Subject: From: AIList Moderator Kenneth Laws <AIList-REQUEST@SRI-AI>

From: [email-masked]
Date: Fri, 26 Jul 85 01:20:54 edt

Received: from sri-ai.arpa by csnet-relay.arpa id a001446; 25 Jul 85 16:12 EDT
Date: Thu 25 Jul 1985 11:57-PDT
Reply-to: AIList@SRI-AI
US-Mail: SRI Int., 333 Ravenswood Ave., Menlo Park, CA  94025
Phone: (415) 859-6467
Subject: AIList Digest   V3 #97
To: AIList@SRI-AI
Received: from rand-relay by vpi; Fri, 26 Jul 85 02:09 EST

AIList Digest           Thursday, 25 Jul 1985      Volume 3 : Issue 97

Today's Topics:
  News - SIGART Chapter Forming,
  Seminars - Speech Acts and Rationality (SRI) &
    Design Expert Systems (CMU) &
    Typed Logical Calculus (SU) &
    Correcting Misconceptions (Penn) &
    Time and Causation (SRI) &
    Realism in Cognitive AI (CSLI) &
    Reformulation of Knowledge (Rutgers) &
    Function from Form (Rutgers)

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Date: Fri 19 Jul 85 16:49:09-CDT
From: David Throop <[email-masked]>
Subject: SIGART Chapter Forming

  A SIGART chapter is forming for Austin, Texas.  SIGART is part of
Association for Computing Machinery.  It's the Special Interest Group on
Artificial Intelligence.

  Monthly program and dinner meetings will start this fall.  Each month an
invited speaker from industry or academia will talk on some aspect of AI in
Central Texas.  Dr. Jonathan Slocum (MCC) will be our first dinner speaker.
He will talk on Machine Translation of Natural Languages.  That meeting
will be Wed, Sept. 4th; the place has not yet been chosen.

  We have already chosen a board: Drs. Elaine Rich (MCC), Woodrow Bledsoe
(MCC & UT), Doug Lenat (MCC), Harry Tennant (Texas Instruments) and Bruce
Porter (UT) will serve.  I am responsible for the initial organization.

  We are inviting strong participation from the several industrial AI
groups in the area.  Austin SIGART will provide a common ground the
hardware people, the software people and the research people that are
making AI happen here.

  If you want to help this organization get going, come to our business
meeting.  Our first one will be a dinner meeting on Thur, July 25, at
6:30 pm, at
              SIRLOIN STOCKADE
              8828 Research Blvd
              (between Ohlen and Burnett)
  The dinner will be $8.00 for a full sirloin dinner.  If you're coming,
inform
    Rodney Lancaster, of TI Advanced Systems Software
      250-6456
      [email-masked]
  We need a rough advance count.

The agenda will include:

    Ratifying our initial bylaws and officers
    Certifying ourselves as an active chapter to the national SIGART
    Securing a place for our program meetings
    Publicity and Membership
    Speakers and Programs

  We will also need assistance, as the time of our first program meeting
approaches, getting sign-up sheets for the dinner circulated at the AI
office sites in town.

  Membership will be open to all people in the area with an interest in AI;
discounts will be available to those who have memberships in the ACM or the
national SIGART.

  I'm looking forward to working with a strong SIGART program for Austin
soon.

------------------------------

Date: Wed 17 Jul 85 14:12:17-PDT
From: [email-masked]
Subject: Seminar - Speech Acts and Rationality (SRI)

                      Speech Acts and Rationality

                             Phil Cohen
                            SRI AI Center

                        11:00 AM, Monday, July 22
                 SRI International, Building E, Room EJ232

This talk will describe how a theory of communication can be grounded in a
theory of rational interaction.  I will present a formalism,
jointly developed with Hector Levesque, that characterizes how an agent's
beliefs and goals eventually lead to action, and how goals to affect the
beliefs and goals of other agents leads to communication.
Communicative acts will be modelled along the lines of Grice's account
of non-natural meaning.  I will show how the speech acts of informing,
requesting, and questioning can be defined (rather than stipulated)
in this framework.  Importantly, these definitions will allow one
to distinguish insincere imperatives from true requests, and
exam questions from real questions.

------------------------------

Date: 18 Jul 85 11:54:18 EDT
From: Mary.Lou.Maher@CMU-RI-CIVE
Subject: Seminar - Design Expert Systems (CMU)

The next DRC seminar on expert systems for design applications is
Tuesday July 23 in the Adamson Wing at 1:30. Refreshments will be served
at 1:15.

