… I focus on issues in interaction, looking at alternatives to the isolation assumptions

Ten years ago, at the first AAAI conference, Alan Newell (1982), in his presidential address, focused on understanding the then dominant paradigm for artificial intelligence: the writing of symbolic reasoning programs for an agent that would act rationally to achieve a goal. He distinguished the "knowledge level" from the "symbol level" description of a system. The former encompasses the knowledge and conditions necessary for an agent to solve a problem. It is only when the knowledge level is reduced to a symbol level description that issues of implementation get considered. Newell's analysis postulated a single agent, with fixed knowledge and a specified goal.