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.

PROSE is a knowledge-based configurator platform for telecommunications products. Its outstanding feature is a product knowledge base written in C-classIC, a frame-based knowledge representation system in the KL-ONE family of languages. Unlike previous configurator applications, the PROSE knowledge base is in a purely declarative form that provides developers with the ability to add knowledge quickly and consistently. The PROSE architecture is general and is not tied to any specific telecommunications product.

The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) held its 1993 Spring Symposium Series on March 23-25 at Stanford University. This article contains summaries of the eight symposia that were conducted: AI and Creativity, AI and NP-Hard Problems, Building Lexicons for Machine Translation, Case-Based Reasoning and Information Retrieval, Foundations of Automatic Planning, Innovative Applications of Massive Parallelism, Reasoning about Mental States, and Training Issues in Incremental Learning. Technical reports of the symposia AI and Creativity, Building Lexicons for Machine Translation, Case-Based Reasoning and Information Retrieval, Foundations of Automatic Planning, Innovative Applications of Massive Parallelism, Reasoning about Mental States, and Training Issues in Incremental Learning are available from AAAI.

In 1991, Ford Motor Company began deployment of CAPE (computer-aided parts estimating system), a highly advanced knowledge-based system designed to generate, evaluate, and cost automotive part manufacturing plans. CAPE is a highly significant system for Ford of Europe in terms of the business needs it satisfies and the corporate acceptance of AI applications: First, CAPE represents a major investment, with significant person-years of effort spent on predeployment development alone. Second, CAPE is the first large-scale production expert system to be deployed within Ford of Europe. CAPE reduces estimating response time by 50 percent.

My dissertation concerns the application of constraint-based reasoning to parametric engineering design (Murtagh 1991).1 It deals with the practical application of constraint networks, using automated reasoning to overcome some of the blind spots in conventional iterative design.

The Ninth International Conference on Machine Learning was held in Aberdeen, Scotland, from 1-3 July 1992, with 198 participants in attendance. The conference covered a broad range of topics drawn from the general area of machine learning, including concept-learning algorithms, clustering, speedup learning, formal analysis of learning systems, neural networks, genetic algorithms, and applications of machine learning. This article briefly touches on six selected talks that were of exceptional interest.

We report on the spring 1992 symposium on diagrammatic representations in reasoning and problem solving sponsored by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. The symposium brought together psychologists, computer scientists, and philosophers to discuss a range of issues covering both externally represented diagrams and mental images and both psychology -- and AI-related issues. In this article, we develop a framework for thinking about the issues that were the focus of the symposium as well as report on the discussions that took place. We anticipate that traditional symbolic representations will increasingly be combined with iconic representations in future AI research and technology and that this symposium is simply the first of many that will be devoted to this topic.

My Ph.D. dissertation describes PAGODA (probabilistic autonomous goal-directed agent), a model for an intelligent agent that learns autonomously in domains containing uncertainty. The ultimate goal of this line of research is to develop intelligent problem-solving and planning systems that operate in complex domains, largely function autonomously, use whatever knowledge is available to them, and learn from their experience. PAGODA was motivated by two specific requirements: The agent should be capable of operating with minimal intervention from humans, and it should be able to cope with uncertainty (which can be the result of inaccurate sensors, a nondeterministic environment, complexity, or sensory limitations). I argue that the principles of probability theory and decision theory can be used to build rational agents that satisfy these requirements.

The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence held its 1992 Fall Symposium Series on October 23-25 at the Royal Sonesta Hotel in Cambridge, Massachusetts. This article contains summaries of the five symposia that were conducted: Applications of AI to Real-World Autonomous Mobile Robots, Design from Physical Principles, Intelligent Scientific Computation, Issues in Description Logics: Users Meet Developers, and Probabilistic Approaches to Natural Language.