Announcement of the new Mobile Robot Competition and Exhibition, to be held annually at the AAAI National Conference on Artificial Intelligence. Announcement of the new Mobile Robot Competition and Exhibition, to be held annually at the AAAI National Conference on Artificial Intelligence.

Decision analysis and expert systems are technologies intended to support human reasoning and decision making by formalizing expert knowledge so that it is amenable to mechanized reasoning methods. Despite some common goals, these two paradigms have evolved divergently, with fundamental differences in principle and practice. We present the key ideas of decision analysis and review recent research and applications that aim toward a marriage of these two paradigms. This work combines decision-analytic methods for structuring and encoding uncertain knowledge and preferences with computational techniques from AI for knowledge representation, inference, and explanation.

Decision analysis and expert systems are technologies intended to support human reasoning and decision making by formalizing expert knowledge so that it is amenable to mechanized reasoning methods. Despite some common goals, these two paradigms have evolved divergently, with fundamental differences in principle and practice. Recent recognition of the deficiencies of traditional AI techniques for treating uncertainty, coupled with the development of belief nets and influence diagrams, is stimulating renewed enthusiasm among AI researchers in probabilistic reasoning and decision analysis. We present the key ideas of decision analysis and review recent research and applications that aim toward a marriage of these two paradigms. This work combines decision-analytic methods for structuring and encoding uncertain knowledge and preferences with computational techniques from AI for knowledge representation, inference, and explanation. We end by outlining remaining research issues to fully develop the potential of this enterprise.

All inquiries should include your travel support for students who are registration area. Now Exempt from applicants must have fulfilled your lab's research efforts to be the volunteer and reporting requirements California Sales Tax shown to a large portion of the AI for previous awards. This year, Recent California legislation required community. California that can be run in parallel on several who submit a letter of recommendation Senate Bill 89 (Chapter 461, screens. Please do not send tapes of a from a faculty supervisor in lieu Statutes of 1991)-signed by the governor particular project or lecture but, of a paper, student authors from foreign at press time-provides AAAI rather, tapes that present broad institutions, and foreign scholars.

Each of the The second volume promises to inherent to the task of specifying objections is then analyzed from a draw on a characterization of AI's the deterministic or nondeterministic formal standpoint because the relevant essential methodology as continuous machine, and complexity of electric elements of formal theory are attempts to overcome the formal or logical circuits), physical limits of introduced in subsequent chapters. I hope to see my (that is, finite, discrete concepts can Lovelace's objection. Despite the criticisms dissipate after reading the never form a perfect model of a continuous introductory character of the chapter, second volume. Let's get a feeling of what this first and possible-world semantics. With volume is really about.

I give an introduction to Bayesian networks for AI researchers with a limited grounding in probability theory. Over the last few years, this method of reasoning using probabilities has become popular within the AI probability and uncertainty community. Indeed, it is probably fair to say that Bayesian networks are to a large segment of the AI-uncertainty community what resolution theorem proving is to the AIlogic community. Nevertheless, despite what seems to be their obvious importance, the ideas and techniques have not spread much beyond the research community responsible for them. This is probably because the ideas and techniques are not that easy to understand. I hope to rectify this situation by making Bayesian networks more accessible to the probabilistically unsophisticated.

The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence held its 1991 Spring Symposium Series on March 26-28 at Stanford University, Stanford, California. This article contains short summaries of the eight symposia that were conducted: Argumentation and Belief, Composite System Design, Connectionist Natural Language Processing, Constraint-Based Reasoning, Implemented Knowledge Representation and Reasoning Systems, Integrated Intelligent Architectures, Logical Formalizations of Commonsense Reasoning, and Machine Learning of Natural Language and Ontology.

I survey four viewpoints about what AI is. I describe a program exhibiting AI as one that can change as a result of interactions with the user. Such a program would have to process hundreds or thousands of examples as opposed to a handful. Because AI is a machine's attempt to explain the behavior of the (human) system it is trying to model, the ability of a program design to scale up is critical. Researchers need to face the complexities of scaling up to programs that actually serve a purpose. The move from toy domains into concrete ones has three big consequences for the development of AI. First, it will force software designers to face the idiosyncrasies of its users. Second, it will act as an important reality check between the language of the machine, the software, and the user. Third, the scaled-up programs will become templates for future work. For a variety of reasons, some of which I discuss one of the following four things: (1) AI means in this article, the newly formed Institute magic bullets, (2) AI means inference engines, for the Learning Sciences has been concentrating (3) AI means getting a machine to do something its efforts on building high-quality you didn't think a machine could do educational software for use in business and (the "gee whiz" view), and (4) AI means elementary and secondary schools. In the two having a machine learn.

Automated diagnosis is an important AI problem not only for its potential practical applications but also because it exposes issues common to all automated reasoning efforts and presents real challenges to existing paradigms. Current research in this area addresses many problems, including managing and structuring probabilistic information, modeling physical systems, reasoning with defeasible assumptions, and interleaving deliberation and action. Furthermore, diagnosis programs must face these problems in contexts where scaling up to deal with cases of realistic size results in daunting combinatorics. This article presents these and other issues as discussed at the First International Workshop on Principles of Diagnosis.

There has been a good deal of discussion recently about the possibility of standardizing knowledge representation efforts, including the development of an interlingua, or knowledge interchange format (KIF), that would allow developers of declarative knowledge to share their results with other AI researchers. In this article, I examine the practicality of this idea. I present some philosophical arguments against it, describe a straw-man KIF, and suggest specific experiments that would help explore these issues.