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.

Search algorithms for finding optimal solutions are, at least from the practical point of view, often enough intractible, so that the search for good ('satisficing') solutions becomes a research topic of its own interest. Satisficing solutions and different approaches to obtain them under various criteria is the subject of these notes, published in the series "Research notes in artificial intelligence". In an introductory chapter the author presents the known point - value and the point - { { set of values} } identification used in search- based decision-algorithms for guiding the search and discusses some of their advantages and disadvantages. This motivates the here studied alternative approach using that evaluation functions do not return a point - value or a range of values corresponding to a point (state) in a tree but now a distribution function, that describes the possible location of the'value' of the state. Chapter 2 introduces this model, Chapter 6 resumes the basic results.

Letters to the Editor

Canadians have made many contributions to artificial intelligence over the years. This article presents a summary of current research in artificial intelligence in Canada and acquaints readers with the Canadian organization for artificial intelligence -- the Canadian Society for the Computational Studies of Intelligence / Societe Canadienne pour l' Etude de l'Intelligence par Ordinateur (CSCSI/ SCEIO).

This article surveys a portion of the field of natural language processing. The main areas considered are those dealing with representation schemes, particularly work on physical object representation, and generalization processes driven by natural language understanding. The emphasis of this article is on conceptual representation of objects based on the semantic interpretation of natural language input. Within the framework of describing each of these programs, several other programs, ideas, and theories that are relevant to the program in focus are presented.

Jim Kornell, Robert Park, Christopher Dungan, Joop Schopman, David Drager, Nils J. Nilsson, Marty Kalin, John Gavin, Bernard Meltzer, Robert Salmansohn, Keith McCammon, Loren Martindale Abstract Subjects include AI's impact on employment, the AAAI conference, a response to McCarthy's Presidential Message, AI going public, and computerless expert systems. Subjects include AI's impact on employment, the AAAI conference, a response to McCarthy's Presidential Message, AI going public, and computerless expert systems.