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AAAI News

AI Magazine

July Conference Highlights m An AI Art Exhibition will showcase robot weighing in at 300 lbs., from the use of AI in serious works SRI; Bert and Ernie, midget-sized Again this year, AAAI is staging the of art. AIon-Line, five audience-interactive Technologies, untethered and battery with the National Conference on Artificial AI user panels, will offer practical powered, from NASA-JSC; William, a Intelligence, with 19 deployed learning on key business and feel-its-way robot from MIT and JPL; applications selected for presentation organization issues, based on case Flash, a Denning mobile platform from entries from around the world. A series of invited speakers and guidance from MITRE; Flash dimension to the conference, panels will complement the refereed Zorton, a walking machine designed promising give-and-take discussions papers and introduce areas of to compete in the robotic decathlon, about AI in operation. AI research that have unusual from Ecole Polytechnique of Montreal; AAAI-92 offers a series of technical interest and application. The of Southern California/Information The AAAI Robot Rules capture the National Conference is the year's Sciences Institute, and Peter spirit of the competition, indicating, largest meeting ground for those Szolovits, Associate Professor of Computer "It will not be slick, polished...there interested in AI, from scientific, academic, Science at the Massachusetts will be a certain amount of chaos, and business communities. This year's program is particularly There is a serious purpose, diverse, with concentration on research AAAI To Include New Dean noted, "to bring together areas results that bridge the gaps between AI Robotics Competition of AI including those working in perception, the different AI technologies and the AAAI will have its first AI Robotics Highlights, including AAAI-92 National Conference in San facilitate this and to make 34 focused technical sessions, with Jose, California July 12-16, 1992.


The Quest for the Thinking Computer

AI Magazine

Alan Turing's decades-old question still influences artificial intelligence because of the simple test he proposed in his article in Mind. In this article, AI Magazine collects presentations about the first round of the classic Turing Test of machine intelligence, held November 8, 1991 at The Computer Museum, Boston. Robert Epstein, Director Emeritus, Cambridge Center for Behavioral Studies, and an adjunct professor of psychology, Boston University, University of Massachusetts (Amherst), and University of California (San Diego) summarizes some of the difficult issues during the planning of this first real-time competition, and describes the event. Presented in tandem with Dr. Epstein's article is the actual transcript of session that won the Loebner Prize Competition--Joseph Weintraub's computer program PC Therapist. In 1985 an old friend, Hugh Loebner, told me The intricacies of setting up a real Turing Test excitedly that the Turing Test should be made that would ultimately yield a legitimate into an annual contest. We were ambling winner were enormous. Small points were down a Manhattan street on our way to occasionally debated for months without dinner, as I recall. Hugh was always full of clear resolution. Turing, proposed a variation on a simple Four years later, while serving as the director parlor game as a means for identifying a of the Cambridge Center for Behavioral Studies, machine that can think: A human judge an advanced studies institute in Massachusetts, interacts with two computer terminals, one I established the Loebner Prize controlled by a computer and the other by a Competition, the first serious effort to locate person, but the judge doesn't know which is a machine that can pass the Turing Test. If, after a prolonged conversation at Hugh had come through with a pledge of each terminal, the judge can't tell the difference, $100,000 for the prize money, along with we'd have to say, asserted Turing, that some additional funds from his company, in some sense the computer is thinking. Crown Industries, to help with expenses. The Computers barely existed in Turing's day, but, quest for the thinking computer had begun. I'll then describe that After much debate, the Loebner Prize Committee first event, which took place on November 8, ultimately rejected Turing's simple 1991, at The Computer Museum in Boston two-terminal design in favor of one that is and offer a summary of some of the data generated more discriminating and less problematic. Finally, I'll speculate The two-terminal design is troublesome for about the future of the competition--now an several reasons, among them: The design presumes annual event, as Hugh envisioned--and that the hidden human--the human about its significance to the AI community.


Intelligent Multimedia Interfaces

AI Magazine

On Monday, 15 July 1991, prior to the Ninth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-91) in Anaheim, California, over 50 scientists and engineers attended the AAAI-91 Workshop on Intelligent Multimedia Interfaces. The purpose of the workshop was threefold: (1) bring together researchers and practitioners to report on current advances in intelligent multimedia interface systems and their underlying theories, (2) foster scientific interchange among these individuals, and (3) evaluate current efforts and make recommendations for future investigations.



