Several people have contributed ideas and effort to KloneTalk. In particular, Austin Henderson was a co-initiator of t,he project, a major contributor to the system's design, and a participant in the programming Ron Brachman, Steve Weyer, and Ira Goldstein provided significant consulting support, and Ben Cohen participated in the programming. Constrains a Person's mother to be a Woman. Constrains a Person to have exactly 1 mother. The number of children is unconstrained.

One should not throw out the baby with the bathwater, according to an old aphorism. Some popular recent positions in AI thinking have done just this, we suggest, by rejecting the useful idea of mental representations in their overenthusiastic zeal to correct some simplifications and naïveties in the way traditional AI ideas have sometimes been understood. These "situated" perspectives correctly emphasize that agents live in a social world, using their environments to help guide their actions without needing to always plan their futures in detail; but they incorrectly conclude that the very idea of mental representation is mistaken. This perspective has its intellectual roots in parts of recent sociological thinking which reject the entire fabric of western science. We discuss these ideas and disputes in the form of an illustrated fable concerning nannies and babies.

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. In 1981, Bob Abelson delivered a keynote speech to the Cognitive Science Society. The scruffies preferred to build systems and experiment with new ideas. The neats tended toward logic, the scruffies toward psychology; the neats worked with paper and pencil, the scruffies with computers; the neats worried about soundness and consistency, the scruffies leaned toward nonlogical representation schemes and used terms such as psychological validity; the neats tended to congregate on the West Coast, the scruffies on the East.

It is generally accepted that knowledge has a contextual component. However, even if its importance is acknowledged, this contextual component is rarely represented explicitly in available knowledge representation systems and is not used in subsequent processing of knowledge. Thus, there is a gap between what is known and what is done. Acquisition, representation, and exploitation of knowledge in context would have a major contribution in knowledge representation, knowledge acquisition, explanation, maintenance, documentation, learning, human-computer communication, and validation or verification. A computational capability to understand, represent, and reason about context will be valuable for, and of immense benefit to, many AI problems.

The American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) held its 1996 Fall Symposia Series on 9 to 11 November in Cambridge, Massachusetts. This article contains summaries of the seven symposia that were conducted: (1) Configuration; (2) Developing Assistive Technology for People with Disabilities; (3) Embodied Cognition and Action; (4) Flexible Computation: Results, Issues, and Opportunities; (5) Knowledge Representation Systems Based on Natural Language; (6) Learning Complex Behaviors in Adaptive Intelligent Systems; and (7) Plan Execution: Problems and Issues. This article contains summaries of the seven symposia that were conducted: (1) Configuration; (2) Developing Assistive Technology for People with Disabilities; (3) Embodied Cognition and Action; (4) Flexible Computation: Results, Issues, and Opportunities; (5) Knowledge Representation Systems Based on Natural Language; (6) Learning Complex Behaviors in Adaptive Intelligent Systems; and (7) Plan Execution: Problems and ...

The American Association for Artificial Intelligence held its 1991 Fall Symposium Series on November 15-17 at the Asilomar Conference Center, Pacific Grove, California. This article contains summaries of the four symposia that were conducted. The American Association for Artificial Intelligence held its 1991 Fall Symposium Series on November 15-17 at the Asilomar Conference Center, Pacific Grove, California. This article contains summaries of the four symposia that were conducted. A representation of the underlying structure of a discourse enhances the ability of a natural language system to interpret and generate a wide variety of linguistic phenomena.

AAAI announces the continuation of its scholarship travel program for students who want to attend the National Conference on Artificial Intelligence in San Jose, California, 12-17 July 1992. Undergraduate or graduate students enrolled in a full-time degree program at any college or university are eligible to serve as student volunteers during AAAI-92, to be held at the San Jose Convention Center in San Jose, California, 12-17 July. In exchange for assisting AAAI staff members during your volunteer shift, you will receive complimentary conference registration, a copy of the AAAI-92 proceedings, and a special AAAI-92 T-shirt. If you are interested in assisting AAAI at the national conference, please contact AAAI at volunteer @aaai.org. All inquiries should include your name, address, telephone, advisor's name, and email address.

This article contains summaries of the nine symposia that were conducted. Unlike previous Artificial Intelligence in Medicine (AIM) meetings, the AIM Symposium was organized around a single source of medical knowledge, the 1991 article "Graft-Versus-Host Disease (GVHD)" by Dr. James L. M. Ferrara and Dr. H. Joachim Deeg (New England Journal of Medicine 324:667). Presenters were also given three clinical vignettes in GVHD to use as examples in their talks or poster presentations. The symposium was significantly more focused because of the use of a common knowledge source. Provocateurs had the task of asking difficult questions to both the presenters and the audience.

Keith M. Andress, coauthor of "Evidence Accumulation and Flow of Control in a Hierarchical Spatial Reasoning System, " is a research associate in the Robot Vision Lab at Purdue University His research interests are in formalisms for accumulation of evidence, expert systems, and computer vision. Steven J. Frank, author of "What AI Practitioners Should Know about the Law. Part Two" is an attorney practicing with Nutter, McClennen & Fish, One International Place, Boston, Massachusetts 02210-2699. Martin Herman, coauthor of "A Framework for Representing and Reasoning about Three-Dimensional Objects for Vision" is group leader of the Sensory Intelligence Group in the Robot Systems Division at the National Bureau of Standards, Gaithersburg, MD 20899. His research interests are robotics, robot vision, image understanding, world modeling, real-time planning, autonomous vehicles, and remotely operated vehicles Avinash C. Kak, coauthor of "Evidence Accumulation and Flow of Control in a Hierarchical Spatial Reasoning System, " is a professor of electrical engineering at Purdue University.