Thanks from Jack and Janet Mostow for causing them to meet at AAAI'87 and subsequently marry; a correction to Jordan Pollack's affiliation; a correction to the winter 1988 wording of his report on Workshop on Theoretical Issues in Conceptual Information Processing; an addendum to the Slagle and Wick article in 9, 4: A Method for Evaluating Candidate Expert System Applications, citing Bruno Franck, and comments on Intelligent Computer-Aided Engineering by Kenneth D. Forbus in vol 9, no 3.

The emergence of the blackboard architecture as a widely used paradigm for problem solving led us and other members of the blackboard research community to organize a workshop. The workshop was held during the 1987 Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence Conference in Seattle. The main purpose of the workshop was to highlight the advances in blackboard architectures since the introduction of the paradigm in Hearsay-II and identify issues relevant to future blackboard system research. This article describes the issues raised and the discussions in each of the five workshop panels.

The Fifth Annual Theoretical Issues in Conceptual Information Processing Workshop took place in Washington, D.C. in June 1987. About 100 participants gathered to hear several invited talks and panels discussing the issues relating to artificial intelligence and cognitive science.

A novel approach is presented for the development of expert systems for structural design problems. This approach differs from the conventional expert systems in two fundamental respects. As an example of this approach, a prototype coupled expert system, the bridge truss expert (BTExpert), is presented for optimum design of bridge trusses subjected to moving loads. BTExpert was developed by interfacing an interactive optimization program developed in Fortran 77 to an expert system shell developed in Pascal.

Emphasizing theory and implementation issues more than specific applications and Prolog programming techniques, this book by David Maier and Davis S. Warren, respected researchers in logic programming, is a superb book.

The following is a synopsis of the findings of the first AAAI Workshop on AI Applications to Battle Management held at the University of Washington, 16 July 1987. This paper served as a focus for the workshop presentations and discussions and was augmented by the workshop presentations; it can also serve as a roadmap of topics for future workshops. AI can provide battle management with such capabilities as sensor data fusion and adaptive simulations. Also, several key needs in battle management will be AI research topics for years to come, such as understanding free text and inferencing in real time.

The goal of intelligent computer-aided engineering (ICAE) is to construct computer programs that capture a significant fraction of an engineer's knowledge. Today, ICAE systems are a goal, not a reality. We begin by examining several scenarios of what ICAE systems could be like. Next we describe why ICAE won't evolve directly from current applications of expert system technology to engineering problems.

Carnegie-Mellon University's Hitech chess computer scored 5-1 in the National Open Chess Championships held in Chicago March 18-20. The Championship Section in which Hitech competed, had 380 entries. Carnegie-Mellon University's Hitech chess computer scored 5-1 in the National Open Chess Championships held in Chicago March 18-20. The Championship Section in which Hitech competed, had 380 entries.