Subject: AIList Digest V5 #123

From: [email-masked]@vtcs1
Date: Fri, 15 May 87 04:11:08 edt

Date: Wed 13 May 1987 21:59-PDT
From: AIList Moderator Kenneth Laws <[email-masked]>
Subject: AIList Digest   V5 #123
To: [email-masked]
Reply-to: [email-masked]
US-Mail: SRI Int., 333 Ravenswood Ave., Menlo Park, CA  94025
Phone: (415) 859-6467

AIList Digest           Thursday, 14 May 1987     Volume 5 : Issue 123

Today's Topics:
  Seminars - Should Feigenbaum and Ginsberg Talk to Each Other? (SU) &
    ONTIC: Knowledge Representation for Mathematics (MCC) &
    PARLOG and Prolog:  A Marriage of Convenience (MCC) &
    Unframing the Frame Problem (UTexas) &
    Concurrent Logic Programming Languages (MCC) &
    Coda: An extended debugger for PROLOG (MCC) &
    Some Graph Theoretic Models in AI (MCC) &
    Causal Reasoning as Nonmonotonic Temporal Reasoning (SU),
  Conference - Computer Vision Workshop

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

Date: 11 May 87  1633 PDT
From: Vladimir Lifschitz <[email-masked]>
Subject: Seminar - Should Feigenbaum and Ginsberg Talk to Each Other? (SU)

            SHOULD ED FEIGENBAUM AND I TALK TO EACH OTHER?

                        Matt Ginsberg, Stanford
                        ([email-masked])

                        Thursday, May 14, 4:15pm
                          Bldg. 160, Room 161K

In a previous talk, I argued on philosophical grounds that the
time has come for the "neats" and "scruffies" in AI to begin
to resolve their differences by working on problems of interest
to each other.  I suggested that, if one were to view the scruffy
programs as performing two distinct tasks, one being conventional
inference, and the other being some sort of "bookkeeping" with
the results, insights could be obtained that would be of interest
to both the formal and informal camps.

In this talk, I discuss the application of this idea to problems
of interest to the informal camp.  Specifically, I will discuss
the construction of a "flexible" expert sytem shell that can be easily
tailored to solve problems using a variety of different methods, simply
by changing an explicit set of bookkeeping functions.  I will show
the system using first-order logic to simulate a digital circuit, as
suggested by Genesereth in his DART work, using an ATMS to diagnose the
same digital circuit, as suggested recently by deKleer, solving a
simple problem in default reasoning, and then solving the same problem
more efficiently by using bookkeeping functions that include both
default and justification information.

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

Date: Fri 3 Apr 87 08:39:00-CST
From: Ellie Huck <[email-masked]>
Subject: Seminar - ONTIC: Knowledge Representation for Mathematics
         (MCC)

Please join the AI Group for the following talk:

                           David McAllester
                              MIT AI Lab

                           April 7 - 10:30am
                            MCC Auditorium

                 "Ontic:  A Knowledge Representation
                      Language for Mathematics"

Ontic is an interactive system for developing and verifying
mathematics.  The system appears to be able to verify "proofs" that
are only one to three times longer than corresponding previously
published English arguments.  Furthermore, the structure of the
machine readable proofs closely matches the structure of the English
arguments.  Ontic's ability to read concise proofs is based on a
mechanism for automatically finding and applying information from a
lemma library containing hundreds of mathematical facts.  Starting
with only the axioms of Zermello Fraenkel set theory, the Ontic system
has been used to build a data base of definitions and lemmas
culminating in a proof of the Stone representation theorem for Boolean
lattices.  This proof involves an ultrafilter construction and is
similar in complexity to the Tychonoff theorem that an arbitrary
product of compact spaces is compact.  This talk will discuss the
structure of Ontic's machine readable proofs, the automatic theorem
proving mechanisms used, and the empirically observed differences
between Ontic's proofs and English arguments.

April 7 - 10:30am
MCC Auditorium

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

Date: Mon 6 Apr 87 15:30:39-CDT
From: Ellie Huck <[email-masked]>
Subject: Seminar - PARLOG and Prolog:  A Marriage of Convenience (MCC)

Please join the AI Program for the following speaker:

                            Steve Gregory
                           Imperial College

                          April 8 - 10:00am
                            MCC Auditorium

           "PARLOG and Prolog:  A Marriage of Convenience"
                   Joint Research with Keith Clark)

PARLOG and Prolog are suited to distinct application areas because of
a fundamental difference.  PARLOG (and other committed choice
languages) feature stream and-parallelism, while Prolog (and its
parallel variants) allow don't-know non-determinism.  These two
properties are not easily combined efficiently.

In this talk, we present a new combination of PARLOG and Prolog which
features "don't-know non-deterministic stream and-parallelism".  This
makes PARLOG suitable for AI applications.  We show how this can be
achieved with only minor extensions to existing PARLOG and Prolog
implementations.

