Thanks from Jack and Janet Mostow for causing them to meet at AAAI'87 and subsequently marry; a correction to Jordan Pollack's affiliation; a correction to the winter 1988 wording of his report on Workshop on Theoretical Issues in Conceptual Information Processing; an addendum to the Slagle and Wick article in 9, 4: A Method for Evaluating Candidate Expert System Applications, citing Bruno Franck, and comments on Intelligent Computer-Aided Engineering by Kenneth D. Forbus in vol 9, no 3.

The emergence of the blackboard architecture as a widely used paradigm for problem solving led us and other members of the blackboard research community to organize a workshop. The workshop was held during the 1987 Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence Conference in Seattle. The main purpose of the workshop was to highlight the advances in blackboard architectures since the introduction of the paradigm in Hearsay-II and identify issues relevant to future blackboard system research. This article describes the issues raised and the discussions in each of the five workshop panels.

Robert K. Levin, Diane E. Drang, and Barry Edelson's book might better be titled, an introduction to expert systems: Turbo Pascal edition. THe book does not live up to the promise implied in the title.

Artificial Intelligence is solving more and more real world problems, but penetration into the complexities of government administration has been minimal. The author suggests that combining expert system technology with conventional procedural computer systems can lead to substantial efficiencies. Business rules can be removed from business-oriented computer systems and stored in a separate but integrated knowledge base, where maintenance will be centralized. Fourteen specific practical applications are suggested.

The Fifth Annual Theoretical Issues in Conceptual Information Processing Workshop took place in Washington, D.C. in June 1987. About 100 participants gathered to hear several invited talks and panels discussing the issues relating to artificial intelligence and cognitive science.

We built on previous work to develop an evaluation method that can be used to select expert system applications which are most likely to be successfully implemented. Both essential and desirable features of an expert system application are discussed. Essential features are used to ensure that the application does not require technology beyond the state of the art. Advice on helpful directions for evaluating candidate expert system applications is also given.

A novel approach is presented for the development of expert systems for structural design problems. This approach differs from the conventional expert systems in two fundamental respects. As an example of this approach, a prototype coupled expert system, the bridge truss expert (BTExpert), is presented for optimum design of bridge trusses subjected to moving loads. BTExpert was developed by interfacing an interactive optimization program developed in Fortran 77 to an expert system shell developed in Pascal.

Emphasizing theory and implementation issues more than specific applications and Prolog programming techniques, this book by David Maier and Davis S. Warren, respected researchers in logic programming, is a superb book.

The workshop featured significant developments in application of theories of representation and reasoning under uncertainty. The effectiveness of these choices in AI systems tends to be best considered in terms of specific problem areas. Influence diagrams are emerging as a unifying representation, enabling tool development. Interest and results in uncertainty in AI are growing beyond the capacity of a workshop format.

A workshop on high-level connectionist models was held in Las Cruces, New Mexico, on 9-11 April 1988 with support from the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence and the Office of Naval Research. John Barnden and Jordan Pollack organized and hosted the workshop and will edit a book containing the proceedings and commentary. The book will be published by Ablex as the first volume in a series entitled Advances in Connectionist and Neural Computation Theory.