The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) held its 1994 Spring Symposium Series on 19-23 March at Stanford University, Stanford, California. This article contains summaries of 10 of the 11 symposia that were conducted: Applications of Computer Vision in Medical Image Processing; AI in Medicine: Interpreting Clinical Data; Believable Agents; Computational Organization Design; Decision-Theoretic Planning; Detecting and Resolving Errors in Manufacturing Systems; Goal-Driven Learning; Intelligent Multimedia, Multimodal Systems; Software Agents; and Toward Physical Interaction and Manipulation. Papers of most of the symposia are available as technical reports from AAAI.

Over 60 researchers from 10 countries took part in the Third Knowledge Discovery in Databases (KDD) Workshop, held during the Eleventh National Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Washington, D.C. A major trend evident at the workshop was the transition to applications in the core KDD area of discovery of relatively simple patterns in relational databases; the most successful applications are appearing in the areas of greatest need, where the databases are so large that manual analysis is impossible. Progress has been facilitated by the availability of commercial KDD tools for both generic discovery and domain-specific applications such as marketing. At the same time, progress has been slowed by problems such as lack of statistical rigor, overabundance of patterns, and poor integration. Besides applications, the main themes of this workshop were (1) the discovery of dependencies and models and (2) integrated and interactive KDD systems.

The field of knowledge engineering has been one of the most visible successes of AI to date. Knowledge acquisition is the main bottleneck in the knowledge engineer's work. Machine-learning tools have contributed positively to the process of trying to eliminate or open up this bottleneck, but how do we know whether the field is progressing? How can we determine the progress made in any of its branches? How can we be sure of an advance and take advantage of it? This article proposes a benchmark as a classificatory, comparative, and metric criterion for machine-learning tools. The benchmark centers on the knowledge engineering viewpoint, covering some of the characteristics the knowledge engineer wants to find in a machine-learning tool. The proposed model has been applied to a set of machine-learning tools, comparing expected and obtained results. Experimentation validated the model and led to interesting results.

(Stankovic and Ramamithram 1990). Such systems are considered intelligent switching that is used in the railway stations when they are able to perform complex of three European countries. Parts of the control actions in response to the sensed environment. Time is a valuable resource that is lost when Years ago, a request came from the railway the system must reason about actions before authorities for a system that could guarantee performing them. This requirement is understandable on two levels: the problem-space level because in typical real-time systems, and the knowledge base level (Tambe and scheduling is mostly based on worstcase Newell 1988). With the problem-space level, execution times of the tasks involved. Usually, a sequence of steps is required the railway authorities.

This article describes a new system for induction of oblique decision trees. This system, OC1, combines deterministic hill-climbing with two forms of randomization to find a good oblique split (in the form of a hyperplane) at each node of a decision tree. Oblique decision tree methods are tuned especially for domains in which the attributes are numeric, although they can be adapted to symbolic or mixed symbolic/numeric attributes. We present extensive empirical studies, using both real and artificial data, that analyze OC1's ability to construct oblique trees that are smaller and more accurate than their axis-parallel counterparts. We also examine the benefits of randomization for the construction of oblique decision trees.

Representatives of universities and businesses were chosen by the Japan Technology Evaluation Center to investigate the state of the technology in Japan relative to the United States. The panel's report focused on applications, tools, and research and development in universities and industry and on major national projects.

However, extended object-oriented oday, object-oriented programming important and powerful programming Italy, Sweden, the United languages and systems have paradigm, especially for Kingdom, and the United States were been developed that are adequate to the development of complex systems, invited to the workshop. This article handle AI applications. AI, raised and the major points made programming, a case of objectoriented however, is looking for knowledge during the presentations of the eight programming that has a representation and programming papers in the workshop's four sessions. AI, does not satisfy distributed AI applications and uses constructs (for The workshop started with an requirements because it lacks representation, example, frames) and notions (for introduction by Ibrahim in which he communication, and organization. Ibrahim posed a to the object-based concurrent The one-day workshop entitled number of questions related to the programming paradigm to close the Objects and AI, held in Sydney, Australia, theme of the workshop and asked gap with distributed AI, such as the on 25 August 1991 in conjunction the participants to address some of introduction of more powerful object with the 1991 International these questions during their talks and representations, a social theory of Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, discussion.

This paper analyzes the correctness of the subsumption algorithm used in CLASSIC, a description logic-based knowledge representation system that is being used in practical applications. In order to deal efficiently with individuals in CLASSIC descriptions, the developers have had to use an algorithm that is incomplete with respect to the standard, model-theoretic semantics for description logics. We provide a variant semantics for descriptions with respect to which the current implementation is complete, and which can be independently motivated. The soundness and completeness of the polynomial-time subsumption algorithm is established using description graphs, which are an abstracted version of the implementation structures used in CLASSIC, and are of independent interest.

The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence held its 1993 Fall Symposium Series on October 22-24 in Raleigh, North Carolina. This article contains summaries of the six symposia that were conducted: Automated Deduction in Nonstandard Logics; Games: Planning and Learning; Human-Computer Collaboration: Reconciling Theory, Synthesizing Practice; Instantiating Intelligent Agents; and Machine Learning and Computer Vision: What, Why, and How?

The Second Annual Robotics Competition and Exhibition was held in July 1993 in conjunction with the National Conference on Artificial Intelligence. This article reports some of my experiences in helping to design and run the contest and some reflections, drawn from post mortem abstracts written by the competitors, on the relation of the contest to current research efforts in mobile robotics.