The Advanced Architectures Project at Stanford University's Knowledge Systems Laboratory seeks to gain higher performance for expert system applications through the design of new, innovative software and hardware architectures. This research concentrates particularly on the use of parallel machines to gain speedup and the design of the software to exploit emergent paral-lel hardware architectures. This article describes the project and details its goals and the work performed in the pursuance of these goals. A brief description is given of each of the project components, and a complete bibliography appears of the publications produced for the project.

Letters to the Editor.

Review of Logic Foundations of Artificial Intelligence

Response to Drew McDermott's Review of Logical Foundations of Artificial Intelligence

Text planning is one of the most rapidly growing subfields of language generation. Until the 1988 AAAI conference, no workshop has concentrated on text planning and its relationship to realiza-tion. This report is a summary of that workshop.

This article is a summary of the Workshop on Explanation held during the 1988 National Conference on Artificial Intelligence in St. Paul, Minnesota. The purpose of the workshop was to identify key research issues in the rapidly emerging area of expert system explanation.

Commonsense reasoning about the physical world, as exemplified by "Iron sinks in water" or "If a ball is dropped it gains speed," will be indispensable in future programs. We argue that to make such predictions (namely, envisioning), programs should use abstract entities (such as the gravitational field), principles (such as the principle of superposition), and laws (such as the conservation of energy) of physics for representation and reasoning. These arguments are in accord with a recent study in physics instruction where expert problem solving is related to the construction of physical representations that contain fictitious, imagined entities such as forces and momenta (Larkin 1983). We give several examples showing the power of physical representations.

Phoenix is a real-time, adaptive planner that manages forest fires in a simulated environment. Alternatively, Phoenix is a search for functional relationships between the designs of agents, their behaviors, and the environments in which they work. In fact, both characterizations are appropriate and together exemplify a research methodology that emphasizes complex, dynamic environments and complete, autonomous agents. This article describes the underlying methodology and illustrates the architecture and behavior of Phoenix agents.