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

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Date: Thu, 3 Oct 85 16:30:14 edt

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Subject: AIList Digest   V3 #131
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AIList Digest            Sunday, 29 Sep 1985      Volume 3 : Issue 131

Today's Topics:
  Seminars - KSL/Symbolic Systems Resources Group (SU) &
    Qualitative Simulation of Mechanisms in Diagnosis (UT) &
    Purpose-Directed Analogy (GTE) &
    Connectionist Parallel Distributed Processing (UCB) &
    Processes, Simultaneity and Causality (SRI) &
    Theory of Declarative Knowledge (UPenn),
  Seminar Series - Software Environments (CSLI),
  Conferences - Society for Computer Simulation & SIGIR/SIGDOC Workshop

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

Date: Tue 24 Sep 85 11:10:07-PDT
From: Ana Haunga <[email-masked]>
Subject: Seminar - KSL/Symbolic Systems Resources Group (SU)

                     KSL/Symbolic Systems Resources Group

                        Tom Rindfleisch and Bill Yeager
                              Stanford University

This is the first of several SIGLunches this fall that will summarize work in
each of the five sublabs of the Stanford Knowledge Systems Laboratory (KSL),
including the Heuristic Programming Project, HELIX Group, Medical Computer
Science Group, Logic Group, and Symbolic Systems Resources Group (SSRG).  This
week's talk will consist of a brief overview of the KSL as an AI laboratory and
a survey of SSRG research and development activities.

Since 1980, the computing environment for KSL research has been moving slowly
away from central time-shared mainframes (like the SUMEX 2060 and VAX) toward
networked Lisp workstations.  Improvements in workstation performance, falling
prices, better packaging, and a wider vendor selection are now accelerating
this transition.  Over the next five years, we are proposing to phase out the
SUMEX research mainframes so that all KSL computing will be workstation-based
-- not only research program development but common tasks like text processing,
mail, file management, and budgeting.  This raises several important issues
that will require a community system software effort comparable to that in the
1970's that led to the current TOPS-20 and UNIX environments.

How can the user computing environment be improved using workstation bitmapped
graphics and AI methods for more intelligent systems/applications programs?

How can user displays connect flexibly to workstations -- from home, over
remote networks like ARPANET, and locally over Ethernet?

How can the considerable computing power distributed among many workstations be
combined to support individual user tasks?

What are the impacts on network protocols and services (file servers, gateways,
printing, etc.) of large numbers of workstations?

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

Date: Tue, 24 Sep 85 15:50:05 cdt
From: [email-masked] (Rajive Bagrodia)
Subject: Seminar - Qualitative Simulation of Mechanisms in Diagnosis (UT)

                  Qualitative Simulation of Mechanisms
                                  and
                   Causal Models in Medical Diagnosis

                               Ben Kuipers

                        Friday, 27th September,

                            Pai 3.38  12 pm

Researchers in the AIM (Artificial Intelligence in  Medicine)  community
have concluded that expert medical diagnosis requires  knowledge  in the
form  of  causal  models, to support reasoning about  how  physiological
mechanisms   work  and  interact.  One  form  of  causal   reasoning  is
qualitative simulation of  descriptions of the structure  of  mechanisms
to yield  predictions of their behavior.  Qualitative  simulation  has a
number  of interesting  mathematical  properties, and a fast  algorithm.
The knowledge base of mechanism descriptions makes it possible  to model
both  a  healthy  and  a  broken  physiological  mechanism  with   minor
perturbations of the same structural description.  This talk will review
recent  results and open problems in both qualitative simulation and its
application to expert systems in medicine.

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

Date: Thu, 26 Sep 85 10:35:40 EDT
From: Bernard Silver <[email-masked]>
Subject: Seminar - Purpose-Directed Analogy (GTE)

                GTE LABORATORIES INCORPARATED
                40 Sylvan Rd, Waltham, MA 02254

TIME:           October 3, 10AM

SPEAKER:        Smadar Kedar-Cabelli
                Laboratory for Computer Science
                Rutgers University, NJ

TITLE:          PURPOSE-DIRECTED ANALOGY

Existing techniques for analogical reasoning are based on mapping
some underlying causal network of relations between analogous
situations.  However, causal relations relevant for the purpose
of one analogy may be irrelevant for another.  We describe here
a technique which uses an explicit representation of the analogy
to automatically create the relevant causal network.

