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Report on the First International Conference on Knowledge Capture (K-CAP)

AI Magazine

This new conference series promotes multidisciplinary research on tools and methodologies for efficiently capturing knowledge from a variety of sources and creating representations that can be (or eventually can be) useful for reasoning. The conference attracted researchers from diverse areas of AI, including knowledge representation, knowledge acquisition, intelligent user interfaces, problem solving and reasoning, planning, agents, text extraction, and machine learning. Knowledge acquisition has been a challenging area of research in AI, with its roots in early work to develop expert systems. Driven by the modern internet culture and knowledge-based industries, the study of knowledge capture has a renewed importance. Although there has been considerable work over the years in the area, activities have been distributed across several distinct research communities.


ISSUQS in Natural

AI Magazine

I. Introduction Two premises, reflected in the title, underlie the perspective from which I will consider research in natural language processing in this paper.* First, progress on building computer systems that process natural languages in any meaningful sense (i.e., systems that interact reasonably with people in natural language) requires considering language as part of a larger communicative situation. In this larger situation, the participants in a conversation and their states of mind are as important to the interpretation of an utterance as the linguistic expressions from which it is formed. A central concern when language is considered as communication is its function in building and using shared models of the world. Indeed, the notion of a shared model is inherent in the word "communicate," which is derived from the Latin communi Preparation of this paper was supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. MCS76-220004, and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency under Contract N00039-79C0118 with the Naval Electronic Systems Command.


Toward Better Models Of The Design Process

AI Magazine

What are the powerful new ideas in knowledge based design? What important research issues require further investigation? Perhaps the key research problem in AIbased design for the 1980's is to develop better models of the design process. A comprehensive model of design should address the following aspects of the design process: the state of the design; the goal structure of the design process; design decisions; rationales for design decisions; control of the design process; and the role of learning in design This article presents some of the most important ideas emerging from current AI research on design, especially ideas for better models of design It is organized into sections dealing with each of the aspects of design listed above What is design? Why should we study it?


The Fourth International and Interdisciplinary Conference on Modeling and Using Context

AI Magazine

The Fourth International and Interdisciplinary Conference on Modeling and Using Context (CONTEXT-03) took place at the Stanford University Center for the Study of Language and Information in Stanford, California, on 23 to 25 June 2003. Like the previous conferences, CONTEXT-03 fulfilled its aim of bringing together representatives of many different research areas, spanning the whole range of the cognitive and information sciences, and with interests ranging from the use of context in specific, commercial applications to highly general philosophical, psychological, and logical theories. The conference chair was Fausto Giunchiglia, University of Trento. The program chairs were Patrick Blackburn, INRIA Lorraine; Chiara Ghidini, the Centre for Scientific and Technological Research in Trento; and Roy Turner, University of Maine. There were 77 submissions, from which 31 papers and 14 posters were selected. One of the aims of the CONTEXT conferences is to bring together representatives of ...


The Computational Metaphor and Artificial Intelligence: A Reflective Examination of a Theoretical Falsework

AI Magazine

AI. Specifically, we address three Just how little can be illustrated by the reaction to Winograd and Flores's (1986) recent book Understanding Computers and Cognition. In personal comments, the book and its authors have been savaged. Published comments are, of course, more temperate (Vellino et al. 1987) but still reveal the hypersensitivity of the Penrose's (1989) even more recent book The Emperor's New Mind have been observed. Like Suchman (1987) and Clancey (1987), we feel that insights of significant value are to be gained from an objective consideration of traditional and alternative perspectives. Some efforts in this direction are evident (Haugeland [1985], Hill [1989], and Born [1987], for example), but the issue requires additional and ongoing attention.


Book Reviews

AI Magazine

However, recently, there seems to be a new wave of interest, as indicated by many papers, monographs, edited books, and doctoral theses, in exploring aspects of similarity and analogical reasoning from various perspectives. Amid these numerous publications, Similarity and Analogical Reasoning surely stands out as the most valuable reference work on the topic, covering especially well the recent advances in the understanding of this topic, with many chapters written by leading researchers. Although it is based on a collection of papers initially presented at the Workshop on Similarity and Analogy, unlike the typical workshop proceedings, this volume is well edited and coherent in both its content and format, with a great deal of cross-references and detailed summary-comment chapters for every part of the book. Let us look at the book in detail. Because each of these chapters has a different perspective, approach, and organization, I first discuss a number of chapters one by one.


Science and Engineering in Knowledge Representation and Reasoning

AI Magazine

As a field, knowledge representation has often been accused of being off in a theoretical noman's land, removed from, and largely unrelated to, the central issues in AI. This article argues that recent trends in KR instead demonstrate the benefits of the interplay between science and engineering, a lesson from which all AI could benefit. This article grew out of a survey talk on the Third International Conference on Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (KR '92) (Nebel, Rich, and Swartout 1992) that I presented at the Thirteenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI '93). This article is an edited version of a talk surveying that conference, which I presented at the Thirteenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI '93). Although nominally a conference overview, the article attempts to summarize the state of the conference and the field with respect to the intertwined goals of science and engineering.


Report on the 1984 Distributed

AI Magazine

The fifth Distributed Artificial Intclligencc Workshop tias held at the Schlumberger-Doll Research Laboratory from October 14 to 17, 1984 It was attended by 20 participants from academic and industrial institutions. As in the past,' this workshop was designed as an informal meeting It included brief research rcport,s from individual groups along with genera1 discussion of questions of common interest. Distributed artificial intelligence (DAI) is concerned with cooperative solution of problems by a decentralized and loosely coupled collection of knowledge sources (KSs), each embodied in a distinct processor node. The KSs cooperate in the sense that no one of them has sufficient information to solve the entire problem; mutual sharing of information is necessary to allow the group as a whole to product an answer. By decentralized we mean that both control and data are logically and often geographically distributed; there is neither global control nor global data storage.


HEURISTICS: Intelligent Search Strategies f Dr Computer Problem Solving

AI Magazine

To fully appreciate Professor Pearl's book, begin with a careful reading of the title. It is a book about "..Intelligent- ..Strategies.." for the discovery and use of "Heuristics.. " to allow computers to solve ".. Search.. ' ' problems. Search is a critical component in AI programs (Nilsson 1980, Barr and Feigenbaum 1982), and in this sense Pearl's book is a strong contribution to the field of AI. It serves as an excellent reference for the researcher/practitioner and is useful as a textbook as well. As a book about search, it is thorough, at the state of the art, and contains expositions that will delight the expert with their clarity and depth.


KBEmacs: Where's the AI?

AI Magazine

The Programmer's Apprentice project uses the domain of programming as a vehicle for studying (and attempting to duplicate) human problem solving behavior. Recognizing that it will be a long time before it is possible to fully duplicate an expert programmer's abilities, the project seeks to develop an intelligent assistant system, the Programmer's Apprentice (PA), which will help a programmer in various phases of the programming task. The Knowledge-Based Editor in Emacs (KBEmacs) is an initial step in the direction of the PA. A question that has been asked about KBEmacs is, "Where's the AI?" Going beyond this, the article uses the development of KBEmacs as an example that illustrates a number of general features of the process of developing an applied AI system. As part of this, the article compares the way AI ideas are used in KBEmacs with the way they were used in the initial proposal for the PA.