               HYBRID KNOWLEDGE-BASED SYSTEMS:
                REQUIREMENTS AND ADVANTAGES

                  Rene Banares-Alcantara

Experiments with the application of knowledge-based systems to engineering
design have shown us that the use of hybrid systems is necessary. Hybrid
knowledge-based systems make it possible to take full advantage of the
existing programs, and also allow the automization of a larger portion of
the design process.

Hybridity is a concept that can be achieved in several dimensions: knowledge
representation and abstraction, implementation languages, problem solving
methods, etc. In order to construct hybrid systems it is necessary to be
able to mix different components (programming languages, modules, programs,
levels of abstraction, etc.) into a common working space. Although no
complete solution has been developed to accomplish this goal, the blackboard
model seems to be the ideal paradigm for this purpose.

DECADE (Design Expert for CAtalyst Development) will be presented as one
system that partially illustrates the above ideas.

  [Automization?  Hybridity?  The latter >>is<< listed in the American
  Heritage dictionary, but do we need it?  -- KIL]

------------------------------

Date: 19 Jul 85  1359 PDT
From: Carolyn Talcott <[email-masked]>
Subject: Seminar - Typed Logical Calculus (SU)

There will be as short series of talks given by visitors to the
computer science department from Japan.  The seminars will occur on
Thursdays at 4pm.  The announcement for the first seminar is below.

Speaker: Prof. Masahiko Sato, University of Tokyo

Title: Typed Logical Calculus

Time: Thursday, July 25, 4:00-5:00 pm
Place: Room 352 Margaret Jacks Hall
      (Computer Science Department), Stanford

          We present a typed formal system QJ which  is
     intended  both  as a logical system and a program-
     ming system.  QJ is a constructive system based on
     free  intuitionistic  logic.  QJ is a typed system
     where forms play the roles of  both  formulas  and
     terms of conventional logical systems.

          The logic of QJ is free  in  the  sense  that
     forms  (considered  as  terms) may fail to denote.
     The type structure of QJ is rich enough to include
     such  data  types  as  integers,  lists, trees and
     function spaces.  A form of QJ, when considered as
     a  term, becomes a program in the usual sense.  As
     a programming language, QJ becomes a  typed  func-
     tional  language somewhat similar to ML.   A  form
     of QJ, when viewed as a formula, may  be  used  to
     specify a program.  We can also verify programs in
     QJ.  By implementing QJ on  a  computer,  we  will
     have  a  uniform environment where we can specify,
     execute and verify programs.

------------------------------

Date: Mon, 22 Jul 85 21:56 EDT
From: Tim Finin <[email-masked]>
Subject: dissertation defense - Correcting Misconceptions (Penn)

                           Dissertation Defense
                 CORRECTING OBJECT RELATED MISCONCEPTIONS
                          Kathleen Filliben McCoy

                      10:00 am, Monday July 29, 1985
                   554 Moore, University on Pennsylvania

Analysis of a corpus of naturally occurring data shows that users conversing
with a database or expert system are likely to reveal misconceptions about
the objects modelled by the system.  Further analysis reveals that the sort
of responses given when such misconceptions are encountered depends greatly
on the discourse context.  This work develops a context-sensitive method for
automatically generating responses to object-related misconceptions with the
goal of incorporating a correction module in the front-end of a database or
expert system.  The method is demonstrated through the ROMPER system
(Responding to Object-related Misconceptions using PERspective) which is
able to generate responses to two classes of object-related misconceptions:
misclassifications and misattributions.

The transcript analysis reveals a number of specific strategies used by
human experts to correct misconceptions, where each different strategy
refutes a different kind of support for the misconception.  In this work
each strategy is paired with a structural specification of the kind of
support it refutes. ROMPER uses this specification, and a model of the user,
to determine which kind of support is most likely.  The corresponding
response strategy is then instantiated.

The above process is made context sensitive by a proposed addition to
standard knowledge-representation systems termed object perspective.  Object
perspective is introduced as a method for augmenting a standard
knowledge-representation system to reflect the highlighting affects of
previous discourse.  It is shown how this resulting highlighting can be used
to account for the context-sensitive requirements of the correction process.

Advisors: Aravind Joshi, Bonnie Webber
Committee: Tim Finin, Ellen Prince, Ralph Weischedel

------------------------------

Date: Wed 24 Jul 85 13:59:10-PDT
From: [email-masked]
Subject: Seminar - Time and Causation (SRI)

            Title: Time and Causation from the Standpoint of AI.
                  Nontitle: The Frame Problem is not.

