We continue to look for excellent senior and junior researchers to add to our current strengths and to help us venture into new areas. The Lister Hill National Center for Biomedical Communications (LHNCBC) is a division of the National Library of Medicine which is one of the National Institutes of Health, Department of Health and Human Services, the government's primary agency for support and conduct of biomedical research. LHNCBC provides opportunities for postdoctoral fellows, graduate and medical students, college students, and visiting faculty to participate in collaborative research in a variety of areas of medical informatics. Research activities involve both basic and applied informatics in several broad research areas. Knowledge-based research focuses on language and information processing, and expert systems.

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.

We describe an application of a dynamic replanning technique in a highly dynamic and complex domain: the military aeromedical evacuation of patients to medical treatment facilities. U.S. Transportation Command (USTRANSCOM) is the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) agency responsible for evacuating patients during wartime and peace. Doctrinally, patients requiring extended treatment must be evacuated by air to a suitable medical treatment facility. The Persian Gulf War was the first significant armed conflict in which this concept was put to a serious test. The results were far from satisfactory--about 60 percent of the patients ended up at the wrong destinations.

This article describes the ExpertCop tutorial system, a simulator of crime in an urban region. In ExpertCop, the students (police officers) configure and allocate an available police force according to a selected geographic region and then interact with the simulation. The student interprets the results with the help of an intelligent tutor, the pedagogical agent, observing how crime behaves in the presence of the allocated preventive policing. The interaction between domain agents representing social entities as criminals and police teams drives the simulation. ExpertCop induces students to reflect on resource allocation.

This conference occupies the currently "hot" area that lies midway between the traditional fields of AI--represented by conferences such as the National Conference on Artificial Intelligence and the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence--and human-computer interface--represented by conferences such as the ACM Computers and Human Interaction (CHI) Conference and the Interact Conference in Europe. As AI technologies become more widely used, user interface technologies for AI will become increasingly more important, and as traditional interactive graphic user interfaces become more complex, people will look to AI technologies as a way of making them smarter and more sensitive to their users. A growing band of researchers is focusing on these issues, which demand an interdisciplinary outlook, and the intelligent user interface conference series is the premiere venue. This year's conference took place in the fascinating city of New Orleans and was attended by about 150 people, slightly more than last year. Despite the small size of the conference, it achieved a high degree of international participation, with papers from Japan, Germany, the United Kingdom, France, Spain, Sweden, and Brazil.

This article contains summaries of the five symposia that were conducted: (1) Control of the Physical World by Intelligent Agents, (2) Improving Instruction of Introductory AI, (3) Knowledge Representation for Natural Language Processing in Implemented Systems, (4) Planning and Learning: On to Real Applications, and (5) Relevance. Proceedings of most of the symposia are available as technical reports from AAAI. Control of the physical world, whether by mobile robots or by chemical process controllers, involves many disciplines, including conventional process control, neural networks, fuzzy logic, decision theory, planning, and vision. This workshop brought together researchers from these and other fields with the aim of enumerating the methods available; making a stab at generating a framework for putting them together; and addressing questions such as, How can control help AI? and How can AI help control? A recurring theme was the benefits--or lack thereof--of hierarchical systems: A majority of the attendees supported the position that hierarchy was necessary: Low-level subsystems process sensory input and execute control strategies, and higher-level systems select control strategies appropriate for the task at hand, especially by planning and, perhaps, developing and using maps of the environment.

Some of the participants characterized the workshop as "very intense" and "very productive" but pointed out the conviviality of the gathering and the pleasantness of the warm sun, miles of view, and the gentle sea breezes. In response to requests from several participants, nearly half the time available was scheduled for open roundtable discussions. Presentations were limited to I3 thirty-minute talks. A short after-dinner session was held on Tuesday to establish topics for the roundtables. Two themes initially brought up were echoed throughout the rest of the workshop: (1) What are issues and concepts of DA1 that distinguish it from AI and distributed computing?

The 198.5 Workshop on Distxibuted Artificial Intelligence (DAI) was held at Sea Ranch, California, 3 to 6 December 1985. Twentyeight participants gathered in this rugged, windswept northern California coastal village to debate the theory and practice of DAL In content, the 1985 meeting differed from prior meetings (reports on prior DAI workshops can be found in Davis 1980, 1982; Fehling and Erman 1983; and Smith 1985). First, there has been a clear movement beyond the early, classical large-grained DA1 implementation "successes": HEARSAY, the contract net system, the University of Massachusetts (UMASS) distributed vehicle monitoring test bed, and the Rand Corporation air traffic control (ATCJ and remotely piloted vehicles (RPV) studies. The earlier work introduced several problem-solving architectures--the contract-net negotiation framework, the blackboard-based distributed HEARSAY framework, and the hierarchical versus anarchic control regimes developed at Rand, for example--and developed principles for cooperation and organization. New experimental research is refining these architectures and control strategies and providing frameworks for integrating heterogeneous strategies.