This project has entered into a joint agreement agreements with Nestor Inc. (Providence, will involve simulating fires in buildings with software giant Microsoft Corp. R.I.) to institute pilot projects and assessing how a VR system as the first step toward installing (Redmond, Wash.) that will enable Planet is an expert system that individual cardholders and banks provides strategic and detailed planning against losses due to fraud, making for financial audits. It produces Bank Bandeirantes (Sao Paulo, Brazil) use of neural networks to learn a cardholder's risk assessments for a variety of financial has teamed up with another Brazilian pattern of credit card use. Venus is a flowcharting tool analysis expert system that operates in Cal.) will team up with VRl Entertainment for auditors who specialize in auditing real-time. The intelligent system has Inc. (Boulder, Colo.) to computer systems running deliver virtual reality to the home via helped the bank experience dramatic SIRIUS (SWIFT's Intelligent examines in detail a P 1 the key AI technologies: telecommunications operators Contact Lionheart Publishing system supervises the 150 switches Inc,2555 Cumberland Parkway, an event manager and hypertext Suite 299, Atlanta, GA 30339, (404) 434-manuals, and fields hundreds of telephone and 350 connections that make up 2187, FAX: (404) 432-6969. Wash.) have teamed up to develop Intelligent Alarming, which integrates Metropolitan Federal Bank (Edina, Mitek Systems (San Diego, Cal.) has industrial automation software Minn.) has deployed an automated completed a test phase for an automatic with an expert system.

In his recent papers, entitled Intelligence without Representation and Intelligence without Reason, Brooks argues for mobile robots as the foundation of AI research. This article argues that even if we seek to investigate complete agents in real-world environments, robotics is neither necessary nor sufficient as a basis for AI research. The article proposes real-world software environments, such as operating systems or databases, as a complementary substrate for intelligent-agent research and considers the relative advantages of software environments as test beds for AI. First, the cost, effort, and expertise necessary to develop and systematically experiment with software artifacts are relatively low. Second, software environments circumvent many thorny but peripheral research issues that are inescapable in physical environments. Brooks's mobile robots tug AI toward a bottom-up focus in which the mechanics of perception and mobility mingle inextricably with or even supersede core AI research. In contrast, the softbots (software robots) I advocate facilitate the study of classical AI problems in real-world (albeit, software) domains. For example, the UNIX softbot under development at the University of Washington has led us to investigate planning with incomplete information, interleaving planning and execution, and a host of related high-level issues.

Terminological knowledge representation systems (TKRSs) are tools for designing and using knowledge bases that make use of terminological languages (or concept languages). We analyze from a theoretical point of view a TKRS whose capabilities go beyond the ones of presently available TKRSs. The new features studied, often required in practical applications, can be summarized in three main points. First, we consider a highly expressive terminological language, called ALCNR, including general complements of concepts, number restrictions and role conjunction. Second, we allow to express inclusion statements between general concepts, and terminological cycles as a particular case. Third, we prove the decidability of a number of desirable TKRS-deduction services (like satisfiability, subsumption and instance checking) through a sound, complete and terminating calculus for reasoning in ALCNR-knowledge bases. Our calculus extends the general technique of constraint systems. As a byproduct of the proof, we get also the result that inclusion statements in ALCNR can be simulated by terminological cycles, if descriptive semantics is adopted.

To support the goal of allowing users to record and retrieve information, this paper describes an interactive note-taking system for pen-based computers with two distinctive features. First, it actively predicts what the user is going to write. Second, it automatically constructs a custom, button-box user interface on request. The system is an example of a learning-apprentice software- agent. A machine learning component characterizes the syntax and semantics of the user's information. A performance system uses this learned information to generate completion strings and construct a user interface. Description of Online Appendix: People like to record information. Doing this on paper is initially efficient, but lacks flexibility. Recording information on a computer is less efficient but more powerful. In our new note taking softwre, the user records information directly on a computer. Behind the interface, an agent acts for the user. To help, it provides defaults and constructs a custom user interface. The demonstration is a QuickTime movie of the note taking agent in action. The file is a binhexed self-extracting archive. Macintosh utilities for binhex are available from mac.archive.umich.edu. QuickTime is available from ftp.apple.com in the dts/mac/sys.soft/quicktime.

