Biological sensorimotor systems are not static maps that transform input (sensory information) into output (motor behavior). Evidence frommany lines of research suggests that their representations are plastic, experience-dependent entities. While this plasticity is essential for flexible behavior, it presents the nervous system with difficult organizational challenges. If the sensorimotor system adapts itself to perform well under one set of circumstances, will it then perform poorly when placed in an environment with different demands (negative transfer)? Will a later experience-dependent change undo the benefits of previous learning (catastrophic interference)?

In supervised learning, learning from queries rather than from random examples can improve generalization performance significantly. Westudy the performance of query learning for problems where the student cannot learn the teacher perfectly, which occur frequently in practice. As a prototypical scenario of this kind, we consider a linear perceptron student learning a binary perceptron teacher. Two kinds of queries for maximum information gain, i.e., minimum entropy, are investigated: Minimum student space entropy (MSSE)queries, which are appropriate if the teacher space is unknown, and minimum teacher space entropy (MTSE) queries, which can be used if the teacher space is assumed to be known, but a student of a simpler form has deliberately been chosen. We find that for MSSE queries, the structure of the student space determines theefficacy of query learning, whereas MTSE queries lead to a higher generalization error than random examples, due to a lack of feedback about the progress of the student in the way queries are selected.

A fundamental feature of cortical architecture is its columnar organization, manifested in the tendency of neurons with similar properties to be organized in columns that run perpendicular to the cortical surface. This organization of the cortex was initially discovered by physiological experiments (Mouncastle, 1957; Hubel and Wiesel, 1962), and subsequently confirmed with the demonstration of histologically defined that axonal projections throughout thecolumns. Tracing experiments have shown tend to be organized in vertically aligned clusters or patches.

Randy Davis announced the appointment of six new program managers at ARPA. At IJCAI-95, Randall Davis assumed the office of president of the American For many attending the Fourteenth for consideration this year," noted Association for Artificial Intelligence International Joint Conference on Ray Perrault of SRI International, (AAAI). Davis is a professor of Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-95), the chair of the conference. "This is more electrical engineering and computer most difficult problem was choosing than at IJCAI-93 and at recent science and associate director of the which session to attend in the rich, National Conferences on AI in the AI Lab at the Massachusetts Institute varied program. Davis succeeds data-mining application from rate was under 25 percent, showing Barbara Grosz, Gordon McKay professor the U.S. Department of the Treasury that there is a great deal of work of computer science in the Division that identifies potential money laundering going on, and the scientific standard of Applied Sciences at Harvard to a small mobile LEG0 robot of IJCAI matches or exceeds that of University.

Daewoo Heavy Industries, in conjunction with the Korean Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, integrated applicability and limitations of various five separate schedulers based on different several papers from the AI techniques. IAAI has been held annually that are addressed at the conference. Mita Industrial Co., Ltd., said Japan's troubleshooting expert system proceedings were published in book Seventeen applications represent this has been supplied as an embedded form through 1992. Since 1993, a year's award winners: 11 were from component of its photocopiers conference proceedings volume has the United States, 4 from the Pacific since April 1994. It uses new reasoning been published, and selected papers Rim, 1 from Europe, and 1 from the methods based on virtual cases have been republished as articles in Middle East.

Daewoo Shipbuilding Company, one of the largest shipbuilders in the world, has experienced great deal of trouble with the planning and scheduling of its production process. To solve the problems, from 1991 to 1993, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) and Daewoo jointly conducted the Daewoo Shipbuilding Scheduling (das) Project. To integrate the scheduling expert systems for shipbuilding, we used a hierarchical scheduling architecture. To automate the dynamic spatial layout of objects in various areas of the shipyard, we developed spatial scheduling expert systems. For reliable estimation of person-hour requirements, we implemented the neural network-based person-hour estimator. In addition, we developed the paneled-block assembly shop scheduler and the long-range production planner. For this large-scale project, we devised a phased development strategy consisting of three phases: (1) vision revelation, (2) data-dependent realization, and (3) prospective enhancement. The DAS systems were successfully launched in January 1994 and are actively being used as indispensable systems in the shipyard, resulting in significant improvement in productivity and visible and positive effects in many areas.

This paper presents an approach to learning from situated, interactive tutorial instruction within an ongoing agent. Tutorial instruction is a flexible (and thus powerful) paradigm for teaching tasks because it allows an instructor to communicate whatever types of knowledge an agent might need in whatever situations might arise. To support this flexibility, however, the agent must be able to learn multiple kinds of knowledge from a broad range of instructional interactions. Our approach, called situated explanation, achieves such learning through a combination of analytic and inductive techniques. It combines a form of explanation-based learning that is situated for each instruction with a full suite of contextually guided responses to incomplete explanations. The approach is implemented in an agent called Instructo-Soar that learns hierarchies of new tasks and other domain knowledge from interactive natural language instructions. Instructo-Soar meets three key requirements of flexible instructability that distinguish it from previous systems: (1) it can take known or unknown commands at any instruction point; (2) it can handle instructions that apply to either its current situation or to a hypothetical situation specified in language (as in, for instance, conditional instructions); and (3) it can learn, from instructions, each class of knowledge it uses to perform tasks.

This paper studies the problem of ergodicity of transition probability matrices in Markovian models, such as hidden Markov models (HMMs), and how it makes very difficult the task of learning to represent long-term context for sequential data. This phenomenon hurts the forward propagation of long-term context information, as well as learning a hidden state representation to represent long-term context, which depends on propagating credit information backwards in time. Using results from Markov chain theory, we show that this problem of diffusion of context and credit is reduced when the transition probabilities approach 0 or 1, i.e., the transition probability matrices are sparse and the model essentially deterministic. The results found in this paper apply to learning approaches based on continuous optimization, such as gradient descent and the Baum-Welch algorithm.

Simmons's dream was that a person could have "a conversation with a book": The computer would read the book, and then the user at that time. William James' could have a conversation with the born in Quincy, Massachusetts, Principles of Psychology seemed to He married me to be a highwater mark for answered from the computer's understanding Patricia Enderson in 1950, and they psychologists who were interested of the book. He investigated raised five children. The fact such as encyclopedia articles; produced in 1954 from the University of that the whole current of psychology higher-level grammars for Southern California. His dissertation has turned to the more expository text; and wrote programs was entitled "The Prediction of Accident rewarding (but to me less inspiring) that could summarize such text. Rates from Basic Design Features study of more easily He later became interested in logic of USAF Aircraft."

The first session aimed to set the component being tested. The stage for the day's discussion by focusing variation in all three of these contexts on the issues surrounding the will lead to different types of and Verification of Knowledge-use of formal specification techniques The first paper, by Formal Specifications to Design Intelligence (AAAI-94) in Seattle, Lance Miller of SAIC, was entitled Verifiable Hybrid KBS" by Rose Gamble, Washington, marked the seventh This paper provided a with its specification, and (2) the The 1994 workshop was significant basis for the comparison of validation refinement of formal specifications in that there was a definitive move in and verification techniques to for their implementation. O'Leary, from the lows the possibility of constraining techniques for validating certain University of Southern California, the experts' choices to ensure that properties of KBSs. A paper by presented a paper on the relationship any new knowledge added is valid Alun Preece, Cliff Gossner, and T. between errors and size in KBSs. This and that the knowledge base structure Radhakrishnan (all from the University paper is among the first to address ensures the knowledge is of Aberdeen, Scotland) considered this important issue.