The fifth Distributed Artificial Intelligence Workshop was held at the Schlumberger-Doll Research Laboratory from October 14 to 17, 1984. It was attended by 20 participants from academic and industrial institutions. As in the past, this workshop was designed as an informal meeting. It included brief research reports from individual groups along with general discussion of questions of common interest. This report summarizes the general discussion and contains summaries of group presentations that have been contributed by individual speakers.

A variety of proposals for preferred methodological approaches has been advanced in the recent artificial intelligence (AI) literature. Rather than advocating a particular approach, this article attempts to explain the apparent confusion of efforts in the field in terms of differences among underlying methodological perspectives held by practicing researchers. The article presents a review of such perspectives discussed in the existing literature and then considers a descriptive and relatively specific typology of these differing research perspectives. It is argued that researchers should make their methodological orientations explicit when communicating research results, to increase both the quality of research reports and their comprehensibility for other participants in the field. For a reader of the AI literature, an understanding of the various methodological perspectives will be of immediate benefit, giving a framework for understanding and evaluating research reports. In addition, explicit attention to methodological commitments might be a step towards providing a coherent intellectual structure that can be more easily assimilated by newcomers to the field.

The Artificial Intelligence in Medicine (AIM) Workshop has become a tradition. Meeting every year for the past nine years, it has been the forum where all the issues from basic research through applications to implementations have been discussed; it has also become a community building activity, bringing together researchers, medical practitioners, and government and industry sponsors of AIM activities.

This article presents a summary of ongoing, funded artificial intelligence research at North Carolina State University. The primary focus of the research is engineering aspects of artificial intelligence. These research efforts can be categorized into four main areas: engineering expert systems, generative database management systems, human-machine communication, and robotics and vision. Involved in the research are investigators from both the School of Engineering and the Department of Computer Science. The research programs are currently being sponsored by the Center for Communications and Signal Processing (CCSP), the Integrated Manufacturing Systems Engineering Institute (IMSEI), the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA).

Letters to the editor on genetics and applied epistemology, a response to "The Professor's Challenge" and a response to John Malpas; knowledge and power, and update on the Autoling System, a relativistic approach, and a response to Franklin's writings in volume 6 number 1.

The University of Michigan is the site of a variety of AI research projects involving faculty, staff and students from several departments and institutes on the Ann Arbor campus.

On October 17-19, 1984, a workshop on nonmonotonic hospitality suite-generally until late in the evenings reasoning was held at, Mohonk Mountain House, outside The workshop's only disappointment was the shortness New Paltz, New York. Speakers (and the audience) oft,en found Raymond R.eit,er and Bonnie Webbcr, and was sponsored that much more time could have been well-spent, especially by the American Association for Artificial Intelligence. The hotel is an inmense of much of the work presented. Surrounded by 2000 Preprints of the papers were distributed at the workshop, acres of private preserve, in full autumnal splcndour, participants but no proceedings will be published A limit,ed number quickly forgot the outside world. The grounds of copies of the preprints can be obtained from.

The Air Force Institute of Technology (AFIT) provides master's degree education to Air Force and Army Officers in various engineering fields It is in a unique position to educate and perform research in the area of applications of artificial intelligence to military problems. Its two AI faculty members are the only military officers with PhD's in Artificial Intelligence. In the past two years, the artificial intelligence Laboratory of AFIT has become a major focal point for AI research and applications within the government. In this article, we describe our on-going applications research in the areas of automated cockpit systems, natural language understanding, maintenance expert systems, expert systems for planning and knowledge based software design.

See Steamer: an Interactive Inspectable Samulation-Based Reid.

This paper reports several properties of heuristic best-first search strategies whose scoring functions ƒ depend on all the information available from each candidate path, not merely on the current cost g and the estimated completion cost h. It is shown that several known properties of A* retain their form (with the minmax of f playing the role of the optimal cost), which helps establish general tests of admissibility and general conditions for node expansion for these strategies. On the basis of this framework the computational optimality of A*, in the sense of never expanding a node that can be skipped by some other algorithm having access to the same heuristic information that A* uses, is examined. A hierarchy of four optimality types is defined and three classes of algorithms and four domains of problem instances are considered. Computational performances relative to these algorithms and domains are appraised.