Subject: AIList Digest V5 #142

From: [email-masked]@vtcs1
Date: Tue, 16 Jun 87 03:21:07 edt

Date: Sun 14 Jun 1987 22:45-PDT
From: AIList Moderator Kenneth Laws <[email-masked]>
Subject: AIList Digest   V5 #142
To: [email-masked]
Reply-to: [email-masked]
US-Mail: SRI Int., 333 Ravenswood Ave., Menlo Park, CA  94025
Phone: (415) 859-6467

AIList Digest            Monday, 15 Jun 1987      Volume 5 : Issue 142

Today's Topics:
  Program - Cognitive Science at Occidental College,
  Seminars - Universal Plans: Emergent Goal Structures (SRI) &
    Abductive Reasoning in Multifault Diagnostic Systems (UPenn) &
    Potential Histories and Inertial Theories (SU) &
    Controlling Execution of Logic Programs (MCC),
  Conferences - OOPSLA-87 &
    Architectures for Intelligent Interfaces

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

Date: 04 Jun 87 09:00:45 PST
From: [email-masked] (Saul P. Traiger)
Subject: Program - Cognitive Science at Occidental College

Occidental College,  a liberal arts college which enrolls approximately
1600 students, is pleased to announce a new Program in Cognitive
Science. The Program offers an undergraduate major and minor in Cognitive
Science. Faculty participating in this program include members of the
departments of mathematics, linguistics, psychology, and philosophy.

The program is the result of one of the most exciting developments in
higher education today, namely the interaction among philosophers,
mathematicians, psychologists, linguists, and computer scientists. This
interaction is the result of common interests in cognitive science.
Computer architecture is now as likely to be discussed in a philosophy or
psychology seminar as it is in a computer science course. Shared
interests in cognitive science lead to the development and adoption of an
interdepartmental program in cognitive science at Occidental College.

The undergraduate major in Cognitive Science at Occidental College
includes courses in mathematics, philosophy, psychology and linguistics.
Instruction in mathematics introduces students to computer languages,
discrete mathematics,  logic, and the mathematics of computation.
Philosophy offerings  cover the philosophy of mind, with emphasis on
computational models of the mind, the theory of knowledge, the philosophy
of science, and the philosophy of language. Psychology courses include
basic psychology, learning, perception, and cognition. Courses in
linguistics provide a theoretical foundation in natural languages, their
acquisition, development, and structure.

For more information about Occidental College's Cognitive Science Program
please contact:

Professor Saul Traiger
Cognitive Science Program
1600 Campus Road
Occidental College
Los Angeles, CA 90041

ARPANET: [email-masked]
BITNET:  oxy!traiger@hamlet
CSNET:   [email-masked]
UUCP:    ....{seismo, rutgers, ames}!cit-vax!oxy!traiger

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

Date: Thu, 11 Jun 87 11:29:04 PDT
From: Amy Lansky <[email-masked]>
Subject: Seminar - Universal Plans: Emergent Goal Structures (SRI)

                       EXECUTING UNIVERSAL PLANS:
                 EMERGENT GOAL STRUCTURES & THEIR USES

                    Marcel Schoppers ([email-masked])
                        Advanced Decision Systems

                       11:00 AM, MONDAY, June 15
              SRI International, Building E, Room EJ228

``Universal plans'' are designed for execution in unpredictable state spaces,
refusing to over-commit to a specific future course of events, and deliberately
making no assumptions about how situations might follow one another. Instead,
plan synthesis becomes the goal-directed selection of reactions to possible
situations; plans become inherently conditional; and plan execution classifies
the current situation so as to respond with the selected reaction. Consequently
there is no inherent distinction between expected and unexpected events; the
concepts of success & failure are irrelevant for both synthesis and execution;
and "error recovery" needs no special mechanisms beyond those already present
for normal execution.

After introducing the Universal Plan representation, this talk will show how at
any given instant, plan predicates can be interpreted as goals of achievement
or of maintenance, and that this interpretation can be used to reconstruct a
four-fold typing of events (of success, failure, serendipity and sabotage). In
other words, intentions emerge from the interaction of plan with environment
(the environment has a large hand in determining the agent's goals at each
moment), and the notions of success and failure are not primitive but
perceived (relative to the agent's goals).

The Universal Plan representation also indicates precisely which conditions
must be monitored at each instant to enable detection of all events of each
type. Two benefits follow; I will only mention them briefly. First, we can
get complexity estimates for detecting all serendipity and sabotage events,
and can produce informed strategies to alleviate sensing costs. Second, the
goal structure at each moment in time contains all the information required
to choose an appropriate action, thus facilitating incremental synthesis.