Applied AI News

AI Magazine

In preparation for the Summer tion needs as customer support, field Stone Webster (Boston, MA) and The Olympics in Barcelona, Telefonica de service, end-user computing, and Foxboro Co. (Foxboro, MA) plan to Espana S.A. (Madrid, Spain), the vendor technical support. Advisor, Stone Webster's real-time Macro*World Investor, a stock analysis developed a Spanish-language speech Foxboro system is at Weyerhaeuser's and data transformations while Spain will recognize the caller's Engineers' Design Institute for had previously been done by human company's customer support personnel The a specified roster of physical and on case-based reasoning. Currently in HSB is used to increase employee thermodynamic properties for the production, the Support Management productivity for both instructors and chemical or mixture. ATT reportedly plans to support this market, such as memory implement a pilot project for Mellon close 31 of its operator centers, and cards, smart cards, tokens, tags, and Bank (Pittsburgh, PA) using Nestor's to lay off from 3,000 to 6,000 of its wireless communication, will also be credit card Fraud Detection System, a workers in the next two years ATT covered. The system is designed in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.


Integrating Case-Based and Model-Based Reasoning: A Computational Model of Design Problem Solving

AI Magazine

My Ph.D. dissertation (Goel 1989) presents a computational model of experience-based design. It first reviews the core issues in experience-based design, for example, (1) the content of a design experience (or case), (2) the internal organization of design cases, (3) the language for indexing the cases, (4) the mechanism for retrieving a case relevant to a given design task, (5) the mechanism for adapting a retrieved design to satisfy the constraints of the design task, (6) the mechanism for evaluating a design against the specification of the design task, (7) the mechanism for redesigning a failed design, (8) the mechanism for acquiring new design knowledge, (9) the mechanism for chunking information about a design into a new case, and (10) the mechanism for storing a new case in memory for potential reuse in the future. It then proposes that decisions about these issues might lie in the designer's comprehension of the designs of artifacts he/she has encountered in the past, that is, in his/her mental models of how the designs achieve the functions and satisfy the constraints of the artifacts.


The Fourth International Symposium on Artificial Intelligence

AI Magazine

The Fourth International Symposium on Artificial Intelligence (ISAI) was held in Cancun, Mexico, 13-15 November 1991. What, another international AI conference, you say? In Mexico? Yes. The first symposium was held in 1988. This fourth consecutive annual conference drew the participation of visitors from several international AI communities, including the United States, Mexico, Canada, Germany, Japan, England, France, Italy, The Netherlands, Spain, China, Belgium, Australia, and Singapore -- an impressive breadth of participants for a conference that has existed for only four years.


Editorial: Ontogeny Recapitulates Ontegeny: AI and AI Magazine

AI Magazine

As the AI community has matured, the role of AI Magazine has continued to evolve. Rich outlines several ways that this community-wide publication can address the current needs of AI researchers, and encourages broad participation from community members.


Advances in Interfacing Production Systems with the Real World

AI Magazine

The workshop "Advances in Interfacing Production Systems with the Real World" was designed to bring together researchers from around the world to focus on the problem of integrating production systems into industrial environments. It was held on 25 August 1991 in Sydney, Australia, in conjunction with the Twelfth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-91). Nine papers were accepted for the proceedings, and six of them were discussed at the workshop.


Functional Categorization of Knowledge: Applications in Modeling Scientific Research and Discovery

AI Magazine

The central thesis of my dissertation (Kocabas 1989)1 is that in complex systems, descriptive and definitive knowledge can be organized into functional categories; this categorization provides clarity and efficiency in representation and facilitates the integrated use of various methods of learning. I describe a formalism for organizing knowledge into such functional categories and some of its implementations. In this formalism, descriptive scientific knowledge is classified into seven categories. The categorization formalism allows complex propositions to be analyzed into their simple constituents; in turn, these constituents can be maintained in their categories. They can then be combined using a simple transformation function to form complex constructs such as frames and schemata. The methodology facilitates the implementation of knowledge-level methods of learning such as similarity-based learning, explanation-based learning, and conceptual clustering. It simplifies the identification and resolution of conflicts in knowledge systems.