This program weaves together three threads: (1) AI, areas of AI.

Cambridge, If you would like us to consider your Mass.: The MIT Press, 1994.

The Third International Workshop on Human and Machine Cognition was held in Seaside, Florida, on 13-15 May 1993. Each paper session included presentations on cognitive research, educational research, AI theory and logic, and particular knowledge engineering projects. This mixture encouraged the participants from diverse disciplines to listen and respond to one another. These international workshops are held to allow leading scientists, scholars, and practitioners to discuss current issues and research in particular topics in AI and cognitive science.

Recent developments have clarified the process of generating partially ordered, partially specified sequences of actions whose execution will achieve an agent's goal. This article summarizes a progression of least commitment planners, starting with one that handles the simple STRIPS representation and ending with UCPOP, a planner that manages actions with disjunctive precondition, conditional effects, and universal quantification over dynamic universes. Along the way, I explain how Chapman's formulation of the modal truth criterion is misleading and why his NP-completeness result for reasoning about plans with conditional effects does not apply to UCPOP.

Fall 1994, 63-75 Abbott, Kathy, see Orlando, Nancy AI and NP-Hard Problems: 1993 Spring Alterman, Richard, see Hendler, James Abhyankar, R. B. Review of Computing Symposium Report.

The atmosphere was definitely international--270 participants from around the world. It is frustrating that no brain, let be important in AI. Included among the meeting's were frustrated by the desire However, without these frustrations, in AI, cognitive science, and discussed ways in which AI could be we would, of course, know that allied disciplines to discuss timely topics, seen as an enabling technology with there was no need for such meetings. As it was, everyone came away with a development efforts in areas spanning FLAIRS-94 was notable for the mix stack of business cards and some the entire AI field. FLAIRS-94 was of industry, government, and academic things to do right away.

The 1993 International Logic Programming Symposium was held in Vancouver, British Columbia, on 26-29 October. It presented the state of the art in logic programming, emphasizing the deliberate interaction with other fields, in particular, humanistic fields. Topics covered at the symposium included algorithmic analysis, programming methodologies, semantic analysis, deductive databases, and programming language design.

(Caldwell 1994). One role is as an complexity of business organizations, billing for goods and services. An intriguing question raised fine-grained predictions about agents' about organizational structures, repeatedly in the course of the workshop reactions to different proposed organizational others will require the representation was whether modeling tools designs. of time and state, and so on. Sheet metal doesn't a changing business process; in particular, care how it is used or even Implementing changes in an organization that they use to make their decisions.

MT Telecom, a Dutch telecommunications utility, has installed expert BNR Europe (Harlow, England), the instrument aboard the satellite. Pending system-based help desk systems to R&D subsidiary of telecommunications NASA approval, EUVE will be the centralize its 23 networked local data equipment supplier Northern first orbiting astrophysics mission to Telecom, is using virtual reality technology replace humans with AI technology. This installation proved to be a critical planning. The VR system allows Re:Member Data Services (Memphis, factor in helping the company BNR's engineers to visualize complex Tenn.), a data processor for obtain the IS0 9000 Total Quality installations and how they will work, credit union software services, has System Standard certification, a greatly saving time and effort compared automated all company service and requirement for those organizations to the traditional CAD system. Continental Bank (Chicago, Ill.) has expert system tracks all requests developed a client/server-based intelligent called in by users, and all requests Lockheed Missiles ST Space (Palo application to improve the can be accessed by anyone at the Alto, Calif.) has developed ASAP quality of its customer service.

Kambhampati presented theoretical planning systems is difficult. Although national AI conference, was lively It was noted that comparing planners encoding expert knowledge is at the and interesting. Both the theoretical is similar in difficulty to comparing heart of HTN planning, there and practical sides of the AI planning programming languages (in fact, the remains a considerable gap to bridge community were represented, input specifications to a planner can in using expert planning knowledge and both sides seemed to understand be viewed as a programming language). Shlomo Zilberstein (University Third, it was generally acknowledged Several papers contributed further of Massachusetts) presented a that common plan representations to the theoretical analysis of number of evaluation measures. A algorithms or through empirical An integrated system that executes common representation would allow studies (Christer Backstrom, or uses the generated plans formal comparisons among widely Linkoping University, Sweden; Subbarao should be evaluated instead of simply different planning technologies.