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

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

Date: Thu, 11 Jun 87 14:13:25 EDT
From: [email-masked] (Tim Finin)
Subject: Seminar - Abductive Reasoning in Multifault Diagnostic
         Systems (UPenn)

       ABDUCTIVE REASONING in MULTIPLE-FAULT DIAGNOSTIC SYSTEMS

                             Gary Morris
                   Computer and Information Science
                      University of Pennsylvania
                           Philadelphia PA

Abductive reasoning involves generating explanations for observed
facts or symptoms -- i.e. diagnosis.  Diagnosis is more difficult,
both theoretically and practically, when more than one disorder or
fault may occur simultaneously in the system beign diagnosed.  Five
approaches to this problem are reviewed and contrasted:

  - Binary Choice Bayesian (Ben-Bassat: the MEDAS system)

  - Sequential Bayesian (Pople: INTERNIST)

  - Causal Model Reasoning (Patil: ABEL)

  - Parsimonious Set Covering (Reggia & Nau: various systems)

  - "Diagnosis From First Principles" (Reiter, deKleer: various)

Finally, an emerging convergence of these methods is described.

                  Friday, June 12,  3:30 pm
                        Room 554 Moore

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

Date: 01 Jun 87  1605 PDT
From: Vladimir Lifschitz <[email-masked]>
Subject: Seminar - Potential Histories and Inertial Theories (SU)

                [Forwarded from the Stanford bboard.]

Yoav Shoham asked me to send a nice little poem to this mailing list:

                 With logics that are monotonic
                 Relations are nice but platonic
                 It's when you permit
                 Just models that fit
                 That things become most erotonic

Yoav will also speak at our seminar on a related subject:

            POTENTIAL HISTORIES AND INERTIAL THEORIES

                           Yoav Shoham
                     Thursday, June 4, 4:15pm
                       Bldg. 160, Room 161K

In previous talks I never managed to get to my solution to the
extended-prediction problem (which is my name for the problem
subsuming the frame problem, a name that, shall we say, never
quite caught). I'll describe the intuitive concept of a potential
history, which has a strong McDermott-like persistence flavor.
I'll then embed the concept formally within the logic of
chronological ignorance. I'll identify a class of theories, called
inertial theories, which extend causal theories, and yet which
a. are expressive enough to capture the notion of potential
histories, and b. have the "unique model" and easy computability
properties.

My intention is this time to go into some detail. I'm still
not sure I have enough material for an hour, and if I don't
I'll ask the audience some questions on TMS's.

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

Date: Mon 1 Jun 87 11:04:12-CDT
From: Ellie Huck <[email-masked]>
Subject: Seminar - Controlling Execution of Logic Programs (MCC)

                              Madhur Kohli
                     Department of Computer Science
                         University of Maryland

                            June 4 - 10:30am
                       ACA Conference Room 2.806

              Controlling the Execution of Logic Programs

 The performance of a logic programming system is  dictated  by  the
 control  strategy  of  its  problem  solving  component.  This talk
 describes a methodology for the specification  and  utilization  of
 control knowledge for logic programs.

 We  describe  a  control  specification  system  developed  as   an
 experimental  tool  for  the  study  of  control  issues in problem
 solving.  Analysis of the control behavior  of  several  sequential
 problem  solvers and PRISM, a parallel logic programming system, is
 used to identify parameters to express control decisions and points
 at  which  they  apply.   These  results  form  the  basis  for the
 definition of a control language to specify the control behavior of
 problem solvers.  The language is expressive enough to specify many
 general  and  specialized  top-down  execution  schemes  for   both
 sequential  and  parallel  problem  solvers.   A  compiler has been
 developed to generate an interpreter which implements the specified
 control  strategy.   Experimental  results  show that the generated
 interpreters  provide  an  order  of  magnitude  improvement   over
 meta-interpretation of the control specification.

 Madhur Kohli
 June 4 - 10:30
 ACA Conference Room 2.806

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

Date: 5 Jun 87 18:50:31 GMT
From: [email-masked] (David
      Fordyce)
Subject: Conference - OOPSLA-87
Article-I.D.: home.444

        OBJECT-ORIENTED DATABASE WORKSHOP: Implementation Aspects

                 To be held in conjunction with the

                 Object-oriented Programming Systems,
          Languages and Applications (OOPSLA-87) Conference

                         October 5, 1987

                         Orlando, Florida

Object-oriented database systems combine the streangths of
object-oriented programming systems and data models, and database
systems.  This half-day workshop will be held on Monday morning, October
5, 1987.  The goal of the workshop is to study the implementation
aspects of object-oriented database systems.  The workshop will focus on
issues such as object fault management, storage management (buffering,
prefetching, clustering, etc.), object persistence, object sharing,
transactions on objects, concurrency control, recovery, and performance
issues.

