Task-specific architectures are a growing area of expert system research. Evaluation is one task that is required in many problem-solving domains. This article describes a task-specific, domain-independent architecture for candidate evaluation. I discuss the task-specific architecture approach to knowledge-based system development. Next, I present a review of candidate evaluation methods that have been used in AI and psychological modeling, focusing on the distinction between discrete truth table approaches and continuous linear models. Finally, I describe a task-specific expert system shell, which includes a development environment (Ceved) and a run-time consultation environment (Ceval). This shell enables nonprogramming domain experts to easily encode and represent evaluation-type knowledge and incorporates the encoded knowledge in performance systems.

My Ph.D. dissertation (Calistri 1990) extends traditional methods of plan recognition to handle situations in which agents have flawed plans. This extension involves solving two problems: determining what sorts of mistakes people make when they reason about plans and figuring out how to recognize these mistakes when they occur. I have developed a complete classification of plan-based misconceptions, which categorizes all ways that a plan can fail, and I have developed a probabilistic interpretation of these misconceptions that can be used in principle to guide a best-first search algorithm. I have also developed a program called Pathfinder that embodies a practical implementation of this theory. Pathfinder is a probability-based plan-recognition.

Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Virginia AT&T's Merrimack Valley Works The US Army Laboratory Command's (Richmond, VA) has developed an (North Andover, MA) has developed Human Engineering Laboratory expert system to classify, evaluate the Expert Capacity and Material (Aberdeen Proving Ground, MD) has and process medical claims. The system, System (XCAM), an expert system awarded a $2.4 million contract to called MedScreen, reportedly which simplifies forecast evaluations Carnegie Group (Pittsburgh, PA) to can process up to 500 claims in 45 for a manufacturing operation The continue work on a knowledge-based minutes, an operation that used to system automates the analysis of logistics planning system. The system take several days to complete. The IBM (Armonk, NY) and Dragon Systems NRM has been successfully deployed ICL (Birmingham, England) has completed (Newton, MA) have jointly in a number of Australian banks, as a pilot test of an intelligent developed VoiceType, a speech recognition well as a food storage and distribution system for field service diagnosing system based on elements of center. ICL used a laptop-based allows hands-free typing.

In my Ph.D. dissertation (Bhansali 1991), I develop an integrated knowledge-based framework for efficiently synthesizing programs by bringing together ideas from the fields of software engineering (software reuse, domain modeling) and AI (hierarchical planning, analogical reasoning). Based on this framework, I constructed a prototype system, APU, that can synthesize UNIX shell scripts from a high-level specification of problems typically encountered by novice shell programmers. An empirical evaluation of the system's performance points to certain criteria that determine the feasibility of the derivational analogy approach in the automatic programming domain when the cost of detecting analogies and recovering from wrong analogs is considered.

Intelligence (AAAI) hopes that these This year's conference featured a new A talk united by a set of related research This year's program represented an by Jim Green0 addressed modeling issues. Constraint this approach is not seen There was time to interact Reasoning and Component Technologies as often today. Where is it session following each set of presentations. Highlights from the program focused on a presentation on among the accepted papers. A panel entitled "How Long which ran for two consecutive days Until the Household Robot: The For the first time, Innovative Applications during the conference. The emergence State of the Art in Robotics" featured in Artificial Intelligence (IAAI) of the forum Planning, Perception, speakers from industry and Carnegie presentations and AI Online interactive and Robotics reflected a recent trend Mellon's Robotic Institute, who panels were presented concurrently in Planning, with videotapes and a live robot providing an impressive demonstration Perception, and Robotics included demonstration.

But even if it isn't way, and addresses significant tasks.

This article picks up the call for a reflective examination of the prevailing computational metaphor of AI (and philosophical presuppositions behind it) by sketching alternatives that might serve as seeds for discussion-specifically, the seven alternatives introduced in our previous article (see "AI Magazine, spring 1991). The relative strengths and weaknesses of the alternatives are contrasted with those of the computational metaphor.

The Board of Directors the address given here.

Engineering and scientific education condition us to expect everything, including intelligence, to have a simple, compact explanation. Accordingly, when people new to AI ask "What's AI all about," they seem to expect an answer that defines AI in terms of a few basic mathematical laws. Today, some researchers who seek a simple, compact explanation hope that systems modeled on neural nets or some other connectionist idea will quickly overtake more traditional systems based on symbol manipulation. Others believe that symbol manipulation, with a history that goes back millennia, remains the only viable approach. Marvin Minsky subscribes to neither of these extremist views. Instead, he argues that AI must use many approaches. AI is not like circuit theory and electromagnetism. There is nothing wonderfully unifying like Kirchhoff's laws are to circuit theory or Maxwell's equations are to electromagnetism. Instead of looking for a "right way," the time has come to build systems out of diverse components, some connectionist and some symbolic, each with its own diverse justification." - Patrick Winston

Machine, I raised (much more playfully) one of the questions David M. West and Larry E. Travis raise in their important article, "The Computational Metaphor and Artificial Intelligence". AI might CA) has added a download microcode FL) has developed an expert system have gone off on the wrong track, enhancement to its Hi-Track expert to set its prices nationwide for Alamo's rather like Columbus believing he'd system. The enhancement will allow rental cars. The embedded system analyzes discovered the Indies. Columbus Hi-Track to remotely identify and the competition's prices, compares hadn't discovered the Indies; in fact solve potential problems in a customer's them to Alamo's, and then he'd stumbled on something as least storage subsystem, over the telephone.