The Eighth International Workshop on Qualitative Reasoning about Physical Systems (QR '94) was held on 7-10 June 1994 in Nara, Japan. Fifty-three people participated, and 34 papers were presented in either oral or poster sessions. The papers either addressed core issues of qualitative reasoning or extended the field along three axes: (1) cognitive modeling, (2) mathematical sophistication, and (3) application. Mita's self-maintenance copier and IBM's mechanism design and analysis using configuration spaces were demonstrated, convincing the participants of the promising role of qualitative-reasoning techniques in engineering and manufacturing domains.

DERVISH won the Office Delivery event of the 1994 Robot Competition and Exhibition, held as part of the Thirteenth National Conferennce on Artificial Intelligence. Although the contest required dervish to navigate in an artificial office environment, the official goal of the contest was to push the technology of robot navigation in real office buildings with minimal domain information. In this article, we present a short description of Dervish's hardware and low-level motion modules. We then discuss this assumptive system in more detail.

The third annual AAAI Robot Competition and Exhibition was held in 1994 during the Twelfth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Seattle, Washington. The competition featured Office Delivery and Office Cleanup events, which demanded competence in navigation, object recognition, and manipulation. The competition was organized into four parts: (1) a preliminary set of trials, (2) the competition finals, (3) a public robot exhibition, and (4) a forum to discuss technical issues in AI and robotics. It also presents the results of the competition and related events and provides suggestions for the direction of future exhibitions.

Rhino was the University of Bonn's entry in the 1994 AAAI Robot Competition and Exhibition. The general scientific goal of the rhino project is the development and the analysis of autonomous and complex learning systems. This article briefly describes the major components of the rhino control software as they were exhibited at the competition. It also sketches the basic philosophy of the rhino architecture and discusses some of the lessons that we learned during the competition.

COMIX (configuration of mixing machines) is a system that assists members of the EKATO Sales Department in designing a mixing machine that fulfills the requirements of a customer. It is used to help the engineer design the requested machine and prepare an offer that's to be submitted to the customer. During the process of routine design, some design decisions have to be made with uncertainty. The success of the system can be measured by the increase in the quantity and the quality of the submitted offers.

Interactive simulation environments constitute one of today's promising emerging technologies, with applications in areas such as education, manufacturing, entertainment, and training. These environments are also rich domains for building and investigating intelligent automated agents, with requirements for the integration of a variety of agent capabilities but without the costs and demands of low-level perceptual processing or robotic control. Our current target is intelligent automated pilots for battlefield-simulation environments. This article provides an overview of this domain and project by analyzing the challenges that automated pilots face in battlefield simulations, describing how TacAir-Soar is successfully able to address many of them -- TacAir-Soar pilots have already successfully participated in constrained air-combat simulations against expert human pilots -- and discussing the issues involved in resolving the remaining research challenges.

It is clear from these discussions that the notion of context is far from defined and is dependent in its interpretation on a cognitive science versus an engineering (or system building) point of view. In identifying the two points of view, this workshop permitted us to go one step further than previous workshops (notably Maskery and Meads [1992] and Maskery, Hopkins, and Dudley [1992]). Once a distinction is made on the viewpoint, one can achieve a surprising consensus on the aspects of context that the workshop addressed -- mainly, the position, the elements, the representation, and the use of context. Despite this consensus on the aspects of context, agreement on the definition of context was not yet achieved.

Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming: Case Studies in Common Lisp -- A Review

The Workshop on Comparative Analysis of AI Planning Systems, held during the 1994 national AI conference, was lively and interesting. Both the theoretical and practical sides of the AI planning community were represented. Several papers contributed to the theoretical analysis of planning algorithms, and others showed the first steps toward convergence between such theoretical work and practical work on the system engineering aspects of working planners.