The TRW Defense Systems Group develops large man-machine networks that solve problems for government agencies. Until a few years ago these networks were either tightly-coupled humans loosely supported by machines -- like our ballistic missile system engineering organization, which provides technical advice to the Air Force, or tightly-coupled machines loosely controlled by humans- like the ground station for the NASA Tracking and Data Relay Satellite System. Because we have been producing first-of- a kind systems like these since the early 1950s, we consider ourselves leaders in the social art of assembling effective teams of diverse experts, and in the engineering art of conceiving and developing networks of interacting machines. But in the mid-1970s we began building systems in which humans and machines must be tightly coupled to each other-systems like the Sensor Data Fusion Center. Then we found that our well-worked system development techniques did not completely apply, and that our system engineering handbook needed a new chapter on communication between people and machines. We're still writing that chapter, and it won't be finished until we can add some not-yet fully developed artificial intelligence techniques. Nevertheless, we learned some lessons worth passing along.

This article discusses the selection of the domain for a knowledge-based expert system for a corporate application. The selection of the domain is a critical task in an expert system development. At the start of a project looking into the development of an expert system, the knowledge engineering project team must investigate one or several possible expert system domains. They must decide whether the selected application(s) are best suited to solution by present expert system technology, or if there might be a better way (or, possibly, no way) to attack the problems. If there are several possibilities, the team must also rank the potential applications and select the best available. To evaluate the potential of possible application domains, it has proved very useful to have a set of desired attributes for good expert domain. This article presents such a set of attributes. The attribute set was developed as part of a major expert system development project at GTE Laboratories. It was used recurrently (and modified and expanded continually) throughout an extensive application domain evaluation and selection process.

Expert system projects are often based on collaboration with single domain expert. This leads to difficulties in judging the suitability of the chosen task and in acquiring the detailed knowledge required to carry out the task. This anecdotal article considers some of the advantages of using a diverse collection of domain experts.

Although cognitive AI is not generally viewed as being "scientific" in the same, strong sense as is physics, it shares a number of the properties of the natural sciences, especially biology. Certain of special themes of biology, notably the principles of historicity and of structure-function relations, are applicable in AI research. From a biologist's viewpoint, certain principles of cognitive AI research emerge.

By-Laws of Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence

In the first section, some characteristic features of AI research in France are presented, including difficulties with the current means and the current organization of AI research. In the second section, the state-of-the-art in different areas of AI is described. Besides some weakness, and in spite of the general difficulties mentioned in the first section, strong points and great potentialities are exhibited. This allows us to conclude that AI research in France may play an important part at the international level, if the necessary means for its development in the middle and long term are given.

The Air Force Institute of Technology (AFIT) provides master's degree education to Air Force and Army Officers in various engineering fields It is in a unique position to educate and perform research in the area of applications of artificial intelligence to military problems. Its two AI faculty members are the only military officers with PhD's in Artificial Intelligence. In the past two years, the artificial intelligence Laboratory of AFIT has become a major focal point for AI research and applications within the government. In this article, we describe our on-going applications research in the areas of automated cockpit systems, natural language understanding, maintenance expert systems, expert systems for planning and knowledge based software design.

In the past twenty years, much time, effort, and money has been expended on designing an unambiguous representation of natural language to make them accessible to computer processing, These efforts have centered around creating schemata designed to parallel logical relations with relations expressed by the syntax and semantics of natural languages, which are clearly cumbersome and ambiguous in their function as vehicles for the transmission of logical data. Understandably, there is a widespread belief that natural languages are unsuitable for the transmission of many ideas that artificial languages can render with great precision and mathematical rigor. Among the accomplishments of the grammarians can be reckoned a method for paraphrasing Sanskrit in a manner that is identical not only in essence but in form with current work in Artificial Intelligence. This article demonstrates that a natural language can serve as an artificial language also, and that much work in AI has been reinventing a wheel millenia old.

I was approached by Phoebe Huang of Comtex Scientific Corporation who hoped that I would help devise a dramatically expanded index for topics in AI to aid Comtex in indexing the series of AI memos and reports that they had been gathering. Comtex had tried to get the ACM to expand and update its classification. But was told that ACM had just revised the listing two years ago or so ago, and did not intend to revise it again for a while: even if they did. The major decision I had to make was whether to use the existing ACM index scheme and add to it, or start with a fresh sheet of paper and devise my own.

The period since the last conference in this series has been characterized by the explosive expansion of AI out of the confines of institutions of basic research like university departments into the worlds of industry, business, and government (a development I had long expected). But it seems to me that there are plenty -- perhaps an overabundance -- of other occasions, other conferences. Other workshops, and like, at which the applications of AI would appropriately be considered.