The YODA Robot Project at the University of Southern California/Information Sciences Institute consists of a group of young researchers who share a passion for autonomous systems that can bootstrap its knowledge from real environments by exploration, experimentation, learning, and discovery. Our participation in the Fifth Annual AAAI Mobile Robot Competition and Exhibition, held as part of the Thirteenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, served as the first milestone in advancing us toward this goal. YODA's software architecture is a hierarchy of abstraction layers, ranging from a set of behaviors at the bottom layer to a dynamic, mission-oriented planner at the top. This abstraction architecture has proven robust in dynamic and noisy environments, as shown by YODA's performance at the robot competition.

To enhance the quality and consistency of its customer- support organization, Reuters embarked on a global knowledge development and reuse project. The system supports 38 Reuter products worldwide. This article presents a case study of Reuter experience in putting a global knowledge organization in place, building knowledge bases at multiple distributed sites, deploying these knowledge bases in multiple sites around the world, and maintaining and enhancing knowledge bases within a global organizational framework. This project is the first to address issues in multicountry knowledge development and maintenance and multicountry knowledge deployment.

The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence held its 1996 Spring Symposia Series on March 27 to 29 at Stanford University. This article contains summaries of the eight symposia that were conducted: (1) Acquisition, Learning, and Demonstration: Automating Tasks for Users; (2) Adaptation, Coevolution, and Learning in Multiagent Systems; (3) Artificial Intelligence in Medicine: Applications of Current Technologies; (4) Cognitive and Computational Models of Spatial Representation; (5) Computational Implicature: Computational Approaches to Interpreting and Generating Conversational Implicature; (6) Computational Issues in Learning Models of Dynamic Systems; (7) Machine Learning in Information Access; and (8) Planning with Incomplete Information for Robot Problems.

From the scientific perspective, the development of theories and mechanisms to enable building collaborative systems presents exciting research challenges across AI subfields. From the applications perspective, the capability to collaborate with users and other systems is essential if large-scale information systems of the future are to assist users in finding the information they need and solving the problems they have. Key features of collaborative activity are described, the scientific base provided by recent AI research is discussed, and several of the research challenges posed by collaboration are presented. It is further argued that research on, and the development of, collaborative systems should itself be a collaborative endeavor -- within AI, across subfields of computer science, and with researchers in other fields.

Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming: Case Studies in Common Lisp -- A Review

This article describes Compaq QUICKSOURCE, an electronic problem-solving and information system for Compaq's line of networked printers. A major goal in designing this system was to empower Compaq's customers with expert system technology, allowing them to solve advanced network printer problems entirely on their own. In its first-generation system, SMART, the objective was to provide expert knowledge to Compaq's help-desk operation to better and more quickly answer customer calls and problems. Because the product would be used by a diverse and heterogeneous set of users, a significant amount of human factors research and analysis was performed as part of system design and implementation.

This article is a slightly modified version of an invited address that was given at the Eighth IEEE Conference on Artificial Intelligence for Applications in Monterey, California, on 2 March 1992. It describes the lessons learned in developing and implementing the Artificial Intelligence Research and Development Program at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). These stages are similar to the "ages of artificial intelligence" that Pat Winston described a year before the NASA program was initiated. The final section of the article attempts to generalize some of the lessons learned during the first seven years of the NASA AI program into AI program management heuristics.

My Ph.D. dissertation (Goel 1989) presents a computational model of experience-based design. It first reviews the core issues in experience-based design, for example, (1) the content of a design experience (or case), (2) the internal organization of design cases, (3) the language for indexing the cases, (4) the mechanism for retrieving a case relevant to a given design task, (5) the mechanism for adapting a retrieved design to satisfy the constraints of the design task, (6) the mechanism for evaluating a design against the specification of the design task, (7) the mechanism for redesigning a failed design, (8) the mechanism for acquiring new design knowledge, (9) the mechanism for chunking information about a design into a new case, and (10) the mechanism for storing a new case in memory for potential reuse in the future. It then proposes that decisions about these issues might lie in the designer's comprehension of the designs of artifacts he/she has encountered in the past, that is, in his/her mental models of how the designs achieve the functions and satisfy the constraints of the artifacts.

Building new knowledge-based systems today usually entails constructing new knowledge bases from scratch. System developers would then only need to worry about creating the specialized knowledge and reasoners new to the specific task of their system. This approach would facilitate building bigger and better systems cheaply. This article presents a vision of the future in which knowledge-based system development and operation is facilitated by infrastructure and technology for knowledge sharing.

A five-year project, it is aimed at promoting cooperation among research centers, developing state-of-the art training and teaching programs, and demonstrating KBCS solutions to selected socioeconomic problems.