Research in AI within the Computer Science Department at the University of California, Los Angeles is loosely composed of three interacting and cooperating groups: (1) the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, at 3677 Boelter Hall, which is concerned mainly with natural language processing and cognitive modelling, (2) the Cognitive Systems Laboratory, at 4731 Boelter Hall, which studies the nature of search, logic programming, heuristics, and formal methods, and (3) the Robotics and Vision Laboratory, at 3532 Boelter Hall, where research concentrates on robot control in manufacturing, pattern recognition, and expert systems for real-time processing.

The founding of a new college at Rutgers in 1969 became the occasion for building a strong computer science presence in the University. Livingston College thus provided the home for the newly organized Department of Computer Science (DCS) and for the beginning of computer science research at Rutgers.

A variety of proposals for preferred methodological approaches has been advanced in the recent artificial intelligence (AI) literature. Rather than advocating a particular approach, this article attempts to explain the apparent confusion of efforts in the field in terms of differences among underlying methodological perspectives held by practicing researchers. The article presents a review of such perspectives discussed in the existing literature and then considers a descriptive and relatively specific typology of these differing research perspectives. It is argued that researchers should make their methodological orientations explicit when communicating research results, to increase both the quality of research reports and their comprehensibility for other participants in the field. For a reader of the AI literature, an understanding of the various methodological perspectives will be of immediate benefit, giving a framework for understanding and evaluating research reports. In addition, explicit attention to methodological commitments might be a step towards providing a coherent intellectual structure that can be more easily assimilated by newcomers to the field.

Over the past few years, the notion of a "prototype" (e.g., TYPICAL-ELEPHANT) seems to have caught on securely in knowledge representation research. Along with a way to specify default properties for instances of a description, proto-representations allow overriding, or "canceling" of properties that don't apply in particular cases. This supposedly makes representing exceptions ( three-legged elephants and the like ) easy; but, alas, it makes one crucial type of representation impossible-that of composite descriptions whose meanings are functions of the structure and interrelation of their parts. This article explores this and other ramifications of the emphasis on default properties and "typical" objects.

The AI Group at The Ohio State University conducts a broad range of research projects in knowledge-based reasoning. The primary focus of this work is on analyzing problem solving, especially within knowledge -rich domains. In information processing or knowledge-level terms. B. Chandrasekaran has been the director of the group since its inception in the late 1970s.

The University of Michigan is the site of a variety of AI research projects involving faculty, staff and students from several departments and institutes on the Ann Arbor campus.

The Artificial Intelligence in Medicine (AIM) Workshop has become a tradition. Meeting every year for the past nine years, it has been the forum where all the issues from basic research through applications to implementations have been discussed; it has also become a community building activity, bringing together researchers, medical practitioners, and government and industry sponsors of AIM activities. The AIM Workshop held at Fawcett Center for Tomorrow at Ohio State University, June 30 - July 3, 1984, was no exception. It brought together more than 100 active participants in AIM.

It is interesting to note that there is no agreed upon definition of artificial intelligence. Why is this interesting? Because government agencies ask for it, software shops claim to provide it, popular magazines and newspapers publish articles about it, dreamers base their fantasies on it, and pragmatists criticize and denounce it. Such a state of affairs has persisted since Newell, Simon and Shaw wrote their first chess program and proclaimed that in a few years, a computer would be the world champion. Not knowing exactly what we are talking about or expecting is typical of a new field; for example, witness the chaos that centered around program verification of security related aspects of systems a few years ago. The details are too grim to recount in mixed company. However, artificial intelligence has been around for 30 years, so one might wonder why our wheels are still spinning. Below, an attempt is made to answer this question and show why, in a serious sense, artificial intelligence can never demonstrate an outright success within its own discipline. In addition, we will see why the old bromide that "as soon as we understand how to solve a problem, it's no longer artificial intelligence" is necessarily true.

In the past twenty years, much time, effort, and money has been expended on designing an unambiguous representation of natural language to make them accessible to computer processing, These efforts have centered around creating schemata designed to parallel logical relations with relations expressed by the syntax and semantics of natural languages, which are clearly cumbersome and ambiguous in their function as vehicles for the transmission of logical data. Understandably, there is a widespread belief that natural languages are unsuitable for the transmission of many ideas that artificial languages can render with great precision and mathematical rigor. Among the accomplishments of the grammarians can be reckoned a method for paraphrasing Sanskrit in a manner that is identical not only in essence but in form with current work in Artificial Intelligence. This article demonstrates that a natural language can serve as an artificial language also, and that much work in AI has been reinventing a wheel millenia old.

In the past twenty years, much time, effort, and money has been expended on designing an unambiguous representation of natural language to make them accessible to computer processing, These efforts have centered around creating schemata designed to parallel logical relations with relations expressed by the syntax and semantics of natural languages, which are clearly cumbersome and ambiguous in their function as vehicles for the transmission of logical data. Understandably, there is a widespread belief that natural languages are unsuitable for the transmission of many ideas that artificial languages can render with great precision and mathematical rigor. But this dichotomy, which has served as a premise underlying much work in the areas of linguistics and artificial intelligence, is a false one. There is at least one language, Sanskrit, which for the duration of almost 1000 years was a living spoken language with a considerable literature of its own. Besides works of literary value, there was a long philosophical and grammatical tradition that has continued to exist with undiminished vigor until the present century. Among the accomplishments of the grammarians can be reckoned a method for paraphrasing Sanskrit in a manner that is identical not only in essence but in form with current work in Artificial Intelligence. This article demonstrates that a natural language can serve as an artificial language also, and that much work in AI has been reinventing a wheel millenia old. First, a typical Knowledge Representation Scheme (using Semantic Nets) will be laid out, followed by an outline of the method used by the ancient Indian grammarians to analyze sentences unambiguously. Finally, the clear parallelism between the two will be demonstrated, and the theoretical implications of this equivalence will be given.