The Center for Automation and Intelligent Systems Research at Case Western Reserve University, founded in 1984, provides the setting and the administrative and funding mechanisms for coordinating and focusing the capabilities of faculty members and students from many disciplines and departments to deal with significant realworld problems encountered in the automation of production. The center serves as an interface between separate basic research efforts in the various disciplines and academic departments and the multidisciplinary group efforts needed to deal effectively with nontrivial real problems.

Review of Readings in Medical Artificial Intelligence: The First Decade

With the great amount of attention now being paid by the media to AI, it would be naive, shortsighted, and even self-deceptive to think that there will not be public interest in scrutinizing, monitoring, regulating, and even constraining our efforts. What we do can affect people's lives as they understand them. People are going to ask not only what we are doing but also whether it should be done. We should be prepared to participated in open discussion and debate on such ethical issues.

Many of the ideas behind object-oriented programming have roots going back to SIMULA. The first substantial interactive, display-based implementation was the SMALLTALK language. The object-oriented style has often been advocated for simulation programs, systems programming, graphics, and AI programming. It is also related to a line of work in AI on the theory of frames and their implementation in knowledge representation languages such as KRL, KEE, FRL, and UNITS.

The major limitations in building large software have always been (a) its brittleness when confronted by problems that were not foreseen by its builders, and (by the amount of manpower required. The recent history of expert systems, for example highlights how constricting the brittleness and knowledge acquisition bottlenecks are. Moreover, standard software methodology (e.g., working from a detailed "spec") has proven of little use in AI, a field which by definition tackles ill- structured problems. But decades of work on such systems have convinced us that each of these approaches has difficulty "scaling up" for want a substantial base of real world knowledge.

This article explores the implications of one type of cognitive technology, techniques and concepts to develop joint human-machine cognitive systems, for the application of computational technology by examining the joint cognitive system implicit in a hypothetical computer consultant that outputs some form of problem solution. This analysis reveals some of the problems can occur in cognitive system design-e.g., machine control of the interaction, the danger of a responsibility-authority double-bind, and the potentially difficult and unsupported task of filtering poor machine solutions. The result is a challenge for applied cognitive psychology to provide models, data, and techniques to help designers build an effective combination between the human and machine elements of a joint cognitive system.

Further, new application domains such as computer -aided design (CAD), computer- aided manufacturing (CAM), and image understanding based on formal logic require novel concepts in knowledge representation and inference beyond the capabilities of current production rule systems. Fundamental research in artificial intelligence is concentrated at Corporate Research and Development (CR&D), with advanced development and applications pursued in parallel efforts by operating departments. The fundamental research and advanced applications activities are strongly coupled, providing research teams with opportunities for field evaluations of new concepts and systems. This article summarizes current research projects at CR&D and gives an overview of applications within the company.

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. 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.

Research in AI within the Computer Science Department at the University of California, Los Angeles is loosely composed of three interacting and cooperating groups: (1) the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, at 3677 Boelter Hall, which is concerned mainly with natural language processing and cognitive modelling, (2) the Cognitive Systems Laboratory, at 4731 Boelter Hall, which studies the nature of search, logic programming, heuristics, and formal methods, and (3) the Robotics and Vision Laboratory, at 3532 Boelter Hall, where research concentrates on robot control in manufacturing, pattern recognition, and expert systems for real-time processing.

One reason is that the requirements-oriented methods and intuitions learned in the development of other types of software do not carry over well to the knowledge engineering task. Another reason is that methodologies for developing expert systems by extracting, representing, and manipulating an expert's knowledge have been slow in coming. At Tektronix, we have been using step-by-step approach to prototyping expert systems for over two years now. This methodology has helped us collect the knowledge necessary to implement several prototype knowledge-based systems, including a troubleshooting assistant for the Tektronix FG-502 function generator and an operator's assistant for a wave solder machine.