The ability to map the state of an object into a category languages is transforming AI theories into symbolic strucin a classification hierarchy has long been an important tures. This pattern can be seen in knowledge representapart of many fields, for example, biology and medicine. Gordon and Shortliffe, 1985), and has been especially concerned with applying classification to diagnostic problems. One of the problems in classification is that the relationship between observable evidence and categories is often ambiguous. A piece of evidence can be associated with several categories or can occur with a category in an irregular fashion.

Introduction One of the major deterrents to productivity in industry today is the inability to effectively manage and control production. The problem is particularly acute in job shop environments where plant operation is routinely characterized by high work-in-process (WIP) inventories, tardy orders, poor resource utilization, and other shop floor inefficiencies. Perhaps the single most significant obstacle to improved factory performance is the complexity associated with constructing and maintaining good production schedules. Good schedules must reflect both the full detail of the operating environment and the influence of a conflicting set of preferences that range from global organizational objectives to specific operational idiosyncrasies. Existing computer-based techniques for production scheduling are capable of incorporating only a small fraction of this scheduling knowledge and, as a result, typically produce schedules that bear little resemblance to the actual state of the ...

We are developing Companion Cognitive Systems, a new kind of software that can be effectively treated as a collaborator. Aside from their potential utility, we believe this effort is important because it focuses on three key problems that must be solved to achieve human-level AI: Robust reasoning and learning, interactivity, and longevity. We describe the ideas we are using to develop the first architecture for Companions: analogical processing, grounded in cognitive science for reasoning and learning, sketching and concept maps to improve interactivity, and a distributed agent architecture hosted on a cluster to achieve performance and longevity. We outline some results on learning by accumulating examples derived from our first experimental version. What is known about cognition has grown significantly, and communication between fields in cognitive science has catalyzed all of them. Largescale representational resources, such as WordNet, FrameNet, and Cyc, have become available so that one can build large knowledge systems without starting from scratch. Central processing units (CPUs) have become fast enough and memories large enough to tackle systems that could only be dreamed about previously. The confluence of these three factors suggest to us that the time is right for more ambitious projects, building integrated systems using the best available results from cognitive science. The effort we have embarked on to create Companion Cognitive Systems represents one such project. Let us start with our practical goals for Companions. The problems we face are growing more complex, but we are not becoming any smarter. Software can help, but often it becomes part of the problem by adding new layers of complexity. We need to bring software closer to us, improving conceptual bandwidth and having it adapt to us, rather than the other way around. Our vision is this: Companions will be software aide-de-camps, collaborators with their users. Companions will help their users work through complex arguments, automatically retrieving relevant precedents, providing cautions and counter-indications as well as supporting evidence. Companions will be capable of effective operation for weeks and months at a time, assimilating new information, generating and maintaining scenarios and predictions. Companions will continually adapt and learn, about the domains they are working in, their users, and themselves.

The 1988 Workshop on Cognitive Models of Speech Processing was held at Park Hotel Fiorelle, Sperlonga, Italy, on 16-20 May 1988. Twentyfive participants gathered in this small coastal village, where the Emperor Tiberius once kept a summer house, to discuss psycholinguistic and computational issues in speech and natural language processing. The main aim of the workshop was to draw together current research trends within the fields of human speech perception and natural language processing. Cognitive psychologists have attempted to model what goes on at the many different levels at which speech perception can be described; they have also been concerned with the interaction, if any, between these levels. The mechanisms that have been proposed have varied in the degree to which they are amenable to detailed computational modeling.

Assembly plays a fundamental role in the manufacturing of most products. Parts that have been individually formed or machined to meet designed specifications are assembled into a configuration that achieves the functions of the final product or mechanism. The economic importance of assembly as a manufacturing process has led to extensive efforts to improve the efficiency and cost effectiveness of assembly operations. The sequence of mating operations that can be carried out to assemble a group of parts is constrained by the geometric and mechanical properties of the parts, their assembled configuration, and the stability of the resulting subassemblies. An approach to representation and reasoning about these sequences is described here and leads to several alternative explicit and implicit plan representations.

In 1984, the former Computer and Communication Sciences Department of the College of Literature, Scicnccs, and the Arts was combined in the College of Engineering with the Electrical Engineering Department. The newly formed Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) is divided into the Computer Science and Engineering Division (CSE) and the Electrical Engineering Division; several faculty mcmbcrs and graduate students in the CSE Division are doing basic Al research. The Center for Robotics and Integrated Manufacturing in the College of Engineering is conducting research and development in robotics and related areas of manufacturing processes. The College of Engineering also has a Humanities Department with faculty working on the role of computers in natural language comprehension and writing. The Psychology Department in the College of Literature, Sciences, and the Arts is the administrative center of the TJniversity's Cognitive Scirnccs Program, which involves several faculty working on cognitive psychology and other topics sharing interests with Al.

THE UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND'S Computer Science Department conducts a broad research program in both theoretical and applied artificial intelligence. Nine faculty and more than fifty research associates and graduate students are involved in AI research. Projects are funded by a large number of government agencies, as well as by several major corporations. The computing environment will improve dramatically over the next several years, due in large part to a Coordinated Experimental Research Equipment Grant awarded to the Computer Science Department by the National Science Foundation in 1982. In addition to the research program in AI, the Department offers a large number of courses at both the graduate and undergraduate levels on all facets of AI.

This mechanism makes use of plausibility information concerning the sub-hypotheses, along with information about what a sub-hypothesis can explain in the particular situation, to build toward a complete explanation. The novel capability arises of confirming a sub-hypothesis on the basis of its ability to explain some feature for which there is no other plausible explanation. The mechanism we have developed accommodates several types of hypothesis interaction: additive hypothesis cooperation in accounting for the features of the situation, substantive hypothesis interactions of mutual compatibility and incompatibility, and interactions of the sort where one hypothesis, if it, is accepted, suggests some other hypothesis. Prospects seem good for extending the mechanism to accommodate other forms of interaction too. We have used this mechanism successfully as the basis for an expert system, called Red, designed to solve realworld problems of red-cell antibody identification.

GIST'S high-level constructs into the lowerlevel That is, the new implementation is developed by analogy with the old. We believe that such an automated maintenance facility will be an important application of analogical reasoning techniques. These interactions may cause the specification to denote behaviors that were unintended by the original specifier or not to denote behaviors that were intended. The Specification Validation project seeks to overcome these impediments by constructing tools to make specifications more understandable, both to specifiers and to those unfamiliar with formal specification languages. We have found the paraphraser to be useful in both clarifying specifications and revealing specification errors.

AI activities are also being pursued at other Schlumberger locations, often jointly with SDR The locations related to logging and interpretation include: Schlumberger-Doll Research, Ridgefield, Connecticut (Contact: Peter Wu'l); Schlumberger Well Services, Austin, Texas (Contact: Scott Gut/my); Schlumberger Well Services, Houston, Texas (Contact: Scott Ma&s); Nippon Schlumberger, K K, Tokyo, Japan (Contact: Dennzs O'NezU); I&ude et Production Schlumbcraer. Other Schlumberger companies involied in Ai research include! Expert Systems Current work in expert, systems is concerned with developing techniques for building more robust and versatile log interpretation systems. One shortcoming of "first generation" expert systems, such as the Dipmeter Advisor, is their inability to reason about the task that they attempt to perform. Any description of the overall task is usually procedurally encoded and unavailable for examination.