NOTE: If you wish to attend this seminar, please contact
Bernard Silver on (617) 466-2663

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

Date: Wed, 25 Sep 85 14:09:11 PDT
From: [email-masked] (Paula Chertok)
Subject: Seminar - Connectionist Parallel Distributed Processing (UCB)

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

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

        SPEAKER:          David  Rumelhart,  Institute  for  Cognitive
                          Science, UCSD

        TITLE:            ``Parallel Distributed Processing:  Explora-
                          tions in the Microstructure of Cognition''

        Parallel Distributed Processing (PDP) is the name which I  and
        my  colleagues  at  San  Diego  have  given  to  the  class of
        neurally-inspired models of cognition we have  been  studying.
        We  have  applied  this  class  of "connectionist" models to a
        variety of  domains  including  perception,  memory,  language
        acquisition  and motor control.  I will briefly present a gen-
        eral framework for the class of PDP  models,  show  how  these
        models  can  be applied in the case of acquisiton of verb mor-
        phology, and show how such  macrostructural  concepts  as  the
        schema  can be seen as emerging from the microstructure of PDP
        models.  Implications of the PDP perspective  for  our  under-
        standing of cognitive processes will be discussed.

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

Date: Thu 26 Sep 85 16:58:54-PDT
From: [email-masked]
Subject: Seminar - Processes, Simultaneity and Causality (SRI)

                  PROCESSES, SIMULTANEITY AND CAUSALITY

                          Michael P.  Georgeff
                      Artificial Intelligence Center
                           SRI International

                    11:00 AM, MONDAY, September 30
       SRI International, Building E, Room EJ228 (new conference room)

The notion of process is essential for reasoning about the behavior of
multiple agents or single agents in dynamic worlds.  In this talk, we
show why reasoning about process is so important, and contrast this
with other approaches in AI which are primarily based on the allowable
behaviors of agents.  An algebra of processes based on events is given.
We then show how events can be represented as changes of world state,
and how state properties can be inferred from the model. Interestingly,
no STRIPS-like assumption is involved in the definition of events, thus
allowing a proper model-theoretic semantics.  One of the most important
features of the model is a hiding operation.  This provides an abstraction
capability that can be used to avoid the combinatorial explosion
typical of other AI approaches.  Finally, we introduce a notion of
causality between events and processes.  This, together with the
notion of simultaneous actions and hiding operations, allows us to
avoid most of the problems associated with the frame problem.

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

Date: Sat, 28 Sep 85 18:06 EDT
From: Tim Finin <[email-masked]>
Subject: Seminar - Theory of Declarative Knowledge (UPenn)

TOWARDS A THEORY OF DECLARATIVE KNOWLEDGE
Krzysztof R. Apt, LITP, Universite Paris, IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center

3:00pm Tuesday 1 Oct, CIS, University of Pennsylvania

        We study logic programming with negation from the point of
        view of  its use  for building  expert  system shells.  We
        achieve   a  separation   between   the   declarative  and
        procedural meaning of the programs. We do this by defining
        a  class of  stratified programs  which  disallow  certain
        combination  of  recursion  and  negation  and to which we
        restrict our study.  We develop a  fixed point  theory  of
        non-monotonic  operators   and   apply it  to   provide  a
        declarative meaning of the programs based on model theory.
        We also define a backchaining interpretor and show that in
        the  absence of  function symbols  it  computes a selected
        model of a stratified program.

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

Date: Tue 24 Sep 85 10:35:38-PDT
From: Terry Winograd <[email-masked]>
Subject: Seminar Series - Software Environments (CSLI)

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

New project meeting on environments
Mondays 1-2 in the trailer classroom, Ventura
[Future meetings will be from 12 to 1:15.]

Beginning Monday, Sept. 30 there will be a weekly meeting on
environments for working with symbolic structures (this includes
programming environments, specification environments,  document
preparation environments, "linguistic workstations", and grammar-
development environments).  As a part of doing our research, many
of us at CSLI have developed such environments, sometimes as a matter
of careful design, and sometimes by the seat of the pants.  In this
meeting we will present to each other what we have done, and also look
at work done elsewhere (both through guest speakers and reading
discussions).

The goal is to look at the design issues that come up in building
environments and to see how they have been approached in a variety of
cases.  We are not concerned with the particular details ("pop-up menus
are/aren't better than pull-down menus") but with more fundamental
problems.  For example:

  What is the nature of the underlying structure the environment supports:
  chunks of text? a data-base of relations? a tree or graph structure?
  How is this reflected in the basic mode of operation for the user?

  How does the user understand the relation between objects (and
  operations on them) that appear on the visible representation (screen
  and/or hardcopy) and the corresponding objects (and operations) on
  some kind of underlying structure?  How is this maintained in a
  situation of multiple presentations (different views and/or multiple
  windows)?  How is it maintained in the face of breakdown (system
  failure or catastrophic user error in the middle of an edit, transfer,
  etc.)?

