Decision analysis and expert systems are technologies intended to support human reasoning and decision making by formalizing expert knowledge so that it is amenable to mechanized reasoning methods. Despite some common goals, these two paradigms have evolved divergently, with fundamental differences in principle and practice. Recent recognition of the deficiencies of traditional AI techniques for treating uncertainty, coupled with the development of belief nets and influence diagrams, is stimulating renewed enthusiasm among AI researchers in probabilistic reasoning and decision analysis. We present the key ideas of decision analysis and review recent research and applications that aim toward a marriage of these two paradigms. This work combines decision-analytic methods for structuring and encoding uncertain knowledge and preferences with computational techniques from AI for knowledge representation, inference, and explanation. We end by outlining remaining research issues to fully develop the potential of this enterprise.

Task-specific architectures are a growing area of expert system research. Evaluation is one task that is required in many problem-solving domains. This article describes a task-specific, domain-independent architecture for candidate evaluation. I discuss the task-specific architecture approach to knowledge-based system development. Next, I present a review of candidate evaluation methods that have been used in AI and psychological modeling, focusing on the distinction between discrete truth table approaches and continuous linear models. Finally, I describe a task-specific expert system shell, which includes a development environment (Ceved) and a run-time consultation environment (Ceval). This shell enables nonprogramming domain experts to easily encode and represent evaluation-type knowledge and incorporates the encoded knowledge in performance systems.

Machine, I raised (much more playfully) one of the questions David M. West and Larry E. Travis raise in their important article, "The Computational Metaphor and Artificial Intelligence". AI might CA) has added a download microcode FL) has developed an expert system have gone off on the wrong track, enhancement to its Hi-Track expert to set its prices nationwide for Alamo's rather like Columbus believing he'd system. The enhancement will allow rental cars. The embedded system analyzes discovered the Indies. Columbus Hi-Track to remotely identify and the competition's prices, compares hadn't discovered the Indies; in fact solve potential problems in a customer's them to Alamo's, and then he'd stumbled on something as least storage subsystem, over the telephone.

Artificial Intelligence 51, pp. 95-143

We study networks of spiking neurons in which spikes are fired as a Poisson process. The state of a cell is determined by the instantaneous firingrate, and in the limit of high firing rates our model reduces to that studied by Hopfield. We find that the inclusion of spiking results in several new features, such as a noise-induced asymmetry between "on" and "off" states of the cells and probability currentswhich destroy the usual description of network dynamics interms of energy surfaces. Taking account of spikes also allows usto calibrate network parameters such as "synaptic weights" against experiments on real synapses. Realistic forms of the post synaptic response alters the network dynamics, which suggests a novel dynamical learning mechanism.

Spiking neurons which integrate to threshold and fire were used to study the transmission of frequency modulated (FM) signals through layered networks. Firing correlations between cells in the input layer were found to modulate the transmission of FM signals undercertain dynamical conditions. A tonic level of activity was maintained by providing each cell with a source of Poissondistributed synapticinput. When the average membrane depolarization produced by the synaptic input was sufficiently below threshold, the firing correlations between cells in the input layer could greatly amplify the signal present in subsequent layers. When the depolarization was sufficiently close to threshold, however, the firing synchrony between cells in the initial layers could no longer effect the propagation of FM signals. In this latter case, integrateand-fire neuronscould be effectively modeled by simpler analog elements governed by a linear input-output relation.

The mapping of the back-propagation and mean field theory learning algorithms onto a generic 2-D SIMD computer is described. This architecture proves to be very adequate for these applications since efficiencies close to the optimum can be attained. Expressions to find the learning rates are given and then particularized to the DAP array procesor.

We study networks of spiking neurons in which spikes are fired as a Poisson process. The state of a cell is determined by the instantaneous firing rate, and in the limit of high firing rates our model reduces to that studied by Hopfield. We find that the inclusion of spiking results in several new features, such as a noise-induced asymmetry between "on" and "off" states of the cells and probability currents which destroy the usual description of network dynamics in terms of energy surfaces. Taking account of spikes also allows us to calibrate network parameters such as "synaptic weights" against experiments on real synapses. Realistic forms of the post synaptic response alters the network dynamics, which suggests a novel dynamical learning mechanism.

Spiking neurons which integrate to threshold and fire were used to study the transmission of frequency modulated (FM) signals through layered networks. Firing correlations between cells in the input layer were found to modulate the transmission of FM signals under certain dynamical conditions. A tonic level of activity was maintained by providing each cell with a source of Poissondistributed synaptic input. When the average membrane depolarization produced by the synaptic input was sufficiently below threshold, the firing correlations between cells in the input layer could greatly amplify the signal present in subsequent layers. When the depolarization was sufficiently close to threshold, however, the firing synchrony between cells in the initial layers could no longer effect the propagation of FM signals. In this latter case, integrateand-fire neurons could be effectively modeled by simpler analog elements governed by a linear input-output relation.

The effects of parameter modifications imposed by hardware constraints on a self-organizing feature map algorithm were examined. Performance was measured by the error rate of a speech recognition system which included this algorithm as part of the front-end processing. System parameters which were varied included weight (connection strength) quantization, adap tation quantization, distance measures and circuit approximations which include device characteristics and process variability. Experiments using the TI isolated word database for 16 speakers demonstrated degradation in performance when weight quantization fell below 8 bits. The competitive nature of the algorithm rela..xes constraints on uniformity and linearity which makes it an excellent candidate for a fully analog circuit implementation. Prototype circuits have been fabricated and characterized following the constraints established through the simulation efforts. 1 Introduction The self-organizing feature map algorithm developed by Kohonen [Kohonen, 1988] readily lends itself to the task of vector quantization for use in such areas as speech recognition.