This is the first presidential address of AAAI, the American Association for Artificial Intelligence. In the grand scheme of history of artificial intelligence (AI), this is surely a minor event. The field this scientific society represents has been thriving for quite some time. No doubt the society itself will make solid contributions to the health of our field. But it is too much to expect a presidential address to have a major impact. So what is the role of the presidential address and what is the significance of the first one? I believe its role is to set a tone, to provide an emphasis. I think the role of the first address is to take a stand about what that tone and emphasis should be-set expectations for future addresses and to communicate to my fellow presidents. Only two foci are really possible for a presidential address: the state of the society or the state of the science. I believe the latter to be correct focus. AAAI itself, its nature and its relationship to the larger society that surrounds it, are surely important. However, our main business is to help AI become a science -- albeit a science with a strong engineering flavor. Thus, though a president's address cannot be narrow or highly technical, it can certainly address a substantive issue. That is what I propose to do.

Advanced Information and Decision Systems (AI-DS) is a relatively new, employee-owned company that does basic and applied research, product development, and consulting in the fields of artificial intelligence, computer science, decision analysis, operations research, control theory, estimation theory, and signal processing. AI&DS performs studies, analyses, systems design and evaluation, and software development for a variety of industrial clients and government agencies, including the Department of Defense and Energy.

Bolt Beranek and Newman June 1981 was the closing date for the receipt of votes) The people listed below have been elected by the membership of the AAAI to the offices as indicated. AAAI Annual Meeting The election was special in several ways, in order to complete the initialization of officers and periods of tenure. The annual meeting of the AAAI will be held during the Both a president (for 1981-82) and a president-elect (who will IJCAI-RI meeting in Vancouver. The meeting will be held on serve as president for 1982-83) were elected. The IJCAI business president-elect would be on the ballot, however, no presidentelect meeting will also be held during the same period.

R1 is a rule-based program that configures VAX-11 computer systems. Given a customer's purchase order, it determines what, if any, substitutions and additions have to be made to the order to make it consistent and complete and produces a number of diagrams showing the spatial and logical relationships among the 90 or so components that typically constitute a system. The program has been used on a regular basis by Digital Equipment Corporation's manufacturing organization since January of 1980. R1 has sufficient knowledge of the configuration domain and of the percliarities of the various configuration constraints that at each step in the configuration process, it simply recognizes what to do; thus it requires little search in order to configure a computer system.

Section 1. Principal Office The principal office of the corporation in the State of California shall be located in the City Section 2. Special Meetings Special meetings of the members of Menlo Park, County of San Mateo Section 1. Classes of Members: The corporation shall have two Section 4 Notice of Special Meeting Notice stating the place, classes of members Regular and Student Student members day, and haul of any special meeting of members shall be have all of the rights and privileges of regular members except delivered either personally, or by mail, telephone, telegram, or that student members shall not be allowed to vote. Section 5 Quorum The persons present at the Annual Meeting Section 3. Membership A person becomes a mcmbel (regular shall constitute a quorum at this meeting, including all adjourned or student) upon acceptance of an application for membership by or continued meetings At any other meeting of the members, the Executive Council and payment of dues Section 6 Proxies, No person, whether a member or not, may vote the proxy of any regular member. Section 5 Termination of Membership The Executive Council, by affirmative vote of two-thirds of all of the members of the Section 7 All voting at meetings shall be by show of hand Council, may suspend or expel a member after an appropriate unless a secret ballot is requested by any member. All voting, hearing Failure to maintain current dues payments shall be whether written or oral, shall bc completed and tabulated prior to automatic grounds for termination of membership. Section 6. Resignation Any member may resign by filing a written resignation with the Secretary-Treasurer, EXECUTIVE COUNCIL Section 7 Reinstatement Upon written request by a former Section I General Power s The affairs of the corporation, member filed with the Secretary-Treasmer, the Executive including the setting of all dues and qualification of members, Council, by majority vote, may reinstate a former member shall be managed by its Executive Council Councilors of the Executive Council must be members of the corporation Section 8. Transfer of Membership Membership in this corporation is not transferable or assignable Section 2 Number, Qualification and Tenure After the initial 38 Al MAGAZINE Winter 1980-81 period of organization of the corporation, the Executive Council Council, or any vacancy by reason of an increase in the number shall consist of the Officers, as identified in Article V, twelve of members of the Executive Council, shall be filled by the individuals elected by the membership for three year terms, and Executive Council.

The Hearsay-H speech-understanding system (SUS) developed at Carnegie-Mellon University recognizes connected speech in a 1000-word vocabulary with correct interpretations for 90 percent of test sentences. Its basic methodology involves the application of symbolic reasoning as an aid to signal processing. A marriage of general artificial intelligence techniques with specific acoustic and linguistic knowledge was needed to accomplish satisfactory speech-This research was supported chiefly by Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency contract F44620-73- C-0074 to Carnegie-Mellon University. In addition, support for the preparation of this paper was provided by USC/ISI, Rand, and the University of Massachusetts. We gratefully acknowledge their support. Views and conclusions contained in this document are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as representing the official opinion or policy of DARPA, the U.S. government, or any other person or agency connected with them.

This research was supported at SRI International by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency under contract N00039--79--C--0118 with the Naval Electronic Systems Command. The views and conclusions contained in this document are those of the author and should not be interpreted as representative of the official policies either expressed or implied of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or the U. S. Government. The author is grateful to Barbara Grosz, Gary Hendrix and Terry Winograd for comments on an earlier draft of this paper.

Assume we have the following transformation rules that define integer multiplication: 0. v 0

To choose their actions, reasoning programs must be able to make assumptions and subsequently revise their beliefs when discoveries contradict these assumptions. The Truth Maintenance System (TMS) is a problem solver subsystem for performing these functions by recording and maintaining the reasons for program beliefs. Such recorded reasons are useful in constructing explanations of program actions and in guiding the course of action of a problem solver. This paper describes (1) the representations and structure of the TMS, (2) the mechanisms used to revise the current set of beliefs, (3) how dependency-directed backtracking changes the current set of assumptions, (4) techniques for summarizing explanations of beliefs, (5) how to organize problem solvers into "dialectically arguing" modules, (6) how to revise models of the belief systems of others, and (7) methods for embedding control structures in patterns of assumptions. We stress the need of problem solvers to choose between alternative systems of beliefs, and outline a mechanism by which a problem solver can employ rules guiding choices of what to believe, what to want, and what to do.Artificial Intelligence 12(3):231-272

Our purpose in studying natural language understanding in conjunction with problem solving is to bring together the constraints of what formal representation can actually be obtained with the question of what knowledge is required in order to solve a wide range of problems in a semantically rich domain. We believe that these issues cannot sensibly be tackled in isolation. In practical terms we have had the benefits of an increased awareness of common problems in both areas and a realisation that some of our techniques are applicable to both the control of inference and the control of parsing. Early work on solving mathematical problems stated in natural language was done by Bobrow (STUDENT - (i]) and Chamiak (CARPS - [5]). However the rudimentary parsing and simple semantic structures used by Bobrow and Charniak are inadequate for any but the easiest problems. Our intention has been to build on B/RG Chris This work was supported by SRC grant number 94493 and an SRC research studentship for Mellish.