On 15-16 November 1989, I attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Industrial Liaison Program entitled "Networks and Learning." The topic was neural networks, their power, potential, and promise. A dozen distinguished professors and researchers presented informative and entertaining talks to an audience of technically minded business executives and industrial researchers who subscribe to MIT's popular series of symposia offered through their Industrial Liaison Program. This informal report encapsulates the two-day event with a brief summary of each talk.

This article reviews research in the development of plan generation systems. Our goal is to familiarize the reader with some of the important problems that have arisen in the design of planning systems and to discuss some of the many solutions that have been developed in the over 30 years of research in this area. In this article, we broadly cover the major ideas in the field of AI planning and show the direction in which some current research is going. We define some of the terms commonly used in the planning literature, describe some of the basic issues coming from the design of planning systems, and survey results in the area. Because such tasks are virtually never ending, and thus, any finite document must be incomplete, we provide references to connect each idea to the appropriate literature and allow readers access to the work most relevant to their own research or applications.

This article examines the near-term impact of expert system technology on work and the organization. First, an approach is taken for forecasting the likely extent of the diffusion, or success, of the technology. Next, the case of advanced manufacturing technologies and their effects is considered. From this analysis, a framework is constructed for viewing the impact of these technologies -- and technologies in general -- as a function of the technology itself; market realities; and personal, organizational, and societal values and policy choices. Two scenarios are proposed with respect to the application of this framework to expert systems. The first concludes that expert systems will have little impact on the nature of work and the organization. The second scenario posits that expert system diffusion will be pulled by, and will be a contributing factor toward, the evolution of the lean, flexible, knowledge-intensive, postindustrial organization.

In this issue, Luc Steels takes a new Clay Carr, Homer Chin, Aaron Cohn, overly commercial tone, for example, and insightful look at knowledgebased Michael Compton, Ajit Dingankar, an article that serves mainly to extol systems and provides a synthesis Lance Eliot, David Fogel, Tom the virtues of a commercial product. of several different approaches to Gruber, Uma Gupta, Larry Hall, Jim Second, the article should be well analyzing expertise. It's a long article Hightower, Dwight Johnson, Bob written. We don't have the editorial but, in my opinion, an important Joyce, Murali Krishnamurthi, John staff to do extensive rewriting. I recommend it to anyone with Kunz, Douglas Leyh, Jim MacDonald, and perhaps, unfortunately, an interest in knowledge-level analysis Brigitte Maitre, Robert Newstadt, we rarely publish manuscripts of expert systems. On the same Matthew Realff, Jeff Schlimmer, Allen submitted by non-English-speaking general topic of expert systems but Sherzer, Bob Smith, Scott Staley, Lynn authors.

Many barriers exist today that prevent effective industrial exploitation of current and future AI research. These barriers can only be removed by people who are working at the scientific forefront in AI and know potential industrial needs. The Knowledge Processing Laboratory's research and development concentrates in the following areas: (1) natural language interfaces to knowledge-based systems and databases; (2) theoretical and experimental work on qualitative modeling and nonmonotonic reasoning for future knowledge-based systems; (3) application-specific language design, in particular, Prolog extensions; and (4) desi gn and analysis of neural networks. This article gives the reader an overview of the main topics currently being pursued in each of these areas.

A full book, available for free in PDF form.From the preface:A major problem in artificial intelligence is to endow computers with commonsense knowledge of the world and with the ability to use that knowledge sensibly. A large body of research has studied this problem through careful analysis of typical examples of reasoning in a variety of commonsense domains. The immediate aim of this research is to develop a rich language for expressing commonsense knowledge, and inference techniques for carrying out commonsense reasoning. This book provides an introduction and a survey of this body of research. It is, to the best of my knowledge, the first book to attempt this.The book is designed to be used as a textbook for a one-semester graduate course on knowledge representation.Morgan Kaufmann

Databases are at the heart of most real-world knowledge base systems. The management and effective use of these databases will be the limiting factors in our ability to build ever more complex AI systems. This article reports on a workshop that explored how databases and their associated technologies can best be used in the development of large AI applications.

Text planning is one of the most rapidly growing subfields of language generation. Until the 1988 AAAI conference, no workshop has concentrated on text planning and its relationship to realiza-tion. This report is a summary of that workshop.

Largely from this Traditionally, systems that automatically and realization--was widely experience, we came to understand generate natural language have deemed more convenient than accurate: the sorts of tasks that a text planner been conceived as consisting of two The components of a generator has to perform: determining which principal components: a text planner should be able to communicate at elements to say, coherently structuring and a realization grammar. Recent any level where their information is the input elements, building advances in the art, especially in the applicable.

The A.T. Nonmonotonic Workshop multisubmission paper policy by Anderson Memorial Scholarship Program The third international workshop on IJCAI was deferred until the of the American Indian Science August meeting.