The workshop panel will consist of: Timothy Andrewes (Ontologic), Umesh
Dayal (Computer Corporation of America), Prof.  David Maier (Oregon
Graduate Center and Servio Logic), Patrick O'Brien (Digital Equipment
Corporation), Prof.  Lawrence Rowe (University of California at
Berkeley), Prof.  Alfred Spector (Carnegie-Mellon University), David
Wells (Texas Instruments), and Prof.  Stan Zdonik (Brown University).
In the first 90 minutes, each panel member will present his position.
This will be followed by questions from the workshop participants and
discussions.

To encourage vigorous interactions and exchange of ideas between the
participants, the workshop will be limited to 50 qualified participants.
If you are interested in attending the workshop, please submit three
copies of a single page abstract to the workshop chairman describing
your work related to the implementation issues of object-oriented
database systems.  The workshop participants will be selected based on the
relevance and significance of their work described in the abstract.
There will be no proceedings for the workshop.

Abstracts should be submitted to the workshop chairman by August 1,
1987.  Selected participants will be notified by September 1, 1987

Workshop Chairman:

Dr. Satish M. Thatte
Manager, Database Systems Branch
Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
Texas Instruments Incorporated
P.O. Box 226015, M/S 238
Dallas, TX 75266

Phone: (214)-995-0340
CSNet: Thatte@TI-CSL

--
Regards, David

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

Date: Fri, 5 Jun 87 09:42:22 PDT
From: [email-masked] (Sherman Tyler)
Subject: Conference - Architectures for Intelligent Interfaces

                        Call for Participation

                             Workshop on

              Architectures for Intelligent Interfaces:

                       Elements and Prototypes

            March 29 - April 1, 1988, Monterey, California
                          Sponsored by AAAI

Objective:  The term ``Intelligent Interface'' characterizes  the  set
of   computer-human   interfaces   which  employ  AI  to  enhance  the
transactional nature of the interface.  The goal of the workshop is to
explore  ways  in which AI techniques (e.g., knowledge representation,
inference mechanisms, and heuristic search) can be used to provide the
adaptability   and   reasoning   capabilities   required  for  a  more
intelligent human-machine interaction.

Some possible areas for focused discussions might include:

      *  Models (user, system, task) - adapting the  dialogue  to  the
         current   context   of   the   interaction,  considering  the
         particular user, the target system, and the  high-level  task
         under execution;

      *  Channels of Communication -  allowing  users  to  communicate
         intentions  with  a  minimum  of  learning  and effort, using
         Natural Language, Graphics,  and  the  integration  of  mixed
         modalities of input;

      *  Planning - for  recognizing  user  plans  and  their  implied
         goals, generating plans to meet those goals, and planning how
         to best display the resulting information to communicate  the
         result of the executed action;

      *  Interface-Building  Tools  -  using  artificial  intelligence
         techniques   to   support   developers   in   designing   and
         constructing interfaces.

Attendance:   In  order  to  provide  an  intellectually   stimulating
environment  conducive  to  interaction  and  exchange  of  ideas, the
attendance will be limited  to  approximately  35  participants.   The
ideal   participant  is  an  individual  who  is  actively  addressing
theoretical,  research,  and/or  implementation  issues  relevant   to
Intelligent  Interfaces  (with a bias toward those who have dealt with
implementation issues at some level).   Limited  financial  assistance
will   be   available   for  graduate  students  who  are  invited  to
participate.

Review Process:  The submitted abstracts and autobiographies  will  be
reviewed  by  the  program  committee.   Invitation will be based upon
relevance of the work to the goals of the workshop, and on  the  basis
of significance, originality, and scientific quality.

Workshop Organization:   The  workshop  organizers  are  J.   Sullivan
(Lockheed  AI Center) and S.  Tyler (Lockheed AI Center).  The program
committee consists of J.  Mackinlay (Xerox PARC), R.  Neches
(USC Information Sciences Institute), E. Rissland (University of
Massachusetts), and N. Sondheimer (USC Information Sciences Institute).

Submission:   A  detailed  eight  page  abstract  and   a   one   page
biographical  sketch  (six  copies  of  each)  should  be submitted by
September 1, 1987.  Invitations for participation will be extended  by
October  16,  1987,  with  complete  papers  due by December 18, 1987.
Publication of the proceedings is planned, therefore  the  quality  of
the papers is important.

Submit abstracts to:   Joseph  W.   Sullivan  or  Sherman  W.   Tyler,
O/90-06  B/259, Lockheed AI Center, 2710 Sand Hill Rd., Menlo Park, CA
94025,      (415)      354-5200,       [email-masked]       or
[email-masked]

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End of AIList Digest
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