Now completing its first year, the High-Performance Knowledge Bases Project promotes technology for developing very large, flexible, and reusable knowledge bases. The project is supported by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and includes more than 15 contractors in universities, research laboratories, and companies. The evaluation of the constituent technologies centers on two challenge problems, in crisis management and battlespace reasoning, each demanding powerful problem solving with very large knowledge bases. This article discusses the challenge problems, the constituent technologies, and their integration and evaluation.

The "Naive Physics Manifesto" of Pat Hayes (1978) proposes a large-scale project to develop a formal theory encompassing the entire knowledge of physics of naive reasoners, expressed in a declarative symbolic form. The theory is organized in clusters of closely interconnected concepts and axioms. More recent work on the representation of commonsense physical knowledge has followed a somewhat different methodology. The goal has been to develop a competence theory powerful enough to justify commonsense physical inferences, and the research is organized in microworlds, each microworld covering a small range of physical phenomena. In this article, I compare the advantages and disadvantages of the two approaches.

Fourth, causality is still an important issue; some formal models of causality have surprisingly close connections to standard nonmonotonic techniques. Fifth, the nonmonotonic logics being used most widely are the classical ones: default logic, circumscription, and by Isaac Levi; (3) Nonmonotonic Reasoning autoepistemic logic. Maybe the most remarkable trend he Seventh International Workshop was held in Trento, Italy, Tolerance by John McCarthy; (4) that became apparent during the on 30 May to 1 June 1998 in conjunction Learning to Make Nonmonotonic workshop was the new excitement with the Sixth International Inferences by Dan Roth; and (5) From among the participants. The depression Conference on the Principles of Features and Fluents to Thinking that plagued a number of people Knowledge Representation and Reasoning When Flying--Reasoning about in the field seems to be over. The workshop was Actions in an Intelligent UAV by Erik common feeling was that the theory sponsored by the American Association Sandewall.

Here scheduling, where we have fast, heuristic we identify a few properties of a real task and scheduling algorithms that yield dramatic produce mathematical abstractions of these speedups over traditional methods; decision properties. Again, both of those steps are perfectly making, where we have expert systems as standard good as initial exploration. But then we tools in many companies and products; work with the mathematical abstractions and and financial forecasting, where we don't hear never come back to the issues that came up in much about what people are doing, but Wall the original task. In some cases, new subfields Street firms seem to hire AI researchers at a of research have arisen based solely on this level rapid rate. of abstraction, and work becomes farther On the perception side, robots with vision and farther removed from the original motivating are revolutionizing manufacturing.

The data perspective can be found in Huerta for Neuroscience, for example, has can be stored in robust databases and and Koslow (1996).

Three main sections follow: mainly on Rodney Brooks's subsumption

This article introduces a generic framework for constraint-directed search. The research literature in constraint-directed scheduling is placed within the framework both to provide insight into, and examples of, the framework and to allow a new perspective on the scheduling literature. We show how a number of algorithms from the constraint-directed scheduling research can be conceptualized within the framework. This conceptualization allows us to identify and compare variations of components of our framework and provides new perspective on open research issues. We discuss the prospects for an overall comparison of scheduling strategies and show that firm conclusions vis-a-vis such a comparison are not supported by the literature. Our principal conclusion is the need for an empirical model of both the characteristics of scheduling problems and the solution techniques themselves. Our framework is offered as a tool for the development of such an understanding of constraint-directed scheduling and, more generally, constraint-directed search.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration Jet Propulsion Laboratory (Pasadena, Calif.) has developed The chip, which has The National Aeronautics and Chester, N.Y.) to improve its ability to been licensed by automaker Ford Space Administration (NASA) Goddard match reported wage information. Motor (Dearborn, Mich.), is designed Space Flight Center (Greenbelt, The solution will help the agency to augment current vehicle on-board Md.) has developed the The Philippines (Quezon City, The process for outside scientists wanting RoyScot Trust, the asset finance arm Philippines) has adopted an intelligent to use NASA's space telescopes. of the Royal Bank of Scotland (Edinburgh, agent-based software system to The system is designed to capture and Scotland), has implemented an manage mission-critical tax processes maintain key scientific knowledge expert system-based solution to automate across The Philippines. The intelligent while it reduces common errors made the credit-underwriting process. The firm has set up a credit control management of the bureau's entire Johnson Controls (Milwaukee, Wis.), system, The turnkey expert installs and maintains. By integrating component has deployed a speech-recognition- frequent air travelers through U.S. math data with work-cell visualization based application for its frequent flier Immigration inspection in less than software, engineers can simulate customers.

The Second International Symposium on Intelligent Data Analysis (IDA97) was held at Birkbeck College, University of London, on 4 to 6 August 1997. The main theme of IDA97 was to reason about how to analyze data,perhaps as human analysts do, by exploiting many methods from diverse disciplines. This article outlines several key issues and challenges, discusses how they were addressed at the conference, and presents opportunities for further work in the field.

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