The Objects and Artificial Intelligence Workshop was held on 25 August 1991 in conjunction with the 1991 International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence. The workshop brought together researchers in AI and object-oriented programming to exchange ideas and investigate possible avenues of cooperation between AI and object-oriented programming. The workshop dealt with both the theoretical and the practical aspects of this cooperation.

A workshop on defeasible reasoning with specificity was held under the arch in St. Louis during April 1989, with support from AAAI and McDonnell Douglas, and the assistance of Rockwell Science Center Palo Alto and the Department of Computer Science of Washington University.

A new computer language for manufacturing is being used to link complex systems of equipment whose components are supplied by multiple vendors. The Cell Management Language (CML) combines computational tools from rule-based data systems, object-oriented languages, and new tools that facilitate language processing. These language tools, combined with rule processing, make it convenient to build new interpreters for interfacing and understanding a range of computer and natural languages; hence, CML is being used primarily to define other languages in an interpretive environment, that is, as a meta-interpreter. For example, in CML it is quite easy to build an interpreter for machine tool languages that can understand and generate new part programs.

Many of the ideas behind object-oriented programming have roots going back to SIMULA. The first substantial interactive, display-based implementation was the SMALLTALK language. The object-oriented style has often been advocated for simulation programs, systems programming, graphics, and AI programming. It is also related to a line of work in AI on the theory of frames and their implementation in knowledge representation languages such as KRL, KEE, FRL, and UNITS.