                              Yoav Shoham
                         Yale University, SRI-AI

                        11:00 AM, Monday, July 29
                 SRI International, Building E, Room EJ232

Most tasks undertaken by AI researchers involve reasoning about
time in one way or another. In particular, the somewhat ill-defined
areas of planning and naive physics reasoning rely crucially on the
passage of time and the taking place of change. I am aiming at
a general and yet rigorous theory of time and change.
I am primarily interested in a useful notational device. Psychological
plausibility is only an added benefit, and philosophical truth
is something over which I lose little sleep.

The talk is structured as follows:

1. A first-order theory of time, which could be viewed as a generalization
   of James Allen's theory.

2. A modal version of the same theory. Several interval-based modal logics
   will be presented, along with the few of their theoretical properties
   which I am beginning to understand.

3. The theory of causal counterfactuals, a particular theory of change
   that relies on part 1. I will demonstrate how this theory appears
   to avoid three major problems:
   a. The cross-world identification problem for time tokens.
   b. The frame problem.
   c. A nameless problem encountered in the philosophy literature.

   Also, in the spirit of recent "rigorous reconstructions" I will
   reformulate Ken Forbus' Qualitative Process theory in terms of
   causal counterfactuals.

In the unlikely event of our having time left over I'll discuss
Richard Waldinger's toy car.

------------------------------

Date: Wed 24 Jul 85 17:04:56-PDT
From: Emma Pease <[email-masked]>
Subject: Seminar - Realism in Cognitive AI (CSLI)

         [Excerpted from the CSLI Newsletter by Laws@SRI-AI.]

              David H. Helman, Department of Philosophy
                   Case Western Reserve University

    ``Realism and Antirealism in Cognitive Artificial Intelligence''
          Ventura Conference Room, Thursday, August 1, 2:15 pm

      In the philosophy of mind, one controversy between realists and
   antirealists concerns the semantics of sentences embedded in attitude
   reports.  Antirealists believe that the interpretation or reference of
   a sentence embedded in an attitude report is a psychological state of
   the agent who is the subject of the attitude report.  Realists believe
   that the interpretation or reference of a sentence is a state of the
   world and not a state of mind, whether or not the sentence is embedded
   in an attitude report.
      In this paper, I show how these two semantic analyses may be
   associated with different theories of mental representation in
   cognitive artificial intelligence.  Realists in cognitive artificial
   intelligence describe the mind by supposing that agents partially
   represent objects' law-like interactions.  Antirealism does not,
   perhaps, constitute a single well-defined research strategy in
   cognitive artificial intelligences.  We may, however, certainly count
   as antirealists those researchers in cognitive artificial intelligence
   who attempt to simulate mental processes by means of procedures which
   mirror tenets of associationist psychology.  I argue that acurate
   computational models of mind must contain elements from both realist
   and antirealist research programs.                   --David Helman

------------------------------

Date: 24 Jul 85 18:52:40 EDT
From: Smadar <[email-masked]>
Subject: Seminar - Reformulation of Knowledge (Rutgers)

                      REFORMULATION OF KNOWLEDGE

                          Erik Van Releghem.
            AI Laboratory, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, and
                GTE Fundamental Research Laboratories

        We describe  a  system for  reformulation  of knowledge  as  a
powerful extension  of the  knowledge representation  system KRS.   We
define reformulation operators that change the structure of knowledge.
A mathematical model describes the operators and shows their power and
limitations. We  show  applications  of reformulation  in  matters  of
defining analogies,  definition  of  office  procedures  and  computer
vision  in  order  to  demonstrate  the  use  of  reformulation  as  a
high-level AI tool.

Date:      Thursday, July 25, 1985
Time:      10:30-11:30 AM
Place:     Hill Center, Room 423

------------------------------

Date: 24 Jul 85 18:52:40 EDT
From: Smadar <[email-masked]>
Subject: Seminar - Function from Form (Rutgers)

                          FUNCTION FROM FORM

                          David J. Braunegg
                              MIT AI Lab, and
                GTE Fundamental Research Laboratories

        I propose an approach  to reasoning about  the function of  an
object based on its shape.  A particular domain, hand tools, is chosen
to demonstrate this  approach.  The  novelty of this  approach is  its
combination of reasoning by analogy to the shapes of known tools  with
reasoning from the possible motions  of tools.  Each of these  methods
compensates for the deficiencies of the other.  When combined with the
use of domain heuristics,  they form a  powerful reasoning system  for
determining function from form.  (WARNING: This talk concerns research
which is  in  its early  stages.   No  claims of  results  or  working
programs are expressed or implied.)

Date:      Thursday, July 25, 1985
Time:      11:30 AM-12:00 PM
Place:     Hill Center, Room 423

------------------------------

End of AIList Digest
********************