This article describes a causal expert system based on hypothetical reasoning and its application to the maintenance of the lower hoist of a Mark 45 turret gun. The system, Hoist, performs fault diagnosis without the use of a repair expert or shallow rules. Its knowledge is coded directly from a structural specification of the Mark 45 lower hoist. The technology reported here for assisting the less experienced diagnostician differs considerably from normal rule-based techniques: It reasons about machine failures from a functional model of the device. In a mechanism like the lower hoist, the functional model must reason about forces, fluid pressures, and mechanical linkages; that is, it must reason about qualitative physics. Hoist technology can be directly applied to any exactly specified device for the modeling and diagnosis of single or multiple faults. Hypothetical reasoning, the process embodied in Hoist, has general utility in qualitative physics and reason maintenance.

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.

In the emerge from a massive knowledge this subject.

From 1949 through the late required to have his research more didn't finish 1960s, he did the best work in making vigorously followed up on. He was the computers learn from their experience. Programs for playing games often and what would be required to In 1949, Samuel joined IBM's fill the role in artificial intelligence reach human-level intelligence. Poughkeepsie Laboratory, where he research that the fruit fly Drosophila Samuel's papers on machine learning worked on IBM's first stored program plays in genetics. Drosophilae are are still worth studying.

The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence held its 1990 Spring Symposium Series on March 27-29 at Stanford University, Stanford, California. This article contains a short summary of seven of the nine symposia that were conducted: AI and Molecular Biology, AI in Medicine, Automated Abduction, Case Based Reasoning, and Knowledge-Based Environments for Teaching and Learning.

Automated knowledge-acquisition systems have focused on embedding a cognitive model of a key knowledge worker in their software that allows the system to acquire a knowledge base by interviewing domain experts just as the knowledge worker would. Two sets of research questions arise: (1) What theories, strategies, and approaches will let the modeling process be facilitated; accelerated; and, possibly, automated? If automated knowledge-acquisition systems reduce the bottleneck associated with acquiring knowledge bases, how can the bottleneck of building the automated knowledge-acquisition system itself be broken? (2) If the automated knowledge-acquisition system centers on having an effective cognitive model of the key knowledge worker(s), to what extent does this model account for and attempt to influence human bias in knowledge base rule generation? That is, humans are known to be subject to errors and cognitive biases in their judgment processes. How can an automated system critique and influence such biases in a positive fashion, what common patterns exist across applications, and can models of influencing behavior be described and standardized? This article answers these research questions by presenting several prototypical scenes depicting bias and debiasing strategies.

Contrary to many prevailing approaches to knowledge acquisition, Laps, our expert-interviewing software, begins by soliciting cases from the expert, but it does not end there. Its uniqueness lies in the fact that it interweaves knowledge gathering, organizing, and testing. Laps begins with a case in the form of a sample solution path elicited from the domain expert. This sample solution path is refined by a process called dechunking, which facilitates finding a model of the expert's reasoning process. The model guides the determination of the structure of alternatives tables at an effective level of abstraction. Once these tables have been set up, the expert is able to produce row after row on his own until a complete rule base is built. A rule generator currently produces rules in Clips or M.1 syntax.

After explicating the need for a large commonsense knowledge base spanning human consensus knowledge, we report on many of the lessons learned over the first five years of attempting its construction. We have come a long way in terms of methodology, representation language, techniques for efficient inferencing, the ontology of the knowledge base, and the environment and infrastructure in which the knowledge base is being built. We describe the evolution of Cyc and its current state and close with a look at our plans and expectations for the coming five years, including an argument for how and why the project might conclude at the end of this time.

The second workshop in two years on the integration of knowledge-based systems with conventional computer techniques in agriculture and natural resource management (NRM) was held 18-19 August 1989 in Detroit, Michigan, in conjunction with the Tenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence. The workshop drew scientists from the United States and Canada, working in disciplines from engineering to entomology in universities, government, and industry. Twenty-two papers were presented at the workshop, after which participants were asked to discuss several key questions about the development, delivery, and use of knowledge-based systems in solving problems in agriculture and NRM.

Thirty users of AI systems, 8. Make sure everyone knows at the Intelligence has announced that, key role in systems that enhance the 1. Integrating AI with traditional starting next year, its National Conference human values of the world we live in." He 2. AI may be only part of the system/ The 1991 AAAI Conferences will noted that, "Some of the most important solution, but it is increasingly the take place in Anaheim, California results of technology transfer part that makes the whole work. The National Conference will be the unexpected." "This is a recognition of changing significant benefits." "As AI moves more broadly champion" outside the AI/IS area, presentations focused on the approaches AI solutions that were only theory 12 to 18 months ago."