Sargur N. Srihari is a professor and acting chairman of the Department of Computer Science, State University of New York (SUNY) at Buffalo. The author of "Recognizing Address Blocks on Mail Pieces," Srihari is an associate editor of the journal Pattern Recognition and is chairman of the technical committee on text-processing applications of the International Mike Baird, who coauthored the tribute to Kvetoslav Prazdny, is manager of Association for Pattern Recognition. Srihari is also currently directing two Intelligence Center 1185 Coleman Avenue, Santa Clara, California 95052. Jeffrey Stone is a consultant who watches the computer industry and Jonathan J. Hull is a research assistant Digital Equipment Corporation that reports new developments and trends. The opinions expressed "Recognizing Address Blocks on Mail address is Knowledge Systems Corporation, in his article are his own. Jeffrey Stout is on the research staff of computer vision, and artificial intelligence. An Expert Elevator report on AI and education, is an Buffalo, where he is also currently Designer that Uses Knowledge-Based associate professor in the Department working on his Ph.D. His research Backtracking." of Mathematics and Computer Science interests include image processing, at Millersville University, computer graphics, and computer segmentation Jay M. Tenenbaum, who coauthored Millersville, Pennsylvania 1755 1. Palumbo is a the tribute to Kvetoslav Prazdny, is a coauthor of "Recognizing Address Schlumberger Fellow at the Schlumberger John McDermott is a principal scientist Blocks on Mail Pieces."

VT (vertical transportation) is an expert system for handling the design of elevator systems that is currently in use at Westinghouse Elevator Company. Although VT tries to postpone each decision in creating a design until all information that constrains the decision is known, for many decisions this postponement is not possible. In these cases, VT uses the strategy of constructing a plausible approximation and successively refining it. VT uses domain-specific knowledge to guide its backtracking search for successful refinements. The VT architecture provides the basis for a knowledge representation that is used by SALT, an automated knowledge-acquisition tool. SALT was used to build VT and provides an analysis of VT's knowledge base to assess its potential for convergence on a solution.

He then the Sempervirens Fund Anyone wishing Kvetoslav "Slava" Prazdny died in a completed a Ph.D. in Computer Science to make a tribute can do so in Slava's hang-gliding accident, Saturday, at the University of Essex. His name to The Sempervirens Fund, P 0 September 19th, 1987, in the California work reflected the marriage of these Drawer BE, Los Altos, California 94023 mountains. He is survived by his disciplines, as he strove to develop wife, Dagmar Dolan, and his 15 year formal computational models of old daughter Bronja Prazdny. During He was a member of American his prolific career, he had published Association for Advancement of Science, over 60 journal articles reporting American Association for Artificial research in human perception, Intelligence, The Cognitive Science stereo vision, image processing, Society, The Psychonomic Soci-robotics, perceptual reasoning and ety, International Society for Ecological learning, adaptive neural networks, Psychology, Society for Information and psychophysics. Display, SPIE, and a Fellow of the Slava derived his greatest pleasure New York Academy of Sciences.

We offer a simple mechanism, that of metalingual definition (D. G. Hays, The Meaning of a Term is a Function of the Theory in Which It Occurs, SIGLASH Newsletter, 1973, 6, 4:S-11).

The first step in the development of an expert system is the extraction and characterization of the knowledge and skills of an expert. This step is widely regarded as the major bottleneck in the system development process. To assist knowledge engineers and others who might be interested in the development of an expert system, I offer (1) a working classification of methods for extracting an expert's knowledge, (2) some ideas about the types of data that the methods yield, and (3) a set of criteria by which the methods can be compared relative to the needs of the system developer. The discussion highlights certain issues, including the contrast between the empirical approach taken by experimental psychologists and the formalism-oriented approach that is generally taken by cognitive scientists.

We note with sorrow the passing of Don Waterman, who died on January 4, 1987. Don was one of the pioneers of our field, whose early research built the foundation for the area that would later come to be labeled "knowledge based systems" (and still later "expert systems").

Letters to the Editor

To know that the other suffers, we have to close the gap between us in an act of empathy. Only then can we begin Editor. Whatever his other attitudes, Dr. Frankenstein knows that his creation suffers In his interesting article "Artificial Intelligence and Ethics: and knows it in the way he knows human beings suffer. An Exercise in the Moral Imagination," Michael LaChat Closely connected to this is the point that just as we have says that the basic outline of Shelley's Frmkensteirz needs to the moral obligation not to err on the wrong side in the fulfillment be recapitulated "even if, as is usually the case, the reader of our obligations toward suffering human beings (that has seen only the poor image of the book in movie form " is, WC should not fail to fulfill our obligations toward them Contrary to what Mr. LaChat says, I think the poor image just because we think they are not really suffering or, worse, most people have of the book is sufficient reason to give a because we haven't been able to prove that they are really short outline of the original story. Doing this, we find one or suffering), we ought not to err on the wrong side for the two arguments that were not mentioned in LaChat's article wrong reason in the case of suffering artifacts.

Letters to the Editor

Our development efforts involve small multidisciplinary KLA Instruments Corporation is looking for bright, dedicated teams with backgrounds in CS, EE, Math, Mechanical professionals to meethe challenge of developing Engineering and Physics, oriented to building leading edge knowledge-based systems for machine successful commercial products. You will have the control. We're using existing Al technology to actually opportunity to work on entire life cycle development get new KLA products out the door. If you have experience from idea to first shippable products.