MRS is a knowledge representation system intended for use by Al researchers in building expert systems. It offers a dkerse repertory of commands for asserting and retrieving information. The initial system includes a vocabulary of concepts and facts about logic, sets, mappings, arithmetic, and procedures. What differentiates MRS from many other knowledge representation systems is its ability to reason about and control its own activity. In MRS the system is treated as a domain in its own right.

This paper describes ROGET, a knowledge-based system that'assists a domain expert with several tasks system's encountered during the early phases of expert-system construction.

This article reviews the strengths and limitations of five major paradigms of medical computer-assisted decision making (CAOM): 1) clinical algorithms.

Georgeff's controlled production systems 65 8.3.3

Diane Warner Hasling Heuristic Programming Project Computer Science Department Stanford University Stanford, CA 94305 stra:cgre explanation we want to generate.

ONCOC1N's design and implementation has occurred in unison with a set of studies and analyses Intended to help us better understand the demands of physicians as computer users. Our study of physician attitudes towards computer-based clinical consultation systems 112: emphasized the importance of a system's explanation capabilities and helped convince us of the important role that Al techniques are likely to play in the development of optimal decision aids.

This is a remarkab'y exciting time to be involved professionally in the field of medical informatics. The underlying scientific principles are beginning to be identified and defined, educators are increasingly acknowledging the importance of thc field for physicians of the present and future, and the tec mology itself is growing at rates that make the future of the field both unbounded and impossible to predict. One has the sense that what was once a field for pioneers is now reaching the stage of established settlements, with a history, traditions, and a feel of permanence. It is therefore appropriate that, at the beginning of ddiberations designed to achieve significant educational goals for the field, we might start by considering the discipline itself and the characteristics that hnve tended to separate it from other traditional academic and research medical specialties. I would like to begin by assuming that certain basic points are well accepted and need not be defended here: first that medical informatics holds both realized and potential importance for the science anc practice of medicine, and second, that there is a need for all medical practitioners to be familiar both with information handling technology and with the underlying principles that make the field relevant, regardless of whether computers are involved.

Simuldtois serve two major purposes: the first is the verification of scientific thP.ories the second is xperimental result prcliction. Thr? verification function is called upon when existing t:leories are btling cxtended or new theories are being ç enerated to explain experimental data: the predictive capabilities are used to predict laboratory results in order to eliminate a great deal of experimmtal effort. An esoecially important role for a simulation pro.warn would be as par; of a larger employing art ficial innelligence techniques to develop mcd.els of a biological system bar:ed on experimental OUSerwitiOris. Such a program would accept as Input observations of a s; stem cud would!fiocii:ce as output a model for tn.t system that could account for the observations. The r.:niu!ation portion of such a program would be a crucial tool for ensuring that on:y theories mat were con::..-4 with thc data were dewloocci. It's a major research goal Cf the HOLDEN pi met to explore methods tor building a systym

It has been argued by Hartley and Sleeman.

The time-sharing systems that were used to develop them are largely inadequate due to the burden placed upon computing and storage resources. Consequently, some of this research is being shifted to personal workstations which provide a sophisticated graphics interface in addition to satisfying the requirements for computational speed and memory. This paper examines the use of that graphics interface in the development of a tool for a system builder. Introduction Medical expert systems are consultation programs designed -..o give advice using both formal knowledge and the judgmental expertise of clinical specialists. When these systems first began to appear in the 1970's, many observers doubted their future role because their size and complexity placed an inordinate burdenlin - the processing and storage resources of conventional time-sharing systems.