Subject: AIList Digest V5 #78

From: vtcs1::in% <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 16 Mar 87 02:35:36 est

AIList Digest            Sunday, 15 Mar 1987       Volume 5 : Issue 78

Today's Topics:
  Queries - Printed Circuit Board Software &
    Toshiba Voice Recognition Chip & Expert System/CAD Interfaces,
  Funding - AFOSR Commendation,
  Jargon - Maths as a Science,
  Expert Systems - Explanations

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Date: 14 Mar 87 00:36:07 GMT
From: [email-masked]  (Rich Hume)
Subject: Printed Circuit Board Software

Question:  Can someone point me to (or better yet send me)
some public domain software for doing printed circuit board
layout?  Even somewhat out of date source would be useful.
Please send responses to me.

Thanks for any info!

Rich Hume
Application Environment Products
NCR Corp.

UUCP:            ...!ncr-sd!se-sd!rich
  ...!seismo!scubed/

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Date: 14 Mar 87 02:13:10 GMT
From: [email-masked]  (John Gilmore)
Subject: Toshiba voice recognition chip

A recent article in Newsbytes Japan mentions:

        Toshiba's Voice Recognition LSI -- Toshiba (Tokyo) has developed
        a powerful LSI for recognizing human speech.  This new product
        recognizes a variety of spoken sounds with 95% accuracy.
        Toshiba plans to use this LSI for a voice input system for its
        word processors.

I am interested in building a voice control system for my house, which
will be fully wired for sound.  Does anyone have further information
about this chip (e.g. press releases, other mentions in the press,
papers at conferences, or actual product numbers and specs)?
--
John Gilmore  {sun,ptsfa,lll-crg,ihnp4}!hoptoad!gnu   [email-masked]
Love your country but never trust its government.
                     -- from a hand-painted road sign in central Pennsylvania

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Date: Sat, 14 Mar 87 15:40 EST
From: [email-masked]
Subject: Expert_system/_CAD_interfaces

    I'm doing research on applications of various expert system
    techniques in architectural design <and, secondarily,
    engineering design>, with emphasis on interfacing knowledge
    based systems with CAD systems.

    In my research, I've developed a number of shells external
    to the CAD system, that are written in LISP, and that use
    different entry points to the CAD system. I've used rule
    based pattern matching shells and binary discrimination networks.

    I've also tried writing shells for an IBM-PC CAD package
    called AutoCAD, which has an internal LISP interpreter, with
    interesting results. I expected that an interpreter resident
    within the CAD system should be a superior strategy to that
    of having an interface of an external shell to the CAD
    package. I found that in the case of AutoLISP however, the
    internal LISP interpreter in AutoCAD, memory requirements for
    even trivial pattern matching algorhythms usually proved to
    be too great (yes, even in the latest versions of AutoCAD).
    Also, AutoLISP functions represent a very small subset of a
    full Common LISP, which makes ES applications exceedingly
    difficult to write, as functions which would otherwise be
    primitively defined must be defined at the interpreter level,
    thus using much of the precious memory it has to allocate to
    function definitions.  Generally, small applications were
    successful.

    I would be very interested to learn about the research and
    experiences of others who are using, or attempting to use,
    expert system applications in CAD, particularly for
    architectural design purposes.

    Cheers,

    Ben Olasov                        <[email-masked]>

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Date: Fri, 13 Mar 1987  19:14 EST
From: [email-masked]
Subject: AIList Digest   V5 #77

Subject: AFOSR Announcement

<The Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) announces a
<new program of support for basic research on the computational
<aspects of neural networks.

This is nice to see.  Nearly thirty years ago, some brave and
imaginative officers at the AFOSR stuck their necks out and funded
several individuals working on early connectionist and symbolic AI
ideas.  Many observers considered them irresponsible, but it led to a
lot of stimulating discoveries.  Now that the field has become
respectable, their foresight ought to be acknowledged.

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

Date: 4 Mar 87 10:44:29 GMT
From: [email-masked]  (Gilbert Cockton)
Subject: Re: Maths as a Science (aka: Learning AI aka: List AI beginners Books)

In article <[email-masked]> [email-masked] (John Rager) writes:
>Logic is a branch of mathematics. The last time I checked mathematics
>was a science.
Where did you check? We have no local index of official scientific
subjects over here :-). Perhaps some US professor has mapped out the whole of
knowledge and categorised it while we were all asleep :-).

