The Fourth International Symposium on Artificial Intelligence (ISAI) was held in Cancun, Mexico, 13-15 November 1991. What, another international AI conference, you say? In Mexico? Yes. The first symposium was held in 1988. This fourth consecutive annual conference drew the participation of visitors from several international AI communities, including the United States, Mexico, Canada, Germany, Japan, England, France, Italy, The Netherlands, Spain, China, Belgium, Australia, and Singapore -- an impressive breadth of participants for a conference that has existed for only four years.

As the AI community has matured, the role of AI Magazine has continued to evolve. Rich outlines several ways that this community-wide publication can address the current needs of AI researchers, and encourages broad participation from community members.

AI Magazine Index, 1980-1991

Bylaws of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence

The workshop "Advances in Interfacing Production Systems with the Real World" was designed to bring together researchers from around the world to focus on the problem of integrating production systems into industrial environments. It was held on 25 August 1991 in Sydney, Australia, in conjunction with the Twelfth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-91). Nine papers were accepted for the proceedings, and six of them were discussed at the workshop.

A large number of problems in AI and other areas of computer science can be viewed as special cases of the constraint-satisfaction problem. Some examples are machine vision, belief maintenance, scheduling, temporal reasoning, graph problems, floor plan design, the planning of genetic experiments, and the satisfiability problem. A number of different approaches have been developed for solving these problems. Some of them use constraint propagation to simplify the original problem.

The International Workshop on Processing Declarative Knowledge was held in Kaiserslautern, Germany, from 1 to 3 July 1991. The workshop was intended as a forum for the presentation of new approaches to processing declarative knowledge, the discussion of procedural versus alternative paradigms, and the issues concerned with efficient processing of realistic knowledge bases. Demonstrations of implemented systems were also announced.

My Ph.D. thesis (Ward 1992, 1991)1 addressed the task of generating natural language utterances. Current generators only accept input that are relatively poor in information, such as feature structures or lists of propositions; they are unable to deal with input rich in information, as one might expect from, for example, an expert system with a complete model of its domain or a natural language understander with good inference ability. FIG is based on a single associative network that encodes lexical knowledge, syntactic knowledge, and world knowledge. Thus, FIG is a spreading activation or structured connectionist system (Feldman et al.

The central thesis of my dissertation (Kocabas 1989)1 is that in complex systems, descriptive and definitive knowledge can be organized into functional categories; this categorization provides clarity and efficiency in representation and facilitates the integrated use of various methods of learning. I describe a formalism for organizing knowledge into such functional categories and some of its implementations. In this formalism, descriptive scientific knowledge is classified into seven categories. The categorization formalism allows complex propositions to be analyzed into their simple constituents; in turn, these constituents can be maintained in their categories.

The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence held its 1991 Fall Symposium Series on November 15-17 at the Asilomar Conference Center, Pacific Grove, California. This article contains summaries of the four symposia: Discourse Structure in Natural Language Understanding and Generation, Knowledge and Action at Social and Organizational Levels, Principles of Hybrid Reasoning, Sensory Aspects of Robotic Intelligence.