  Does the environment deal with a distributed network of storage and
  processing devices?  If so, does it try to present some kind of
  seamless "information space" or does it provide a model of objects
  and operations that deals with moving things (files, functions, etc.)
  from one "place" to another, where different places have relevant
  different properties (speed of access, security, shareability, etc.)?

  How is consistency maintained between separate objects that are
  conceptually linked (source code and object code, formatter source
  and printer-ready files, grammars and parse-structures generated from
  them, etc.)?  To what extent is this simply left to user convention,
  supported by bookkeeping tools, or automated?

  What is the model for change of objects over time?  This includes
  versions, releases, time-stamps, reference dates, change logs, etc.,
  How is information about temporal and derivational relationships
  supported within the system?

  What is the structure for coordination of work?  How is access to the
  structures regulated to prevent "stepping on each other's toes"? to
  facilitate joint development? to keep track of who needs to do what
  when?

Lurking under these are the BIG issues of ontology, epistemology,
representation, and so forth.  Hopefully our discussions on a more down-
to-earth level will be guided by a consideration of the larger picture
and will contribute to our understanding of it.

The meeting is open to anyone who wishes to attend.  Topics will be
announced in advance in the newsletter.  The first meeting will
be devoted to a general discussion of what should be addressed and to
identifying the relevant systems (and corresponding people) within
CSLI, and within the larger (Stanford, Xerox, SRI) communities in
which it exists.

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

Date: 24 Sep 1985 09:24-CST
From: [email-masked]
Subject: Conference - Society for Computer Simulation

Sponsor: Society for Computer Simulation

Dates: October 24-25 1985
Location: General Dynamics Recreation Area
Fee: $25 both day; $15 one day; $10 both days full time students

AI related talks listed below:
Thursday, October 24
8:45 AM Session I

"Adaptive Sequencing Rules in a Shop Floor Control System", Chris Gill,
General Dyanamics

Session II

"Shape Memory Alloy fo Robot Muscles", MIke Zerkus, Jeff Akus,
Martin Spizale, Louisiana Tech University

"Advanced Data and Picture Transformation System",
Dr. V. Devarajan, Y. P. Chen, LTV Corporation

10:30 AM Keynote Address
Keyote address: "Robotics and Intelligent Systems: An Overview"
Dr. George Bekey, University of Southern California

1:30 PM Session IV
"A Symbolic Expert System for the Design of Digital Controllers
for Space Vehicles", Dr. Wolf Kohn, Robert Norsworthy, Lockheed EMSCO

3:15 PM Session VI
"Ultra Sonic Ranging for Robot Sensing: Dr. Troy Henson,
Louisiana Tech University

"A Presentation of Expert Systems at NASA Johnson Space
Center, Dr. Wade Webster, Lockheed EMSCO

Friday, October 25

Session VII

"Exploiting Artificial Intelligence in Simulation"
Walter Strucely, Texas Instruments

"Application of an Expert System in Process Control in Aerospace
Manufactuirng
Bill Skelton, LTV Corporation

9:45 AM

Session X
"General Dynamics Simulation Systems and Artificial Intelligence:
Rich Teichgraeber, General Dynamics

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

Date: Sat, 7 Sep 85 18:28:58 edt
From: Michael Lesk <lesk%petrus@MOUTON>
Subject: SIGIR/SIGDOC Workshop

          [Excerpted from the IRList Digest by Laws@SRI-AI.]

The following is a proposal for a workshop which, although not yet
formally approved, [Note: Diana Patterson of SIGDOC has signed - Ed]
is very likely to take place in Snowbird, Utah, June 30-July 2, 1986.
Chair: Michael Lesk; Local Arrangements: Lee Hollaar; Treasurer: Karen Kukich.

Attendance will be limited to 75; there will be no formal proceedings,
but a report will be written for some ACM publication; a number of
prominent people (Karen Sparck Jones, David McDonald, Donald Walker,
Patricia Wright, etc.) have indicated interest in attending.  Comments
on the workshop, or indications of interest, are welcome.  Please
notify the chair at: bellcore!lesk, or lesk%bellcore@csnet-relay, or
(if you have current routing tables) lesk@bellcore.  Phone: 201-829- 4070.

NOTE: I will be on vacation Sept 9 - Oct 4; failure to reply
during those dates merely means your message has not been read!! --
Thanks, Michael Lesk

                       Writing to be Searched:
             A Workshop on Document Generation Principles

     As computers learn to write English, and others improve at
searching it, they ought to benefit from people who know how to do
these jobs.  We're proposing a workshop bringing together AI special-
ists in document generation, information retrieval experts, people who
know how to write manuals, and those who write programs to evaluate
writing.