This workshop brought together 20 computer scientists, psychologists, and human-computer interaction (HCI) researchers to exchange results and views on human error and judgment bias. Human error is typically studied when operators undertake actions, but judgment bias is an issue in thinking rather than acting. Both topics are generally ignored by the HCI community, which is interested in designs that eliminate human error and bias tendencies. As a result, almost no one at the workshop had met before, and the discussion for most participants was novel and lively. Many areas of previously unexamined overlap were identified. An agenda of research needs was also developed.

PROSE is a knowledge-based configurator platform for telecommunications products. Its outstanding feature is a product knowledge base written in C-classIC, a frame-based knowledge representation system in the KL-ONE family of languages. It is one of the first successful products using a KL-ONE style language. Unlike previous configurator applications, the PROSE knowledge base is in a purely declarative form that provides developers with the ability to add knowledge quickly and consistently. The PROSE architecture is general and is not tied to any specific telecommunications product. As such, it is being reused to develop configurators for several different products. Finally, PROSE not only generates configurations from just a few high-level parameters, but it can also verify configurations produced manually by customers, engineers, or salespeople. The same product knowledge, encoded in C-classIC, supports both the generation and the verification of product configurations.

PITCH EXPERT was developed to make expertise available to mill-site engineers to solve pitch problems in kraft pulp mills. These problems have been estimated to cause losses to the Canadian pulp and paper industry in excess of $80 million each year. The design of the system took into account not only the complexity of the process interactions and the need for accuracy and completeness of recommendations but also the ongoing need for training mill personnel and the requirement that the system be maintainable and expandable without the constant involvement of the developers. PITCH EXPERT is now accessible by modem, and the savings achieved through use of the system covered the development costs within six months of release.

This article describes Compaq QUICKSOURCE, an electronic problem-solving and information system for Compaq's line of networked printers. A major goal in designing this system was to empower Compaq's customers with expert system technology, allowing them to solve advanced network printer problems entirely on their own. This process minimizes customer down time; reduces the number of telephone calls to the Compaq Customer-Support Center (resulting in monetary savings); improves customer satisfaction; and, perhaps most importantly, differentiates Compaq printers in the market-place by providing the best and most technologically advanced customer-support facility. This approach also represents a reengineering of Compaq's customer-support strategy and implementation. In its first-generation system, SMART, the objective was to provide expert knowledge to Compaq's help-desk operation to better and more quickly answer customer calls and problems. QUICKSOURCE is a second-generation system in that the customer-support function is put directly in the hands of the consumers (an example of knowledge publishing). As a result, its design presented a number of different and challenging issues. Because the product would be used by a diverse and heterogeneous set of users, a significant amount of human factors research and analysis was performed as part of system design and implementation. The analysis also dictated certain decisions about the organization and design of the expert system component. Since September 1992, Compaq has shipped more than 3000 copies of QUICKSOURCE.

Prairie Virtual Systems Corp. play the resulting changes. Control Ocean Surveillance Center (Chicago, Ill.) has developed a barrier-free Harvest Software Inc. (Sunnyvale, (San Diego, Cal.) is conducting sea trials design virtual reality system Cal.) has integrated a neural networkbased of a multi-beam acoustic signal detection that checks building access. The which helps designers meet the into its Harvest Operator software Navy is evaluating the neural network-based requirements of the American with system. Harvest Operator automates system's ability to operate Disabilities Act, assists in the design the entire process of receiving faxed in real time, and to detect and classify of interiors that are accessible and forms. The neural network adds intelligent acoustic signals.

These original contributions provide a current sampling of AI approaches to problems of with an analysis program for structural biological significance; they are the first to treat the computational needs of concrete design, and design sessions the biology community hand-in-hand with appropriate advances in artificial were performed to demonstrate intelligence. Focusing on novel technologies and approaches, rather than on how redundant analysis could be proven applications, they cover genetic sequence analysis, protein structure representation and prediction, automated data analysis aids, and simulation avoided and examine different of biological systems. A brief introductory primer on molecular biology and aspects of the reasoning and propagation AI gives computer scientists sufficient background to understand much of the strategies provided. Interval biology discussed in the book.