This report stems from a workshop that was organized by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) and cosponsored by the Information Technology and Organizations Program of the National Science Foundation. The purpose of the workshop was twofold: first, to increase awareness among the artificial intelligence (AI) community of opportunities presented by the National Information Infrastructure (NII) activities, in particular, the Information Infrastructure and Tech-nology Applications (IITA) component of the High Performance Computing and Communications Program; and second, to identify key contributions of research in AI to the NII and IITA.

The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence held its 1995 Spring Symposium Series on March 27 to 29 at Stanford University. This article contains summaries of the nine symposia that were conducted: (1) Empirical Methods in Discourse Interpretation and Generation; (2) Extending Theories of Action: Formal Theory and Practical Applications; (3) Information Gathering from Heterogeneous, Distributed Environments; (4) Integrated Planning Applications; (5) Interactive Story Systems: Plot and Character; (6) Lessons Learned from Implemented Software Architectures for Physical Agents; (7) Representation and Acquisition of Lexical Knowledge: Polysemy, Ambiguity, and Generativity; (8) Representing Mental States and Mechanisms; and (9) Systematic Methods of Scientific Discovery.

The annual Workshop on the Validation and Verification of Knowledge-Based Systems is the leading forum for presenting research on the validation and verification of knowledge-based systems (KBSs). The 1994 workshop was significant in that there was a definitive move in the philosophical position of the workshop from a testing- and tool-based approach to KBS evaluation to that of a formal specification-based approach. This workshop included 12 full papers and 5 short papers and was attended by 35 researchers from government, industry, and academia.

Over the centuries, it has become reified in that analogical reasoning has sometimes been regarded as a fundamental cognitive process. In addition, it has become identified with a particular expressive format. Beyond this dependence, research in cognitive science suggests that analogy relies on a number of genuinely fundamental cognitive capabilities, including semantic flexibility, the perception of resemblances and of distinctions, imagination, and metaphor. Extant symbolic models of analogical reasoning have various sorts of limitation, yet each model presents some important insights and plausible mechanisms.

The Seventh International Workshop on Natural Language Generation was held from 21 to 24 June 1994 in Kennebunkport, Maine. Sixty-seven people from 13 countries attended this 4-day meeting on the study of natural language generation in computational linguistics and AI. The goal of the workshop was to introduce new, cutting-edge work to the community and provide an atmosphere in which discussion and exchange would flourish.

My collaborators and I have recently reported in domain science journals several human-computer discoveries in biology, chemistry, and physics. My conclusion is that each finding involves a new representation of the scientific task: The problem spaces searched were unlike previous task problem spaces. Such new representations need not be wholly new to the history of science; rather, they can draw on useful representational pieces from elsewhere in natural or computer science. My analysis also suggests a broader potential role for (AI) computer scientists in the practice of natural science.

A Review of Qualitative Reasoning: Modeling and Simulation with Incomplete Knowledge

The Georgia Institute of Technology won the Office Cleanup event at the 1994 AAAI Robot Competition and Exhibition with a multirobot cooperating team. This article describes the design and implementation of these reactive trash-collecting robots, including details of multiagent cooperation, color vision for the detection of perceptual object classes, temporal sequencing of behaviors for task completion, and a language for specifying motor schema-based robot behaviors.

The Eighth International Workshop on Qualitative Reasoning about Physical Systems (QR '94) was held on 7-10 June 1994 in Nara, Japan. Fifty-three people participated, and 34 papers were presented in either oral or poster sessions. The papers either addressed core issues of qualitative reasoning or extended the field along three axes: (1) cognitive modeling, (2) mathematical sophistication, and (3) application. Mita's self-maintenance copier and IBM's mechanism design and analysis using configuration spaces were demonstrated, convincing the participants of the promising role of qualitative-reasoning techniques in engineering and manufacturing domains.

DERVISH won the Office Delivery event of the 1994 Robot Competition and Exhibition, held as part of the Thirteenth National Conferennce on Artificial Intelligence. Although the contest required dervish to navigate in an artificial office environment, the official goal of the contest was to push the technology of robot navigation in real office buildings with minimal domain information. In this article, we present a short description of Dervish's hardware and low-level motion modules. We then discuss this assumptive system in more detail.