Subject: From: AIList Moderator Kenneth Laws <AIList-REQUEST%sri-ai.arpa@CSNET-RELAY>

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Subject: AIList Digest   V3 #142
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AIList Digest           Thursday, 10 Oct 1985     Volume 3 : Issue 142

Today's Topics:
  Seminars - AI Meets Natural Stupidity (CSLI) &
    Learning Expert Knowledge (UT) &
    Interactive Modularity (UCB),
  Seminar Series - Commonsense and Nonmonotonic Reasoning (CSLI),
  Conference - Logic in Computer Science

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Date: Wed 9 Oct 85 16:51:08-PDT
From: Emma Pease <[email-masked]>
Subject: Seminar - AI Meets Natural Stupidity (CSLI)

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

          CSLI ACTIVITIES FOR *THIS* THURSDAY, October 10, 1985

   12 noon              TINLunch
     Ventura Hall       ``Artificial Intelligence Meets Natural Stupidity''
     Conference Room    by Drew McDermott
                        Discussion led by Roland Hausser, U. of Munich

   McDermott discusses three `mistakes', or rather bad habits, which are
   frequent in A.I. work.  He speaks from his own experience and cites
   several illuminating and amusing examples from the literature. In this
   TINLunch I will be discussing his thoughts on treating reference in
   A.I., which are discussed in the section entitled `unnatural
   language'.                                           --Roland Hausser

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

Date: Tue, 8 Oct 85 16:01:56 cdt
From: [email-masked] (Rajive Bagrodia)
Subject: Seminar - Learning Expert Knowledge (UT)

                          Machine Learning for
                       Acquiring Expert Knowledge

                                  by
                             Bruce  Porter

                       noon, Friday 11th, Pai 3.38

An important  effort in Artificial Intelligence is the construction of
Expert Systems, but this effort is stymied by the problem of acquiring
knowledge  to guide  problem solving and reasoning.  This talk reviews
efforts  in  Machine  Learning  to  automate knowledge acquisition and
describes our current approach to the problem.

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

Date: Wed, 9 Oct 85 16:48:25 PDT
From: [email-masked] (Cognitive Science Program)
Subject: Seminar - Interactive Modularity (UCB)

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

        TIME:             Tuesday, October 15, 11:00 - 12:30
        PLACE:            240 Bechtel Engineering Center
        DISCUSSION:       12:30 - 1:30 in 200 Building T-4

        SPEAKER:          Ronald M. Kaplan,
                          Xerox Palo Alto Research Center  and  Center
                          for  the  Study of Language and Information,
                          Stanford University

        TITLE:            ``Interactive Modularity''

        Comprehensible  scientific  explanations  for   most   complex
        natural  phenomena  are  modular  in character.  Phenomena are
        explained in terms of the operation of separate  and  indepen-
        dent  components, with relatively minor interactions.  Modular
        accounts of complex cognitive phenomena, such as language pro-
        cessing,  have  also  been proposed, with distinctions between
        phonological, syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic modules,  for
        example,  and  with  distinctions  among  various rules within
        modules.  But these modular accounts  seem  incompatible  with
        the   commonplace  observations  of  substantial  interactions
        across component boundaries: semantic and  pragmatic  factors,
        for  instance,  can  be shown to operate even before the first
        couple of phonemes in an utterance have been identified.

             In this talk I consider several  methods  of  reconciling
        modular descriptions in service of scientific explanation with
        the apparent  interactivity  of  on-line  behavior.   Run-time
        methods  utilize  interpreters that allow on-line interleaving
        of operations from different modules, perhaps including  addi-
        tional  "scheduling"  components  for  controlling  the cross-
        module flow of information.  But depending on their mathemati-
        cal properties, modular specifications may also be transformed
        by off-line, compile-time operations into  new  specifications
        that  directly  represent  all  possible cross-module interac-
        tions.  Such compilation techniques allow for run-time  elimi-
        nation  of  module  boundaries  and  of intermediate levels of
        representation.  I will illustrate these techniques with exam-
        ples  involving  certain  classes of phonological rule systems
        and structural correspondences in Lexical-Functional Grammar.

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

Date: Wed 9 Oct 85 16:51:08-PDT
From: Emma Pease <[email-masked]>
Subject: Seminar Series - Commonsense and Nonmonotonic Reasoning (CSLI)

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

            COMMON SENSE AND NON-MONOTONIC REASONING SEMINARS
            Organized by John McCarthy and Vladimir Lifschitz
               Computer Science Dept., Stanford University

      A series of seminars on Common Sense and Non-monotonic reasoning
   will explore the problem of formalizing commonsense knowledge and
   reasoning, with the emphasis on their non-monotonic aspects.
      It is important to be able to formalize reasoning about physical
   objects and mental attitudes, about events and actions on the basis of
   predicate logic, as it can be done with reasoning about numbers,
   figures, sets and probabilities.  Such formalizations may lead to the
   creation of AI systems which can use logic to operate with general
   facts, which can deduce consequences from what they know and what they
   are told and determine in this way what actions should be taken.
      Attempts to formalize commonsense knowledge have been so far only
   partially successful. One major difficulty is that commonsense
   reasoning often appears to be non-monotonic, in the sense that getting
   additional information may force us to retract some of the conclusions
   made before.  This is in sharp contrast to what happens in
   mathematics, where adding new axioms to a theory can only make the set
   of theorems bigger.
      Circumscription, a transformation of logical formulas proposed by
   John McCarthy, makes it possible to formalize non-monotonic reasoning
   in classical predicate logic. A circumscriptive theory involves, in
   addition to an axiom set, the description of a circumscription to be
   applied to the axioms. Our goal is to investigate how commonsense
   knowledge can be represented in the form of circumscriptive theories.
      John McCarthy will begin the seminar by discussing some of the
   problems that have arisen in using abnormality to formalize common
   sense knowledge about the effects of actions using circumscription.
   His paper Applications of Circumscription to Formalizing Common Sense
   Knowledge is available from Rutie Adler 358MJH.  This paper was given
   in the Non-monotonic Workshop, and the present version, which is to be
   published in Artificial Intelligence, is not greatly different. The
   problems in question relate to trying to use the formalism of that
   paper.
      The seminar will replace the circumscription seminar we had last
   year.  If you were on the mailing list for that seminar then you will
   be automatically included in the new mailing list. If you would like
   to be added to the mailing list (or removed from it) send a message to
   Vladimir Lifschitz (VAL@SAIL).

      The first meeting is in 252MJH on Wednesday, October 30, at 2pm.

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

Date: Wed 9 Oct 85 16:51:08-PDT
From: Emma Pease <[email-masked]>
Subject: LICS Conference

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

                             LICS CONFERENCE

      A new conference, LICS, (an acronym for ``Logic in Computer
   Science'') will meet in Cambridge, Mass, June 16-18, 1986.  The topics
   to be covered include abstract data types, computer theorem proving
   and verification, concurrency, constructive proofs as programs, data
   base theory, foundations of logic programming, logic-based programming
   languages, logics of programs, knowledge and belief, semantics of
   programs, software specifications, type theory, etc.  For a local copy
   of the full call for papers, contact Jon Barwise (Barwise@CSLI) or
   Joseph Goguen (Goguen@SRI-AI), members of the LICS Organizing
   Committee.

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

End of AIList Digest
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