In English secondary education, the official policy is that Maths
is NOT a science, as it does not rest on any empirical
methods at all (empirical in the sense of observing the natural world,
perhaps in a controlled experiment). Neither is applied maths a
science, as the modelling process may involve abstracting intuitively
and the return to the real problem domain also involves unobservable
judgement.

Whilst the only thing most people could need to know about
epistemology is how to spell it, folk in AI need to get right to grips
with it if their talk of 'Knowledge Representation/Elicitation' is to
be anything more than one big amateur pose. Throw in some cognitive
sociology and the faint-hearted will probably go back to chess
games and tic-tac-toe (real everyday intelligence that) :-).

--
   Gilbert Cockton, Scottish HCI Centre, Ben Line Building, Edinburgh, EH1 1TN
   JANET:  [email-masked]    ARPA:   [email-masked]
                UUCP:   ..!{backbone}!aimmi.hw.ac.uk!gilbert

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

Date: 6 Mar 87 19:18:37 GMT
From: [email-masked]  (Michael
      Maxwell)
Subject: Re: dear abby....

In article <[email-masked]> saal@/guest5/saalUUCP (45444-AUG871-S.Saal) writes:
>In article <[email-masked]> [email-masked] (Roy Masrani) writes:
>>Dear Abby.  My friends are shunning me because i think that to call
>>a program an "expert system" it must be able to explain its decisions.
>>"The system must be able to show its line of reasoning", I cry.  They
>>say "Forget it, Roy... an expert system need only make decisions that
>>equal human experts...
>
>...Once it is "in production" (the field) it may not
>be as important to give an explanation every time.  This is
>particularly the case when the expert system is used to help do
>some of the more mundane tasks on a very frequent basis.  There
>are 2 reasons for this. (1) the user may be able to agree
>intuitively after deriving the answer -  the machine has just
>helped speed the process. OR (2) If a production ES has been
>converted to a compiled language,  the code to express the
>rationale may be removed to speed up run time.

I'm not an ES expert, but when I talk to a human expert in a field, I commonly
ask "why?" or "what alternatives are there?" (which is the same thing for the
user, I think, although perhaps not for the expert).  This is even true in
"mundane" or frequently performed tasks.

An example is when I went to the AAA to ask what the best route was to drive
from Seattle to Miami in early spring.  Since I'm going to an expert for the
solution, there's a reason, and almost by definition it's not routine.
I may have asked them how to drive from A to B many times, but in this case I
asked why they routed me the way they did, because I'm unsure of
the weather conditions over passes in Montana and Colorado.

If the ES is to not just "make decisions that equal human experts" but
replace and/or augment a human, I would want to be able to ask it the same
questions.  Hence I think that while point (2)--by deleting explanation
code we can speed up the run time system--may be true, it is beside the point
(pun).  If anything, it is an argument for faster hardware.

Or maybe I'm just suspicious...
--
Mike Maxwell
Boeing Advanced Technology Center
        arpa: [email-masked]
        uucp: uw-beaver!uw-june!bcsaic!michaelm

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

Date: Wed, 11 Mar 87 18:02:33 GMT
From: Vic Churchill <[email-masked]>
Reply-to: Vic Churchill <[email-masked]>
Subject: Re: Expert systems

In article <[email-masked]>
[email-masked] (Bruce Krulwich) writes:
>
>There seems to be a trend nowadays to use the phrase "expert systems" to
>mean rule-based systems, not to mean any systems that mimick expert
>behavior.  While I'm not sure I like the terminology, I think that it's
>beneficial to have a seperate catagory for rule-based-systems work,
>since that's often very different from other A.I. work ....

I'm inclined to agree. Once upon a time, "Knowledge Based System"
equalled "Expert System" equalled "Rule Based System", none of which
equalled "AI System". AI sympathists looked askance  at the sudden
mushrooming of expert systems with suspicion and cynicism as a band-
wagon for squeezing as much cash as possible out of gullible sponsors.
(And perhaps the old "if it's *that* easy to do, it can't be AI"
attitudes came around again...)
But KBS work is now returning to the stable, and concerning itself more
and more with "real AI" (!) issues - use of metaknowledge for planning
and control, problems of learning, ... so now when people say "expert
system" they could mean a KBS or they could mean a "first generation"
rule-based system. My guess is that KBS will replace ES as the
preferred term for forthcoming systems, and that ES will shrink to
denoting the things that you make using a commercially- available
ES shell: typically, rule-based (and that don't mean much more than
computer-based) systems.
As for the other question of whether an ES should explain itself: it's
fairly easy to make a RBS give some kind of explanation, and so it's
been done frequently. The domain and user context might not require it,
and the nature of the explanation might be useless anyway, but ....
I'd go along with the other correspondents who argue that a KBS might
just not have access any more (at the time you asked for it) to the
'exact' reasons for its outputs and that maybe there is no 'exact'
reason if there is indeterminacy/context-dependency built in.
Generally, the ability to give explanation on demand seems to be
only an optional, useage-dependent, external characteristic rather than
an essential universal internal one.

