Stuart Goldkind's book Machines and Intelligence: A Critique of Arguments against the Possibility of Artificial Intelligence (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1987, 139 pages, $29.95, ISBN 0-313-25450-8) considers and criticizes a collection of arguments against the possibility of AI.

I appreciated very much the Spring 1990 issue of the AI Magazine on Robotic Assembly and Task Planning. It seems to me, however, that some good work that has been carried out on this subject in Europe during recent years has not been covered very much. Also commons on the low participation levels of women in the computer industry, suggestions for the inclusion of dissertation abstracts, comments on the Feldman article in the Fall 1990 issue, and a note about the discontinuance of plastic coverings on AI Magazine.

Arthur Samuel (1901-1990) was a pioneer of artificial intelligence research. From 1949 through the late 1960s, he did the best work in making computers learn from their expe-rience. His vehicle for this work was the game of checkers.

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From 1949 through the late required to have his research more didn't finish 1960s, he did the best work in making vigorously followed up on. He was the computers learn from their experience. Programs for playing games often and what would be required to In 1949, Samuel joined IBM's fill the role in artificial intelligence reach human-level intelligence. Poughkeepsie Laboratory, where he research that the fruit fly Drosophila Samuel's papers on machine learning worked on IBM's first stored program plays in genetics. Drosophilae are are still worth studying.

Thirty users of AI systems, 8. Make sure everyone knows at the Intelligence has announced that, key role in systems that enhance the 1. Integrating AI with traditional starting next year, its National Conference human values of the world we live in." He 2. AI may be only part of the system/ The 1991 AAAI Conferences will noted that, "Some of the most important solution, but it is increasingly the take place in Anaheim, California results of technology transfer part that makes the whole work. The National Conference will be the unexpected." "This is a recognition of changing significant benefits." "As AI moves more broadly champion" outside the AI/IS area, presentations focused on the approaches AI solutions that were only theory 12 to 18 months ago."

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The second workshop in two years on the integration of knowledge-based systems with conventional computer techniques in agriculture and natural resource management (NRM) was held 18-19 August 1989 in Detroit, Michigan, in conjunction with the Tenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence. The workshop drew scientists from the United States and Canada, working in disciplines from engineering to entomology in universities, government, and industry. Twenty-two papers were presented at the workshop, after which participants were asked to discuss several key questions about the development, delivery, and use of knowledge-based systems in solving problems in agriculture and NRM.

Automated knowledge-acquisition systems have focused on embedding a cognitive model of a key knowledge worker in their software that allows the system to acquire a knowledge base by interviewing domain experts just as the knowledge worker would. Two sets of research questions arise: (1) What theories, strategies, and approaches will let the modeling process be facilitated; accelerated; and, possibly, automated? If automated knowledge-acquisition systems reduce the bottleneck associated with acquiring knowledge bases, how can the bottleneck of building the automated knowledge-acquisition system itself be broken? (2) If the automated knowledge-acquisition system centers on having an effective cognitive model of the key knowledge worker(s), to what extent does this model account for and attempt to influence human bias in knowledge base rule generation? That is, humans are known to be subject to errors and cognitive biases in their judgment processes. How can an automated system critique and influence such biases in a positive fashion, what common patterns exist across applications, and can models of influencing behavior be described and standardized? This article answers these research questions by presenting several prototypical scenes depicting bias and debiasing strategies.

On 15-16 November 1989, I attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Industrial Liaison Program entitled "Networks and Learning." The topic was neural networks, their power, potential, and promise. A dozen distinguished professors and researchers presented informative and entertaining talks to an audience of technically minded business executives and industrial researchers who subscribe to MIT's popular series of symposia offered through their Industrial Liaison Program. This informal report encapsulates the two-day event with a brief summary of each talk.