The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, in cooperation with Stanford University's Department of Computer Science, presented the 2002 Spring Symposium Series, held Monday through Wednesday, 25 to 27 March 2002, at Stanford University. The nine symposia were entitled (1) Acquiring (and Using) Linguistic (and World) Knowledge for Information Access; (2) Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Entertainment; (3) Collaborative Learning Agents; (4) Information Refinement and Revision for Decision Making: Modeling for Diagnostics, Prognostics, and Prediction; (5) Intelligent Distributed and Embedded Systems; (6) Logic-Based Program Synthesis: State of the Art and Future Trends; (7) Mining Answers from Texts and Knowledge Bases; (8) Safe Learning Agents; and (9) Sketch Understanding.

The goal of intelligent computer-aided engineering (ICAE) is to construct computer programs that capture a significant fraction of an engineer's knowledge. Today, ICAE systems are a goal, not a reality. We begin by examining several scenarios of what ICAE systems could be like. Next we describe why ICAE won't evolve directly from current applications of expert system technology to engineering problems.

The goal of intelligent computer-aided engineering (ICAE) is to construct computer programs that capture a significant fraction of an engineer's knowledge. Today, ICAE systems are a goal, not a reality. This article attempts to refine that goal and suggest how to get there. We begin by examining several scenarios of what ICAE systems could be like. Next we describe why ICAE won't evolve directly from current applications of expert system technology to engineering problems. I focus on qualitative physics as a critical area where progress is needed, both in terms of representations and styles of reasoning.