April 8 - 10:00am
MCC Auditorium

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

Date: Tue 14 Apr 87 13:17:08-CDT
From: [email-masked]
Subject: Seminar - Unframing the Frame Problem (UTexas)

                          UNFRAMING THE FRAME PROBLEM

                              Dennis de Champeaux

                             Hewlett Packard Labs
                             Palo Alto, California

Date:           Thursday, April 16, 1987

Time:           3:00 pm - 4:00 pm

Where:          Taylor Hall 3.128

                COFFEE 2:30 pm, TAYLOR 3.128

The  predicate  calculus in uncommitted to any ontology.  Consequently it has a
nearly boundless domain of application.  The price of this generality  is  that
some pervasive properties of the domain are represented at great implementation
cost.  The Frame Problem is an example par  excellence.    To  cope  with  this
problem,  we  propose  to employ a fragment of intensional logic.  Consequently
frame axioms or their equivalent have only to be injected  for  those  entities
that  are  affected  by an event, i.e., those for which a new extension must be
introduced.  The situation calculus  allows  the  description  of  a  state  of
affairs  to  coexist  with  the  history.    This  property is preserved in our
proposal.  The formalism  has  been  implemented  in  the  context  of  program
verification.

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

Date: Thu 16 Apr 87 11:20:45-CDT
From: Ellie Huck <[email-masked]>
Subject: Seminar - Concurrent Logic Programming Languages (MCC)

As announced earlier, please join the AI Program for the following
talk:

                 Concurrent Logic Programming Languages
                           Vijay A. Saraswat
                               CSD CMU
                          April 17 - 9:30am
                            MCC Auditorium

In this talk we present the language CP(!,|,&), which, together with
languages such as Concurrent Prolog and GHC explores the space of
concurrent logic programming (CLP) languages.  Theoretically, CLP
languages offer a simple model of concurrent computation; practically,
they offer a powerful pointer-based, concurrent programming vehicle
that supports new paradigms of computation.

We illustrate the conceptual simplicity of CLP languages by presenting
a simple formal semantics for (Flat) CP(!,|,&), showing how to extend
the semantic techniques to GHC and Concurrent Prolog, and proving some
relationships between these languages. We show that there is a natural
definition of the relationship `IS-A-SUBSET-OF' between CLP languages,
and that:

    GHC is-a-subset-of CP(!,|) is-a-subset-of (Safe) Concurrent Prolog

We also present the notion of CONSISTENT COMPLETENESS of LP languages
and argue that it serves to identify those languages which may
legitimately be called (Horn) LOGIC programming languages. We show:

    CP(!,|,&), and hence GHC, is consistently complete.
    Concurrent Prolog and (sequential) Prolog (with cut) are not.

On the practical side, of the various styles of programming supported
by CP, perhaps the most novel is that of CONCURRENT, CONTROLLABLE
constraint systems.  We argue that purely declarative search
formalisms, whether they are based on dependency-directed backtracking
(as in Steele's thesis or the work of Bruynooghe et al) or bottom-up
breadth-first definite clause theorem provers (deKleer's ATMS) or
built-in general purpose heuristics (Laurier's ALICE) are unlikely to
be efficient enough to serve as the basis of a GENERAL PURPOSE
programming formalism which supports the notion of constraint-based
computation.  CP allows the user to express domain-specific heuristics
and CONTROL the forward search process based on eager propagation of
constraints and early detection of determinacy and contradiction.
This control follows naturally from the alternate metaphor of viewing
constraints as processes that communicate by exchanging messages. The
language, in addition, provides naturally for the dynamic generation
and hierarchical specification of constraints, for concurrent
exploration of alternate solutions, for pruning and merging sub-spaces
and for expressing preferences over which portions of the search space
to explore next.

Friday - April 17
9:30am
MCC Auditorium

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

Date: Fri 24 Apr 87 11:34:28-CDT
From: Ellie Huck <[email-masked]>
Subject: Seminar - Coda: An extended debugger for PROLOG (MCC)

Please join the AI Program for the following speaker:

                            David Plummer
                         University of Texas
                          April 29 - 10:00am
                            MCC Auditorium

                Coda: An extended debugger for PROLOG
                =====================================

In this talk I will describe @b<Coda>, an extension of the @i<de
facto> standard debugger which presents more information about the
execution of the program to the user as the program is debugged.
@b<Coda> extends the standard debugger in a number of ways.  First,
@b<Coda> allows the user to interact with the pattern matching
computation step.  Thus the reason for the failure of a particular
goal may be more precisely determined by the programmer.  Second,
@b<Coda> displays the program trace in terms of the clauses of the
program rather than the goals that are executed.  Thus, the program
trace is directly related to the program that was written, and is at a
level more appropriate to the programmer than that of the standard
debugger.  Finally, @b<Coda> allows finer control over the information
that is displayed by the debugger, by an extended command set and a
more powerful language for describing " spy points".