   Vic Churchill (  ...!mcvax!ukc!stl!jvc  +44-279-29531 x 2546)
         STL Ltd., London Road, Harlow, Essex CM17 9NA,  U.K.

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

Date: Fri, 13 Mar 87 09:53:51 MST
From: Roy Masrani <[email-masked]>
Subject: reply to dear abby

Dear abby (sigh).  And I thought you had all the answers!

Just to summarize the responses (wow.. so many of them too!)

1.  justification mechanisms are not good enough yet, ergo expert
systems do not need a justification capability.

  This is missing the point.  Just because current justification
  mechanisms (jms)  simply print a trace of its reasoning is not an
  argument against the utility of jms per se.  perhaps the work on
  "deep model" reasoning will come up with good jms.

  >When they ask for "the reason why" should I have written
  >a huge explanation database instead of relying on the
  >programming language internal logic control??????? (Michaelson)

  No, but *when* they ask why, you should get the (current state of
  the art) explanation module that was keeping track of the reasoning
  system to spit out what it has.  Pretty difficult to do in prolog
  unless you build some kind of es shell on top of it.

1b.  Humans do not backtrack over a line of reasoning.  Humans dont
justify themselves.

  An interesting comment by B. Nevin.
  >....Instead, we reconstruct what such a line of reasoning
  > might plausibly be.  It's called rationalization.

  To me, a doctor who says "S**t, I prescribed x... better
  cover myself" is one who is rationalizing his/her decisions.  (but
  at least s/he is providing a justification for the decision (:->))
  Even if the expert is reconstructing the reasoning, it is based on
  the knowledge of the field, and it is difficult (for me) to argue that the
  "rationalization" wasn't a trace of the line of reasoning since you
  dont have access to the reasoning in the first place.

  I dont ask my doctor to always explain herself, but if she was not
  able to when i did, i would leave pretty quickly.

2.  the term "expert system" is not well defined.

  I couldn't agree more with this more.  Three terms are often used
  interchangeably "expert system, rule-based system, knowledge-based
  system".

  A program that behaves as an expert (i.e. makes expert-like
  decisions) cannot be considered an expert system.  Is SPSS (the
  statistical package written in fortran) an expert system.. it sure
  performs functions similar to an expert statistician (relative to
  me, anyway).  A program that only has a clear knowledge/control
  separation cannot be called an es.  any system written on top of a
  spreadsheet has a clear knowledge/control separation.

  >Knowledge-based system technology is a programming methodology, which
  >facilitates the incorporation of "human or expert" knowledge. Hence, the
  >criterion that explanation facilitiy is a must for a knowledge based
  >system (or an expert system once you add the expert's knowledge) is
  >to be questioned.  [...users don't like rule printouts, they like
  >"a more robust ENGLISH translation and "nice graphics" (Sriram)

  I dont see how your (pretty broad) definition of a knowledge-based
  system negates the need for an explanation facility (if kb-system
  in your reality == expert system).  The second comment simply supports
  my view (cf 1)

  >...it seems to me that disputes over whether explanation is "needed"
  >before you can call it an expert system are missing the point... (Coffee)

  Wish I had said that.

3. depends on what the es will be used for.  es will be more accepted
if they have an explanation facility.

  I guess when i think of expert systems' use, i usually think in
  terms of it being used as a consultant or advisor (cf "our
  expert is overworked, and getting old" stories).  Using an "expert
  system" in "production" seems analogous to human experts writing a
  set of instructions for use when they are not available.  Would
  consulting the set of instructions constitute a session with the
  expert?

  Putting a justification mechanism if/when needed is another way
  of saying that the facility is a "luxury" and not really
  necessary.  I think that perhaps I have a very tight view of the
  term "expert system" and its use.

Thanks for the feedback,

roy

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End of AIList Digest
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