AAAI News the edge of technology now, but we'll be at the point where we can Terry Weymouth of The University of Michigan was cochair and ringmaster for the performances. Grosz, Gordon conferences carried on with quiet the robots managed to perform this McKay Professor of Computer excitement in Washington in July, reasonably well. Science at Harvard, is the new President, AAAI's Autonomous Mobile Robot The third event proved the hardest, succeeding Patrick Hayes of the Competitions drew a stream of rousing and none of the robots completed the University of Illinois. The of MIT is President-Elect. The two events drew competitors robots were asked to select four "In the last several years," Grosz and spectators.

We have expanded review criteria for the technical program, effectively increasing the number of ways in which a submitted paper can qualify for acceptance. Most importantly, we have revised the review procedure to encourage acceptance of a larger number and broader range of papers, as discussed below.

The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) held its 1993 Spring Symposium Series on March 23-25 at Stanford University. This article contains summaries of the eight symposia that were conducted: AI and Creativity, AI and NP-Hard Problems, Building Lexicons for Machine Translation, Case-Based Reasoning and Information Retrieval, Foundations of Automatic Planning, Innovative Applications of Massive Parallelism, Reasoning about Mental States, and Training Issues in Incremental Learning. Technical reports of the symposia AI and Creativity, Building Lexicons for Machine Translation, Case-Based Reasoning and Information Retrieval, Foundations of Automatic Planning, Innovative Applications of Massive Parallelism, Reasoning about Mental States, and Training Issues in Incremental Learning are available from AAAI.

In 1991, Ford Motor Company began deployment of CAPE (computer-aided parts estimating system), a highly advanced knowledge-based system designed to generate, evaluate, and cost automotive part manufacturing plans. cape is engineered on an innovative, extensible, declarative process-planning and estimating knowledge representation language, which underpins the cape kernel architecture. Many manufacturing processes have been modeled to date, but eventually every significant process in motor vehicle construction will be included. Significant cost reductions are among the many benefits CAPE brings to Ford. CAPE is a highly significant system for Ford of Europe in terms of the business needs it satisfies and the corporate acceptance of AI applications: First, CAPE represents a major investment, with significant person-years of effort spent on predeployment development alone. Second, CAPE is the first large-scale production expert system to be deployed within Ford of Europe. Third, cost estimating is a critical business function. With a total annual materials budget of several billion dollars, cost control is at the heart of Ford's business. Fourth, reducing the lead time for new model programs provides a key competitive advantage. CAPE reduces estimating response time by 50 percent. Fifth, this system is enormously ambitious. The final system will capture the combined knowledge of estimating experts in all areas of automotive manufacture.

Because of their occasional need to return to shallow points in a search tree, existing backtracking methods can sometimes erase meaningful progress toward solving a search problem. In this paper, we present a method by which backtrack points can be moved deeper in the search space, thereby avoiding this difficulty. The technique developed is a variant of dependency-directed backtracking that uses only polynomial space while still providing useful control information and retaining the completeness guarantees provided by earlier approaches.

AI broadly "as the science of intelligence the philosophical problems associated with the machine metaphor and in general--or, more accurately, asks whether machine intelligence is as the intellectual core of Lee A. Gladwin

The Workshop on Integrating Neural and Symbolic Processes (the Cognitive Dimension), sponsored by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, was held on 16 July 1992 at the San Jose Convention Center, San Jose, California. The workshop addressed the cognitive aspects of integrating neural and symbolic processes through the comparison, the categorization, and the examination of existing and new approaches. The workshop attracted a large audience from both academia and industry. The presentation of 16 papers, 3 invited talks, and a summary panel, as well as open discussions, helped to shed much new light on technical issues and future directions in this area.

Nestor Inc. (Providence, R.I.) and Intel Corp. (Santa Clara, Cal.) have The US Army Research Lab and the Knowledge Engineering Group of the US delivered the first samples of a Army Ordnance Center and School (Aberdeen Proving Grounds, Md.) have jointly developed, second-generation developed a visual expert system for diagnostics of the Ml tank's turbine engine. A visualization of the East Quayside area, including landscaping, American Medical Laboratories the road network, buildings, and the Tyne Bridge landmark, is being created (Chantilly, Va.) has implemented as a virtual world. Prospective tenants and purchasers will be able to three speech recognition systems to experience a "walk through" of the buildings. Togai InfraLogic (Irvine, Cal.) has been awarded a Phase II Small Business Innovation The three VoicePath systems, developed Research (SBIR) grant by NASA Johnson Space Center to study fuzzy by Kurzweil AI (Waltham, logic control for improving performance of thermal control systems, including Mass.), contain a 50,000-word dictionary, industrial applications such as air conditioning and energy control. Their research is aimed at helping manufacturers Sciaky (Chicago, Ill.), a developer improve their products while trimming production and retooling costs.

It is Lynn Andrea Stein, Carol AAAI's new Secretary/Treasurer.

Laird's system is a greedy one, using hill climbing to Conference conference, some participants elected descriptions of funnels, operators organizers were Derek Sleeman (conference to stay an extra day to participate whose preconditions and postconditions chair) and Peter Edwards in one of several informal workshops. Because it is impossible to review Once the descriptions are obtained, Since the first machine-learning all the papers presented, this article planning becomes simply a matter of workshop was held at Carnegie-Mellon briefly touches on six selected talks search to identify a sequence of funnels University (CMU) in July 1980, that were, in my opinion, of exceptional with high probability of success. These capsule summaries Like Laird, Christiansen used an alternating between a more formal are intended to serve as a representative empirical test on the classic tray-tilting conference format and a more informal sample of the research manipulation problem to evaluate workshop format. This summer's presented at the conference; the the effectiveness of his approach. View, California) presented his clustering techniques to the problem All conference sessions were held work on dynamic optimization of of learning action models for a robotnavigation on the stately campus of King's College pure Prolog programs.