The "Naive Physics Manifesto" of Pat Hayes (1978) proposes a large-scale project to develop a formal theory encompassing the entire knowledge of physics of naive reasoners, expressed in a declarative symbolic form. The theory is organized in clusters of closely interconnected concepts and axioms. More recent work on the representation of commonsense physical knowledge has followed a somewhat different methodology. The goal has been to develop a competence theory powerful enough to justify commonsense physical inferences, and the research is organized in microworlds, each microworld covering a small range of physical phenomena. In this article, I compare the advantages and disadvantages of the two approaches.

The Second International Symposium on Intelligent Data Analysis (IDA97) was held at Birkbeck College, University of London, on 4 to 6 August 1997. The main theme of IDA97 was to reason about how to analyze data,perhaps as human analysts do, by exploiting many methods from diverse disciplines. This article outlines several key issues and challenges, discusses how they were addressed at the conference, and presents opportunities for further work in the field.

Our subject has been compared to Mozart. His both in the popular media and its corrupting moral influence on society, proofs are ingenious, cleverly argued, among the cultured intelligentsia. Lanier's home page: While many of these attacks are cited "... machine decision making is widely, most of them are ridiculous running our household finances to anyone with an appropriate technical to a scary degree. Our demonstrated - Sir John Eccles for the "Mysterious willingness to accommodate machines Loom Theory." AI…lets strategists Thus, the Simon Newcomb award imagine less gruesome warfare this year goes to Jaron Lanier. He is an essayist whose views can be found in such magazines All of this ill-informed pseudo-political as Harpers and Wired; he is also, ranting is remarkably silly, but according to his web page, "available none of it can really be said to constitute for public speaking." He is widely regarded an argument. The first part of the argument is clearly inspired by Searle's magnificent reductio, though performed in a very different style. Recall that Searle's those numbers are a computer Obviously one is supposed to think argument amounts to the claim program. Lanier then makes the move that any sufficiently complex physical through all the possible computers which wins him this year's Award: system--the atoms in a wall, say that could exist … until you "You say the rainstorm is not --has within it a pattern which could find one that treats the raindrop really doing computation--it is be the encoding of a given piece of patterns as a program exactly just sitting there as a passive program--and software--a word-processor, for instance--and equivalent to your brain." Perhaps there's something "Yes, it can be done..." [Since the Now the raindrops are reduce to nonsense, that a program There's a technical slip here: the doing the computing."

Now completing its first year, the High-Performance Knowledge Bases Project promotes technology for developing very large, flexible, and reusable knowledge bases. The project is supported by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and includes more than 15 contractors in universities, research laboratories, and companies. The evaluation of the constituent technologies centers on two challenge problems, in crisis management and battlespace reasoning, each demanding powerful problem solving with very large knowledge bases. This article discusses the challenge problems, the constituent technologies, and their integration and evaluation.

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This article presents an experiment of expertise capitalization in road traffic-accident analysis. We study the integration of models of expertise from different members of an organization into a coherent corporate expertise model. We present our elicitation protocol and the generic models and tools we exploited for knowledge modeling in this context of multiple experts. We compare the knowledge models obtained for seven experts in accidentology and their representation through conceptual graphs. Finally, we discuss the results of our experiment from a knowledge capitalization viewpoint.

Calendar of AI-related meetings, conferences, meetings, workshops, and symposia.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration Jet Propulsion Laboratory (Pasadena, Calif.) has developed The chip, which has The National Aeronautics and Chester, N.Y.) to improve its ability to been licensed by automaker Ford Space Administration (NASA) Goddard match reported wage information. Motor (Dearborn, Mich.), is designed Space Flight Center (Greenbelt, The solution will help the agency to augment current vehicle on-board Md.) has developed the The Philippines (Quezon City, The process for outside scientists wanting RoyScot Trust, the asset finance arm Philippines) has adopted an intelligent to use NASA's space telescopes. of the Royal Bank of Scotland (Edinburgh, agent-based software system to The system is designed to capture and Scotland), has implemented an manage mission-critical tax processes maintain key scientific knowledge expert system-based solution to automate across The Philippines. The intelligent while it reduces common errors made the credit-underwriting process. The firm has set up a credit control management of the bureau's entire Johnson Controls (Milwaukee, Wis.), system, The turnkey expert installs and maintains. By integrating component has deployed a speech-recognition- frequent air travelers through U.S. math data with work-cell visualization based application for its frequent flier Immigration inspection in less than software, engineers can simulate customers.

Fourth, causality is still an important issue; some formal models of causality have surprisingly close connections to standard nonmonotonic techniques. Fifth, the nonmonotonic logics being used most widely are the classical ones: default logic, circumscription, and by Isaac Levi; (3) Nonmonotonic Reasoning autoepistemic logic. Maybe the most remarkable trend he Seventh International Workshop was held in Trento, Italy, Tolerance by John McCarthy; (4) that became apparent during the on 30 May to 1 June 1998 in conjunction Learning to Make Nonmonotonic workshop was the new excitement with the Sixth International Inferences by Dan Roth; and (5) From among the participants. The depression Conference on the Principles of Features and Fluents to Thinking that plagued a number of people Knowledge Representation and Reasoning When Flying--Reasoning about in the field seems to be over. The workshop was Actions in an Intelligent UAV by Erik common feeling was that the theory sponsored by the American Association Sandewall.

Here scheduling, where we have fast, heuristic we identify a few properties of a real task and scheduling algorithms that yield dramatic produce mathematical abstractions of these speedups over traditional methods; decision properties. Again, both of those steps are perfectly making, where we have expert systems as standard good as initial exploration. But then we tools in many companies and products; work with the mathematical abstractions and and financial forecasting, where we don't hear never come back to the issues that came up in much about what people are doing, but Wall the original task. In some cases, new subfields Street firms seem to hire AI researchers at a of research have arisen based solely on this level rapid rate. of abstraction, and work becomes farther On the perception side, robots with vision and farther removed from the original motivating are revolutionizing manufacturing.