. I think the role of the first address is to take a stand about what that tone and emphasis should be-set expectations for future addresses and to communicate to my fellow presidents. Only two foci are really possible for a presidential address: the state of the society or the state of the science. I believe the latter to be correct focus. AAAI itself, its nature and its relationship to the larger society that surrounds it, are surely important. However, our main business is to help AI become a science -- albeit a science with a strong engineering flavor. Thus, though a president's address cannot be narrow or highly technical, it can certainly address a substantive issue. That is what I propose to do.

Advanced Information and Decision Systems (AI-DS) is a relatively new, employee-owned company that does basic and applied research, product development, and consulting in the fields of artificial intelligence, computer science, decision analysis, operations research, control theory, estimation theory, and signal processing. AI&DS performs studies, analyses, systems design and evaluation, and software development for a variety of industrial clients and government agencies, including the Department of Defense and Energy.

Carnegie-Mellon University has established a Robotics Institute to bring its expertise in engineering, science, and industrial administration to bear upon the problem of national industrial productivity. The institute has been established to undertake advanced research and development in seeing, thinking robots and intelligent systems, and to facilitate transfer of this technology to industry. The Institute is engaged in broad programs of research in robotics, artificial intelligence, manufacturing technology, micro-electronics technology, and computer science. The Institute offers the promise of dramatic advances that will not only improve the productivity of all types of employees but also lead to improvements in the "quality of life" for all.

On August 18 and 19, 1980, at Stanford U n i v e r s i t y during at Stanford U n i v e r s i t y, with the actual game on i n a c l o s e d the A A A I conference, the f i r s t of a projected p a i r of annual room containing o n l y the player, computer terminal operators c h e s s competitions pitting the w o r l d ' s best computer programs (L a r r y A t k i n and David Cahlander of Control Data Corporation) against rated human p l a y e r s of approximately the same and the referee. U p s t a i r s was a large demonstration strength was held. These matches are part of the F r e d k i n p r i z e room where two boards, one for the actual position and one competition, wherein a sum of $100,000, established by the for a n a l y s i s, were used to keep the audience abreast of what F r e d k i n Foundation of Cambridge, Mass, i s to be awarded to was happening and could be expected to happen. The moves the creators of a program that can defeat the W o r l d Chess were communicated through a telecommunications setup Champion i n o f f i c i a l competition. The program i n t h i s match was C H E S S 4.9 of Northwestern In the f i r s t game, C H E S S 4.9 played the White s i d e of a U n i v e r s i t y, authored by David S l a t e and L a r r y A t k i n.

The Yale Artificial Intelligence Project, under the direction of Professor Roger C. Schank, supports a number of research projects. Most of this research is in the02-02 area of attempting to model the processes involved in human understanding, with a current emphasis on memory models and the processes involved in learning.

This overview takes a general look at search in problem solving, indicating some connections with topics considered in other Handbook chapters. The these general ideas are found in programs for natural second section considers algorithms that use these language understanding, information retrieval, automatic representations. In methods, which use information about the nature and this chapter of the Handbook we examine search as a tool structure of the problem domain to limit the search. Most of the Finally, the chapter reviews several well-known early examples considered are problems that are relatively easy programs based on search, together with some related to formalize. The first of these is a may be, however, that the description of a task-domain database, which describes both the current task-domain situation is too large for multiple versions to be stored situation and the goal.

AI research at CMU is closely integrated with other activities in the Computer Science Department, and to a major degree with ongoing research in the Psychology Department. Although there are over 50 faculty, staff and graduate students involved in various aspects of AI research, there is no administratively (or physically) separate AI laboratory. To underscore the interdisciplinary nature of our AI research, a significant fraction of the projects listed below are joint ventures between computer science and psychology.

At the recent AAAI conference at Stanford, it became apparent that many new AI research centers are being established around the country in industrial and governmental settings and in universities that have not paid much attention to AI in the past. At the same time, many of the established AI centers are in the process of converting from older facilities, primarily based on Decsystem-10 and Decsystem-20 machines, to a variety of newer options. At present, unfortunately, there is no simple answer to the question of what machines, operating systems, and languages a new or upgrading AI facility should use, and this situation has led to a great deal of confusion and anxiety on the part of those researchers and administrators who are faced with making this choice. In this article I will survey the major alternatives available at present and those that are clearly visible on the horizon, and I will try to indicate the advantages and disadvantages of each for AI work. This is mostly information that we have gathered at CMU in the course of planning for our own future computing needs, but the opinions expressed are my own.