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Letters to the Editor

AI Magazine

Thanks from Jack and Janet Mostow for causing them to meet at AAAI'87 and subsequently marry; a correction to Jordan Pollack's affiliation; a correction to the winter 1988 wording of his report on Workshop on Theoretical Issues in Conceptual Information Processing; an addendum to the Slagle and Wick article in 9, 4: A Method for Evaluating Candidate Expert System Applications, citing Bruno Franck, and comments on Intelligent Computer-Aided Engineering by Kenneth D. Forbus in vol 9, no 3.


Expert Systems: How Far Can They Go? Part One

AI Magazine

A panel session at the 1989 International Joint Conference on artificial intelligence in Los Angeles dealt with the subject of knowledge-based systems; the session was entitled "Expert Systems: How Far Can They Go?" The panelists included Randall Davis (Massachusetts Institute of Technology); Stuart Dreyfus (University of California at Berkeley); Brian Smith (Xerox Palo Alto Research Center); and Terry Winograd (Stanford University), chairman. Part 1 includes presentations from Winograd and Dreyfus. Part 2, which will appear in the Summer 1989 issue, includes presentations from Smith and Davis and concludes with the panel discussion.


The First Workshop on Blackboard Systems

AI Magazine

The emergence of the blackboard architecture as a widely used paradigm for problem solving led us and other members of the blackboard research community to organize a workshop. The workshop was held during the 1987 Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence Conference in Seattle. The main purpose of the workshop was to highlight the advances in blackboard architectures since the introduction of the paradigm in Hearsay-II and identify issues relevant to future blackboard system research. This article describes the issues raised and the discussions in each of the five workshop panels.


Review of A Comprehensive Guide to AI and Expert Systems: Turbo Pascal Edition

AI Magazine

Robert K. Levin, Diane E. Drang, and Barry Edelson's book might better be titled, an introduction to expert systems: Turbo Pascal edition. THe book does not live up to the promise implied in the title.


Expert Systems in Government Administration

AI Magazine

Artificial Intelligence is solving more and more real world problems, but penetration into the complexities of government administration has been minimal. The author suggests that combining expert system technology with conventional procedural computer systems can lead to substantial efficiencies. Business rules can be removed from business-oriented computer systems and stored in a separate but integrated knowledge base, where maintenance will be centralized. Fourteen specific practical applications are suggested.


Review of Natural Language Understanding

AI Magazine

Hutchins not only presents machine translation research (such as problems of machine translation It is the theories, algorithms, and designs practical versus theoretical, empirical also not clear that the AI philosophy but also the history, goals, assumptions, versus perfectionist, and direct versus of understanding and meaning (p 327) and constraints of each project.


Review of Expert Systems for the Technical Professional

AI Magazine

Hutchins not only presents machine translation research (such as problems of machine translation It is the theories, algorithms, and designs practical versus theoretical, empirical also not clear that the AI philosophy but also the history, goals, assumptions, versus perfectionist, and direct versus of understanding and meaning (p 327) and constraints of each project.


Second International Workshop on Nonmonotonic Reasoning

AI Magazine

It 445 Burgess Drive In spite of the many strong technical was generally agreed that the formalization Menlo Park, CA 94025-3496 results that have been produced, it is of commonsense reasoning (415) 328-3123 still far from clear whether existing should be a top-level item for future approaches are sufficient to formalize research.


Logic and Decision-Theoretic Methods for Planning under Uncertainty

AI Magazine

Decision theory and nonmonotonic logics are formalisms that can be employed to represent and solve problems of planning under uncertainty. We analyze the usefulness of these two approaches by establishing a simple correspondence between the two formalisms. The analysis indicates that planning using nonmonotonic logic comprises two decision-theoretic concepts: probabilities (degrees of belief in planning hypotheses) and utilities (degrees of preference for planning outcomes). We present and discuss examples of the following lessons from this decision-theoretic view of nonmonotonic reasoning: (1) decision theory and nonmonotonic logics are intended to solve different components of the planning problem; (2) when considered in the context of planning under uncertainty, nonmonotonic logics do not retain the domain-independent characteristics of classical (monotonic) logic; and (3) because certain nonmonotonic programming paradigms (for example, frame-based inheritance, nonmonotonic logics) are inherently problem specific, they might be inappropriate for use in solving certain types of planning problems. We discuss how these conclusions affect several current AI research issues.


Review of A Comprehensive Guide to AI and Expert Systems: Turbo Pascal Edition

AI Magazine

Hutchins not only presents machine translation research (such as problems of machine translation It is the theories, algorithms, and designs practical versus theoretical, empirical also not clear that the AI philosophy but also the history, goals, assumptions, versus perfectionist, and direct versus of understanding and meaning (p 327) and constraints of each project.