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

From: [email-masked]
Date: Mon, 23 Sep 85 04:49:47 edt

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Subject: AIList Digest   V3 #127
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AIList Digest            Monday, 23 Sep 1985      Volume 3 : Issue 127

Today's Topics:
  Seminars - Spencer-Brown Seminar in San Francisco &
    Knowledge Representation (SRI) &
    Knowledge-Directed Database Management (IBM-SJ) &
    Learning Spatial Concepts (CSLI) &
    2nd-Order Lambda Calculus (UPenn) &
    Computer Tutor for Programming Recursion (UCB),
  Course - AI Theories of Belief and Action (SU)

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

Date: Wed, 18 Sep 85 13:15:23 pdt
From: [email-masked] (william bricken)
Subject: Spencer-Brown seminar in San Francisco

G. Spencer-Brown, the author of LAWS OF FORM, will be presenting
a five-day seminar at the Miyako Hotel in San Francisco, from
October 7 through 11, 1985.

Morning sessions will address the technical methodology of Laws
of Form.  Afternoon sessions will address "open intelligence",
Spencer Brown's ideas on life and living.

Registration costs:  $650 for both sessions,
                     $300 for afternoons only.

Information:  UNI-OPS
              260 Marshall Drive
              Walnut Creek, CA  94598-2833
              phone Walter Zintz, (415) 945-0048

PERSONAL COMMENTS:  Spencer-Brown's work on the 4-color map theorem was
discussed in this list early last year.  The man is an iconoclast, and
has managed to alienate a significant portion of most audiences.  The
afternoon session may be anything from EST training (which Spencer-Brown
is said to have originated) to metaphysical ecstacy.  The application of
Brownian mathematics to representation theory and automated theorem
proving in AI is profound.  Followers of his work range from mystics
to mathematicians;  he is both.  I have heard that he is not talking
to mathematicians.

william

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

Date: Wed 18 Sep 85 15:19:44-PDT
From: [email-masked]
Subject: Seminar - Knowledge Representation (SRI)

                        THE SKY IS A BLUE COLOR

                           Marcel Schoppers
                      SRI International AI Center

                        11:00 AM, MONDAY, September 23
       SRI International, Building E, Room EJ228 (new conference room)

        I present a representation which will allow us to encode and
        access much of the information contained in simple descriptive
        statements. "The sky is a blue color" entails that blue is a
        color, that the sky has a color, that the sky is blue, that the
        sky is visible, and that the sky is located both spatially and
        temporally. These generalizations are so trivial that they border
        on presuppositions, and they have consequently been taken for
        granted in semantic nets and frames. Making such information
        explicit greatly increases the density and usefulness of stored
        knowledge. One interesting application is to disambiguate an
        adjective/predicate to suit a given noun/extension.

        My representation is parsimonious, having O(three) primitive con-
        structs (link types); is highly irredundant, since blue(sky) and
        color(blue) reference the same blue; and is static, being inten-
        ded to formalize and implement "massively parallel" deterministic
        connectionist question-answering systems. Predicates, relations,
        and simple forms of quantification all emerge as by-products of
        function applicability and set inclusion. Viewed as a logic the
        representation is potentially O(w), intensional and inconsistent.

        The talk will touch on issues in philosophy of logic and linguistics.
        I will especially appreciate constructive criticism in those areas,
        as I am a novice there.

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

Date: Wed, 18 Sep 85 15:34:00 PDT
From: IBM-SJ Calendar <[email-masked]>
Subject: Seminar - Knowledge-Directed Database Management (IBM-SJ)

                     IBM San Jose Research Lab
                          5600 Cottle Road
                         San Jose, CA 95193

                              CALENDAR
                     SEPTEMBER 23 - 27, 1985

Thurs., Sept. 26  Computer Science Seminar
10:00 A.M.        PROBE: A RESEARCH PROJECT
Aud. B            IN KNOWLEDGE-DIRECTED DATABASE MANAGEMENT
                  Conventional record-based DBMSs will be
                  inadequate for many of the knowledge-intensive
                  information processing applications (e.g.,
                  business and industrial automation, CAD/CAM, and
                  military command and control) of the future.
                  These applications require integrated access to
                  a variety of information types (e.g., images,
                  maps, signals, text) not currently supported by
                  DBMSs.  Also, they rely on specialized knowledge
                  or expertise for processing the new information
                  types; for many of these types, specialized
                  storage devices and processors (e.g.,
                  workstations, image enhancers, solid modellers),
                  are or will be available.  Currently, DBMSs have
                  no general facilities for efficiently
                  assimilating and utilizing this special
                  knowledge or for incorporating these specialized
                  processors into their own processing.  The
                  objective of the PROBE project is to develop an
                  advanced DBMS effective for these
                  knowledge-intensive applications.  Our approach
                  is to enhance existing DBMSs with (a)
                  user-defined object classes as the basis for
                  defining new information types and operations
                  and for integrating specialized processors, (b)
                  dimensional (space and time) concepts, which are
                  a common characteristic of many of the new
                  information types, and (c) recursive predicates
                  and queries, which provide intensional knowledge
                  processing capabilities essential for many of
                  the applications.  In each case, it is necessary
                  to augment both the logical (data model, query
                  language) components and the physical (storage
                  structures, access methods, query processor)
                  components of the DBMS.  In this talk, we
                  describe approaches to addressing all these
                  issues.

