There is substantial evidence that AI technology can meet the requirements of the large potential market that will exist for knowledge-based software engineering at the turn of the century. In this article, which forms the conclusion to the AAAI Press book Automating Software Design, edited by Michael Lowry and Robert McCartney, Michael Lowry discusses the future of software engineering, and how knowledge-based software engineering (KBSE) progress will lead to system development environments. Specifically, Lowry examines how KBSE techniques promote additive programming methods and how they can be developed and introduced in an evolutionary way.

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The work described in my Ph.D. dissertation (Fischer 1991)1 merges computational and cognitive investigations of abductive reasoning. It is the outcome of seven years of research focusing on abductive explanation generation and involving the departments of computer and information science, industrial and systems engineering, pathology, and allied medical professions at The Ohio State University.

The Department of Computer Science at Louisiana State University (LSU) has been involved in robotics research since 1992 when the Robotics Research Laboratory (RRL) was established as a research and teaching program specializing in autonomous mobile robots (AMRS). Researchers at RRL are conducting high-quality research in amrs with the goal of identifying the computational problems and the types of knowledge that are fundamental to the design and implementation of autonomous mobile robotic systems. In this article, we overview the projects that are currently under way at LSU's RRL.

We can take planning to be the optimization and debugging of a robot's program by reasoning about possible courses of execution. It is necessary to the extent that fragments of robot programs are combined at run time. There are several strands of research in the field; I survey six: (1) attempts to avoid planning; (2) the design of flexible plan notations; (3) theories of time-constrained planning; (4) planning by projecting and repairing faulty plans; (5) motion planning; and (6) the learning of optimal behaviors from reinforcements. However, we are already beginning to see how to mesh plan execution with plan generation and learning.

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.

An effective to develop an abstract UI model which solution to this problem must have three encompasses the essence of those systems.

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.

The Sixth Annual Knowledge-Based Software Engineering Conference (KBSE-91) was held at the Sheraton University Inn and Conference Center in Syracuse, New York, from Sunday afternoon, 22 September, through midday Wednesday, 25 September. The KBSE field is concerned with applying knowledge-based AI techniques to the problems of creating, understanding, and maintaining very large software systems.

Mobile Robot Competition and Exhibition