Technology
Reflections on the ARPA Experience
When I returned to Stanford last summer after a two-year leave of absence, serving as a program manager at the Defense Advanced Projects Agency, I was frequently asked about that experience. It was superb experience, for many reasons. As a program manager I had near-perfect vantage point from which to view the entire field of Artificial Intelligence. Not only did I become better acquainted with the most creative and active people in the field, I was also personally kept up to date on their latest research. ARPA is not just a place to go to provide a public service, but is really a central node in the research network for collecting and integrating results and disseminating them to the broader community: government, industry and the public at large. Moreover, it was my responsibility to identify new avenues of research and/or applications of research, coupled with the resources (limited, but real) to make these new activities happen -- a unique opportunity.
Artificial Intelligence and Brain-Theory Research at Computer and Information Science Department, University of Massachusetts
Our program in AI is part of the larger departmental focal area of cybernetics which integrates both AI and brain theory (BT). Our research also draws upon a new and expanding interdepartmental program in cognitive science that brings together researchers in cybernetics, linguistics, philosophy, and psychology. This interdisciplinary approach to AI has already led to a number of fruitful collaborations in the areas of cooperative computation, learning, natural language parsing, and vision.
Second KL-One Workshop
Schmolze, Jim, Brachman, Ronald J.
Amidst the beautiful foliage in Jackson, N.H., the each session circulated a position paper to the group, Second KL-ONE Workshop was held over a five-day raising the questions he wanted to see addressed at the period this past October. Not only did "KloneTalk" (a version of KL-ONE implemented in we have a general conference session, wherein people SmaiiTa k at Xerox PARC -- this inchrded a videotaped could report on activities at their own institutions, discuss demonstration of the system's interface), prototypes in issues of general interest, etc., we also had a knowledge representation, translation of INTERLISP two-and-a-half day working research session. KL-ONE to FranzLisp, a calculus of Structural The technieai discussion part of the Workshop Descriptions, and the KL-ONE Classifier, not to mention several others. We also had the larger group break up preceded the general conference, so that we could report into smaller working groups to consider inference in on findings to the larger group of participants (forty-six KL-ONE, representing beliefs, some KL-ONE practice this year, from twenty-one institutions). Also, we planned to cover only a small extensive Proceedings of the Workshop.
High-Road and Low-Road Programs
Consider a class of computing problem for which all bananas is left as an exercise for the reader, or the sufficiently short programs are too slow and all sufficiently monkey. When it has been possible to couple causal models problems of this kind were left strictly alone for the first with various kinds and combinations of search, twenty-years or so of the computing era. There were two mathematical programming and analytic methods, then good reasons. First, the above definition rules out both evaluation of t has been taken as the basis for "high road" the algorithmic and the database type of solution. In "low road" representations Second, in a pinch, a human expert could usually be s may be represented directly in machine memory as a set found who was able at least to compute acceptable A recent pattern-directed allocation, inventory optimisation, or whatever large heuristic model used for industrial monitoring and control combinatorial domain might happen to be involved.
Logic for Natural Language Analysis
A ciear and powerful formalism for describing languages, both natural and artificial, follows from a method for expressing grammars in logic due to Colmerauer and Kowalski. This formalism, which is a natural extension of context-free grammars, we call “definite clause grammars” (DCGs). A DCG provides not only a description of a language, but also an effective means for analysing strings of that language, since the DCG, as it stands, is an executable program of the programming language Prolog. Using a standard Prolog compiler, the DCG can be compiled into efficient code, making it feasible to implement practical language analysers directly as DCGs. This paper compares DCGs with the successful and widely used augmented transition network (ATN) formalism, and indicates how ATNs can be translated into DCGs.
Computer vision
Vision theories can be categorized in terms of the amount of explicit representation postulated in the perceiver. Gibson's precomputational theory eschewed any explicit representation. In contrast, Marr used layers of explicit representation, hoping to simplify vision computations. Current technological advances in robotic hardware and computer architectures have allowed the building of anthropomorphic devices that capture important technical features of human vision. Experience with these devices suggests that cooperative sensorimotor behaviors can reduce the need for explicit representation.
Rete: A Fast Algorithm for the Many Pattern/Many Object Pattern Match Problem
The Rete Match Algorithm is an efficient method for comparing a large collection of patterns to a large collection of objects. It finds all the objects that match each pattern. The algorithm was developed for use in production system interpreters, and it has been used for systems containing from a few hundred to more than a thousand patterns and objects. This article presents the algorithm in detail. It explains the basic concepts of the algorithm, it describes pattern and object representations that are appropriate for the algorithm, and it describes the operations performed by the pattern matcher.
Models of Bounded Rationality, Volume 1: Economic Analysis and Public Policy
The Nobel Prize in Economics was awarded to Herbert Simon in 1978. At Carnegie-Mellon University he holds the title of Professor of Computer Science and Psychology. These two facts together delineate the range and uniqueness of his contributions in creating meaningful interactions among fields that developed in isolation but that are all concerned with human decision-making and problem-solving processes. In particular, Simon has brought the insights of decision theory, organization theory (especially as it applies to the business firm), behavior modeling, cognitive psychology, and the study of artificial intelligence to bear on economic questions. This has led not only to new conceptual dimensions for theoretical constructions, but also to a new humanizing realism in economics, a way of taking into account and dealing with human behavior and interactions that lie at the root of all economic activity.
Logic for Natural Language Analysis
Pereira, Fernando Carlos Neves
This work investigates the use of formal logic as a practical tool for describing the syntax and semantics of a subset of English, and building a computer program to answer data base queries expressed in that subset. To achieve an intimate connection between logical descriptions and computer programs, all the descriptions given are in the definite clause subset of the predicate calculus, which is the basis of the programming language Prolog. The logical descriptions run directly as efficient Prolog programs. Three aspects of the use of logic in natural language analysis are covered: formal representation of syntactic rules by means of a grammar formalism based on logic, extraposition grammars;. formal semantics for the chosen English subset, appropriate for data base queries; informal semantic and pragmatic rules to translate analysed sentences into their formal semantics. On these three aspects, the work improves and extends earlier work by Colmerauer and others, where the use of computational logic in language analysis was first introduced. The University of Edinburgh