                  Dr. U. Dayal, Computer Corporation of America
                  Host:  C. Mohan

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

Date: Thu 19 Sep 85 08:14:26-PDT
From: Emma Pease <[email-masked]>
Subject: Seminar - Learning Spatial Concepts (CSLI)

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

    ``Crossing the Rubicon: From a Physics of Dead Coordinate Spaces
               to a Physics of Living Coordinate Spaces''

   Dr. Peter Kugler, The Crump Institute for Medical Engineering, UCLA
            Monday, September 23, 1985, 2:15pm, Ventura Hall

      This talk will be about self-organizing systems that involve
   low-energy (nonforce) coupling and the nature of the predicates that
   constitute the low-energy descriptors, and will be organized around
   issues pertaining to general problems of language and information.
   The emphasis will be on systems that generate (self-assemble) new
   levels of description.  These new levels constitute new languages
   parasitic on the lower level languages but not reducible to their
   predicates.  In the self-organizing systems of interest it is the
   ``coordinate spaces,'' which are themselves evolving, that become the
   important objects of study.  Instead of assuming a fixed coordinate
   space, when the interest focuses on trajectories, attention is devoted
   to the coordinate space itself, since this is what provides the semantics.
      This approach is very similar to developments in computer
   architecture that focus on parallel processing.  In these machines
   (connection machines, Boltzmann, etc.) the machine language
   self-organizes (e.g. programs itself through the emergence of new
   stable configurations), and the new predicate descriptions play the
   role of symbols in terms of their opacity with respect to the lower
   level language.  The machine language `gives birth' to the symbolic
   level of description.  This situation contrasts dramatically with that
   of von Neumann machines, for which the symbolic language is
   ontologically independent of the machine language.  A symbolic
   language can run on any of an infinite variety of mechanistic
   substrates, the primacy of the symbol prevailing over the substrate
   machine.  The approach advocated here, puts the focus on the machine
   level of interaction, thus preserving an ontological continuity and
   avoiding mind/body, syntactic/semantic, etc. problems.

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

Date: Fri, 20 Sep 85 11:06 EDT
From: Tim Finin <[email-masked]>
Subject: Seminar - 2nd-Order Lambda Calculus (UPenn)

THE 2ND ORDER LAMBDA CALCULUS - Dale Miller, Penn CIS
Joint Mathematics / Computer Science Logic Colloquium
4:40 Monday 23 September 1985, DRL 4E17, University Of Pennsylvania

In this talk we will present the description of an extended type lambda
calculus where types can be used as values.  We will illustrate how this
language can be used to perform computation in novel fashions and what
semantics might work with it.

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

Date: Wed, 18 Sep 85 11:12:07 PDT
From: davies%ucbcogsci@Berkeley (Catherine Davies)
Subject: Seminar - Computer Tutor for Programming Recursion (UCB)

                         BERKELEY COGNITIVE SCIENCE PROGRAM
                                     Fall 1985
                       Cognitive Science Seminar -- IDS 237A

           TIME:                Tuesday, September 24, 11:00 - 12:30
           PLACE:               240 Bechtel Engineering Center
              (followed by)
           DISCUSSION:          12:30 - 1:30 in 200 Building T-4

           SPEAKER:          Peter  Pirolli,  School  of  Education,
                             UC Berkeley

           TITLE:          ``A Cognitive Model and Intelligent Computer
                             Tutor for Programming Recursion''

           Recursion is typically a novel concept  for  programming  stu-
           dents  that  causes  them  considerable  grief and difficulty.
           Thus, the study of how people learn to program recursive  pro-
           grams  provides a useful domain for addressing the psychologi-
           cal issue of how fundamentally new knowledge  is  acquired  as
           well  as  the  instructional issue of how to teach a difficult
           programming concept.  I will present a production system model
           that  addresses  expert  and  novice  problem-solving, problem-
           solving by  analogy,  and  skill  acquisition  in  programming
           recursive  functions.   This  research served as the basis for
           the development of recursion lessons in  an  intelligent  com-
           puter  tutor for programming LISP.  Specifically, a simulation
           model of ``ideal'' and ``buggy'' novice problem-solving was con-
           structed  for  coding  recursion.   Using this model, the LISP
           tutor provides instruction, hints, and feedback in the context
           of  programming.  The LISP tutor also maintains a model of the
           skill development of  individual  students.  Evaluations  show
           that the LISP tutor is more effective in teaching introductory
           LISP  programming  than   good   classroom   instruction   and
           approaches the effectiveness of human tutors.

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

Date: Wed 18 Sep 85 09:26:04-PDT
From: Kurt Konolige <[email-masked]>
Subject: Course - AI Theories of Belief and Action (SU)

         [Forwarded from the Stanford bboard by Laws@SRI-AI.]

Announcement of a new course in Artificial Intelligence:

        CS429:  Formal AI Theories Of Belief and Action

Instructor:  Kurt Konolige, SRI International and CSLI

Description: We will discuss some formal commonsense theories of
belief and action that have emerged over the last 5-7 years.  This
course is intended both as a survey of recent research in this area,
and as an introduction to the application of techniques from formal
logic to AI problems.  The emphasis is on acquiring a facility for
working with the tools of logic, especially by analyzing and
critiquing current AI research.  The following is a list of topics we
will cover:

        1. Knowledge and Belief
                - Kripke and sentential semantics
                - Modal logics for knowledge and belief
                - Proof methods for quantified modal logics,
                        including recent resolution methods

        2. Formal planning theories
                - The situation calculus
                - Integration of action and belief

        3. Further topics
                - Introspective belief theories
                - The relation between introspection and nonmonotonic
                        reasoning

Prerequisites: Some familiarity with basic concepts from first-order
logic will be assumed, e.g., students should know what what a model
is, how to construct proofs from axioms and rules of inference, and so
on.

Requirements: Graduate-level course for CS students, 3 units.
Students will be expected to read 1-2 papers a week.  There will be
one problem set a week, and either a project or final exam.

Time:  MWF 11am (50 min), MJH 352, Fall 1985

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

End of AIList Digest
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