The Second International Workshop on Human and Machine Cognition was held on 9-11 May 1991. Participation was limited to 40 researchers who are principally involved in computer science, philosophy, and psychology. The workshop focused on the foundational and methodological concerns of those who want to forge a robust and scientifically respectable AI and cognitive science. The debate between the traditional AI and the situated cognition types and the connnectionists was a focal point for discussion during the workshop.

Matthew R. Cronin, Oscar Firschein, Gary Ogasawara, Elaine Rich Abstract An argument against the view that computer science and communication are unrelated, comments on the imitation game, and the validity of the Turing test. An argument against the view that computer science and communication are unrelated, comments on the imitation game, and the validity of the Turing test.

The work described in my Ph.D. dissertation (Fischer 1991)1 merges computational and cognitive investigations of abductive reasoning. It is the outcome of seven years of research focusing on abductive explanation generation and involving the departments of computer and information science, industrial and systems engineering, pathology, and allied medical professions at The Ohio State University.

The Department of Computer Science at Louisiana State University (LSU) has been involved in robotics research since 1992 when the Robotics Research Laboratory (RRL) was established as a research and teaching program specializing in autonomous mobile robots (AMRS). Researchers at RRL are conducting high-quality research in amrs with the goal of identifying the computational problems and the types of knowledge that are fundamental to the design and implementation of autonomous mobile robotic systems. In this article, we overview the projects that are currently under way at LSU's RRL.

Recent attempts to develop larger and more complex knowledge-based systems have revealed the shortcomings and problems of centralized, single-agent architectures and have acted as a springboard for research in distributed AI (DAI). Although initial research efforts in DAI concentrated on issues relating to homogeneous systems (that is, systems using agents of a similar type or with similar knowledge), there is now increasing interest in systems comprised of heterogeneous components. The workshop on cooperation among heterogeneous intelligent agents, held July 15 during the 1991 National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, was organized by Evangelos Simoudis, Mark Adler, Michael Huhns, and Edmund Durfee. It was designed to bring together researchers and practitioners who are studying how to enable a heterogeneous collection of independent intelligent systems to cooperate in solving problems that require their combined abilities.

My Ph.D. dissertation (Goel 1989) presents a computational model of experience-based design. It first reviews the core issues in experience-based design, for example, (1) the content of a design experience (or case), (2) the internal organization of design cases, (3) the language for indexing the cases, (4) the mechanism for retrieving a case relevant to a given design task, (5) the mechanism for adapting a retrieved design to satisfy the constraints of the design task, (6) the mechanism for evaluating a design against the specification of the design task, (7) the mechanism for redesigning a failed design, (8) the mechanism for acquiring new design knowledge, (9) the mechanism for chunking information about a design into a new case, and (10) the mechanism for storing a new case in memory for potential reuse in the future. It then proposes that decisions about these issues might lie in the designer's comprehension of the designs of artifacts he/she has encountered in the past, that is, in his/her mental models of how the designs achieve the functions and satisfy the constraints of the artifacts.

Bylaws of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence

The workshop "Advances in Interfacing Production Systems with the Real World" was designed to bring together researchers from around the world to focus on the problem of integrating production systems into industrial environments. It was held on 25 August 1991 in Sydney, Australia, in conjunction with the Twelfth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-91). Nine papers were accepted for the proceedings, and six of them were discussed at the workshop.

The Sixth Annual Knowledge-Based Software Engineering Conference (KBSE-91) was held at the Sheraton University Inn and Conference Center in Syracuse, New York, from Sunday afternoon, 22 September, through midday Wednesday, 25 September. The KBSE field is concerned with applying knowledge-based AI techniques to the problems of creating, understanding, and maintaining very large software systems.

The International Workshop on Processing Declarative Knowledge was held in Kaiserslautern, Germany, from 1 to 3 July 1991. The workshop was intended as a forum for the presentation of new approaches to processing declarative knowledge, the discussion of procedural versus alternative paradigms, and the issues concerned with efficient processing of realistic knowledge bases. Demonstrations of implemented systems were also announced.