April 29 - 10:00am
MCC Auditorium

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

Date: Tue 5 May 87 09:02:33-CDT
From: Ellie Huck <[email-masked]>
Subject: Seminar - Some Graph Theoretic Models in AI (MCC)

Please join the AI Program for the following speaker:

                             Frank Harary
                              Consultant
May 7 at 10:00am
MCC Auditorium

                 "Some Graph Theoretic Models in AI"

Trees and other graphs abound in AI theory, e.g., in:

a)  Searching trees and labeling them
b)  Three proofs from the apochryphal "Best Book of Mathematical
    Proofs":
    1) The ramsly number of a triangle is 6
    2) Every self-complementary graph has diameter 2 or 3
    3) Every weakly connected nontrivial acryclic digraph has a
       receiver
c)  On converting a theorem into a game
d)  On games and game trees

Thursday, May 7
10:00am
MCC Auditorium

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

Date: Wed, 13 May 87 17:11:10 PDT
From: Amy Lansky <[email-masked]>
Subject: Seminar - Causal Reasoning as Nonmonotonic Temporal
         Reasoning (SU)

          CAUSAL REASONING AS NONMONOTONIC TEMPORAL REASONING

               Yoav Shoham ([email-masked])
                       Stanford University

                   11:00 AM, MONDAY, May 18
            SRI International, Building E, Room EJ228

This talk will address the following topics:

  * A definition of the problems of Qualification and Extended Prediction,
    and their relation to the Frame Problem.

  * An outline of a semantical approach to nonmonotonic logics.

  * A definition of a specific nonmonotonic epistemic logic, the logic
    of Chronological Ignorance, and a demonstration of its utility in
    solving the two problems mentioned above.

I will argue that the above analysis explains the meaning of causation,
and its central role in commonsense reasoning.

VISITORS:  Please arrive 5 minutes early so that you can be escorted up
from the E-building receptionist's desk.  Thanks!

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

Date: Mon 11 May 87 13:08:24-PDT
From: Keith Price <[email-masked]>
Subject: Conference - Computer Vision Workshop

                      WORKSHOP ON COMPUTER VISION
                         IEEE COMPUTER SOCIETY
               FONTAINEBLEAU HILTON, MIAMI BEACH, FLORIDA
                      NOVEMBER 30-DECEMBER 2, 1987

General Chair:                      Program Chairs:
Keith Price                         Narendra Ahuja
Institute for Robotics and          Thomas Huang
 Intelligent Systems, MC 0273       Coordinated Science Laboratory
Electrical Engineering - Systems    University of Illinois
University of Southern California   1101 W. Springfield Ave
Los Angeles, CA 90089               Urbana, IL 61801
[email-masked]               [email-masked]
Tel: (213) 743-5526                 Tel: (217) 333-1837

     Papers are solicited on the following and related topics:
Image structure (edges, regions,    High level vision
 texture, ...)                      Vision guided manipulation,
Segmentation and 2-D description     navigation
3-D from 2-D (motion, stereo,       Vision systems
 texture, ...)                      Industrial vision
Shape and 3-D description           Human visual perception
Range imaging
Model based vision

                            REVIEW OF PAPERS

     In  order  to  maintain  quality  of  papers and consistency in the
reviewing standards, all papers will be reviewed by two members  of  the
program   committee  (membership  yet  to  be  announced).  The  program
committee will then make the final selections. Papers will  be  accepted
either  for  regular  peresentations  (6  proceedings  pages)  or poster
presentations (3 proceedings pages). It is important that regular papers
report  on  new  and  interesting research ideas; research proposals and
minor changes to old ideas are discouraged.  Poster presentations  could
be less complete or present novel results of established techniques.

                          SUBMISSION OF PAPERS

     Each  paper  should  be  complete  and  have a cover sheet with the
title, authors' names, primary address, index terms including  at  least
one  of the above topics, and the type of paper (regular or poster). The
cover page will not be sent to the reviewers. The body of the paper must
contain  the  title  of  the  paper  and an abstract of about 250 words,
followed by the text of the paper. The authors' names  and  organization
should  not  be on the body of the paper. The length of the paper should
not exceed:  25 double spaced typed pages for regular papers  (including
about  6000  words of text and illustrations), or 12 double spaced typed
pages for  poster  papers  (including  about  3000  words  of  text  and
illustrations).

     Four copies of papers should be sent to:
    Narendra Ahuja
    Coordinated Science Laboratory
    University of Illinois
    1101 W. Springfield Avenue
    Urbana, Illinois 61801

     The  deadline  for  submission  of papers is July 14, 1987. Authors
will be notified of acceptance by late August 1987. Final  camera  ready
copies of the papers will be due at IEEE early in October 1987.

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

End of AIList Digest
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