The Portrait Programs Project grew out of hyperinterdisciplinarianism of the famed Gigabase Sculpture Group, in turn stimulated by recent cutbacks in government support for the arts. The National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Science Foundation had jointly funded the Gigabase Sculpture Project to foster the literary/musical genre of composing genetic codes for novel organisms. Later, artists trained in recombinant DNA technology designed massive Brancusi-esque statues of living cytoplasmic jelly. However, Art For Art's Sake objectives of these giblet sculptors were compromised by precautions necessary after discovery of the "Gogol's-Theorem Bomb" that threatened to get loose and jam all DNA replication in the biosphere; not even viruses would have survived.

Research and applications work in AI is being conducted by several groups at Johnson Space Center (JSC). In the Research and Engineering Directorate, these groups include (1) the Artificial Intelligence and Information Sciences Office, (2) the Simulation and Avionics Integration Division, (3) the Avionics Systems Division (ASD), and (4) the Tracking and Communications Division. In the Space Operations Directorate, these groups include (1) the Mission Planning and Analysis Division - Technology Development and Applications Branch, (2) the Spacecraft Software Division, and (3) the Systems Division-Systems Support Section. The first part of the article describes the AI work in Research and Engineering Directorate.

The consensus of government, academic, and industry leaders widely supports the strategic positioning of U.S. and Japanese research and development in mutually beneficial, two-way flows of innovation. This report is derived from the IJCAI panel titled U.S and Japanese Cooperation in AI and R&D Opportunities, held August 23, 1986 at the University of California at Los Angeles. This panel discussed the sensitive topic of alternatives to nationalistic competitive strategies that have contributed to an extreme trade deficit surpassing $40 billion in 1986. The ideas offered by the panelists shed light on ways our countries' respective scientific communities can blend talents to achieve the best results in reducing trade frictions. Each country has designated AI research as a key to unlock years of generations of technology and has directed billions of dollars to fund this development. The most recognized projects are the U.S. Microelectronics Technology Computer Consortium (MCC) and Japan's Fifth Generation Computer Project (ICOT). Although noting the obstacles, the panelists encouraged specific, shared efforts to ensure the development of a closer working relationship to explore AI's benefits.

The interpretation of images of postal mail pieces is The Vision Group the domain of this investigation. Our efforts have included It is becoming increasingly important for vision researchers the development of various operators for visual data processing in diverse fields to interact, and the Vision Group at SUNY and image segmentation. The invocation of these Buffalo was formed to facilitate that interaction Current routines and the interpretation of the information they return membership includes 25 faculty and 25 students from 10 is determined by a control structure that uses a variant departments (computer science, electrical and computer of relaxation combined with a rule-based methodology.

THE AI MAGAZINE Summer, 1986 55 building one of the first stored-program digital computers, AI also had its share of controversy, however, at Rand the JOHNNIAC (see Figure 1) (Gruenberger, 1968);l and elsewhere. Given its quick rise to popularity and its George Dantzig and his associates were inventing linear ambitious predictions (Simon & Newell, 1958), AI soon programming (Dantzig, 1963); Les Ford and Ray Fulkerson had its critics, and one of the most prominent, Hubert were developing techniques for network flow analysis Dreyfus, published his famous critique of AI (Dreyfus, (Ford & Fulkerson, 1962); Richard Bellman was developing 1965) while he was consulting at Rand. In addition, the his ideas on dynamic programming (Bellman, 1953); early promise of automatic machine translation of text Herman Kahn was advancing techniques for Monte Carlo from one language to another (the emphasis at Rand was simulation (Kahn, 1955); Lloyd Shapley was revolutionizing on translation from Russian to English) produced only game theory (Shapley, 1951-1960); Stephen Kleene was modest systems, and the goal of fully automated machine advancing our understanding of finite automata (Kleene, translation was abandoned in the early 1960s.

Research and applications work in AI is being conducted by several groups at Johnson Space Center (JSC). These are primarily independent groups that interact with each other on an informal basis. In the Research and Engineering Directorate, these groups include (1) the Artificial Intelligence and Information Sciences Office, (2) the Simulation and Avionics Integration Division, (3) the Avionics Systems Division (ASD), and (4) the Tracking and Communications Division. In the Space Operations Directorate, these groups include (1) the Mission Planning and Analysis Division - Technology Development and Applications Branch, (2) the Spacecraft Software Division, and (3) the Systems Division-Systems Support Section. The first part of the article describes the AI work in Research and Engineering Directorate. The second part of the article, to be published in the Conference edition of the AI Magazine, describes the AI work in the Space Operations Directorate

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. How can these bottlenecks be widened? Attractive, elegant answers have included machine learning, automatic programming, and natural language understanding. 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.

The MITRE Corporation is a scientific and technical organization engaged in systems engineering activities, principally in support of the United States Air Force and other government agencies, and primarily in the field of information systems. MITRE is a special kind of engineering organizations. The corporation is a Federal Contract Research Center, a designation covering the handful of independent institutions that perform government sponsored research. It is an independent, nonprofit corporation designed and managed to provide long-term assistance to government agencies in planning, design, procurement, and testing of their information systems.

Tsukuba Expo '85 is huge, interesting, and fun. The Japanese pavilions are plush and well -organized and contain some impressive artificial intelligence demonstrations. The U.S. pavilion is an embarrassment.

The enterprise of developing knowledge-based systems is currently witnessing great growth in popularity. The central unity of many such programs is that they interpret knowledge that is explicitly encoded as rules. While rule-based programming comes with certain clear pay-offs, further fundamental advances in research are needed to extend the scope of tasks that can be adequately represented in this fashion. This article is a statement of personal perspective by a researcher interested in fundamental issues in the symbolic representation and organization ok knowledge.