     In recent years there has been a surge of interest in the use of
computer programs that write English.[1,2,3] Expert systems, for exam-
ple, need to explain what they are doing.  Programs are making
increasing strides in fluency, domain coverage, and expressive
power.[4,5] In fact, it is remarkable that there has been a long dis-
cussion over the last ten years about whether or not apes have
mastered language, based on utterances such as ``Please tickle more,
come Roger tickle''[6] while computer programs saying things like
``The market crept upward early in the session yesterday, but stumbled
shortly before trading ended''[7,8] have not impressed the public
nearly as much.  But even supposing that computers can now write
English, what should they write?   [...]

  [There followed a long essay about having computers write
  computer manuals.  -- KIL]

Workshop Specifics.

     In this workshop we will bring together subject specialists in
four main areas:

*    Artificial intelligence researchers working in natural language
     generation;

*    Documentation specialists interested in writing style and qual-
     ity, and in the definition of a `good' document;

*    Text analysis developers, building programs that analyze text
     automatically and try to make value judgments about it; and

*    Retrieval experts, who know how to build systems for keyword
     matching and retrieval.

Another major area that should be represented, but possibly not until
a later meeting, is computer graphics.  The value of illustrations,
diagrams, and charts is unquestioned but it is not clear how we can
integrate graphics with text today.  [...]

     Our best possible outcome, of course, is that the participants
will find something which is not quite a conventional reference
manual, but serves the same purpose and does it better.  Whether this
will be a structured document still written in English, or a
question-answering database with an explanation generator, it is
impossible to say.  But unless the various groups start talking to one
another, we'll never find out.

Michael Lesk
Bell Communications Research
435 South St., Rm. 2A-385
Morristown, NJ 07960

August 9, 1985

References

1.   E. Conklin and D. McDonald, "Salience: The Key to the Selection
     Problem in Natural Language Generation," Proc. 20th Meeting ACL,
     pp. 129-135, 1982.

2.   K. R. McKeown, "The TEXT System for Natural Language Generation:
     An Overview," Proc. 20th Meeting ACL, pp. 113-120, Toronto, Ont.,
     1982.

3.   R. E. Cullingford, M. W. Krueger, M. Selfridge, and M. A. Bien-
     kowski, "Automated Explanations as a Component of a Computer-
     Aided Design System," IEEE Trans. Sys., Man & Cybernetics, pp.
     168-181, 1982.

4.   W. C. Mann, "An Overview of the NIGEL Text Generation Grammar,"
     Proc. 21st ACL Meeting, pp. 79-84, 1983.

5.   A. K. Joshi and B. L. Webber, "Beyond Syntactic Sugar," Proc. 4th
     Jerusalem Conf. on Information Technology, pp. 590-594, 1984.

6.   S. Chevalier-Skolnikoff, "The Clever Hans Phenomenon, Cuing and
     Ape Signing: A Piagetan Analysis of Methods for Instructing
     Animals," in The Clever Hans Phenomenon: Communication with
     Horses, Whales, Apes and People, ed. Thomas Sebeok and Robert
     Rosenthal, vol. 364, pp. 60-93, New York Academy of Sciences,
     1981.

7.   Karen Kukich, Knowledge-Based Report Generation: A Knowledge-
     Engineering Approach to Natural Language Report Generation.  Ph.D
     Thesis, University of Pittsburgh, 1983

8.   Karen Kukich, "ANA's First Sentences: Sample Output from a
     Natural Language Stock Report Generator," Proc. Nat'l Online
     Meeting, pp. 271-80, 1983.

9.   G. Salton and M. McGill, Introduction to Modern Information
     Retrieval, McGraw-Hill, 1983.

10.  Among sellers of free text retrieval systems are ``Cucumber
     Information Systems'' (5611 Kraft Drive, Rockville, MD 20852) and
     ``Knowledge Systems, Inc.'' (12 Melrose St., Chevy Chase, MD
     20815).

11.  G. Salton, The SMART Retrieval System -- Experiments in Automatic
     Document Processing, Prentice-Hall, 1971.

12.  G. W. Furnas, T. K. Landauer, L. M. Gomez, and S. T. Dumais,
     "Statistical Semantics: Analysis of the potential performance of
     key-word information systems," Bell Sys. Tech. J., vol. 62, no.
     6, pp. 1753-1806, 1983.

13.  Marion O. Harris, "Thoughts on an All-Natural User Interface,"
     Proc. Summer USENIX Conf., pp. 343-347, Portland, Oregon, June
     1985.

14.  L. M. Bernstein and R. E. Williamson, "Testing of a Natural
     Language Retrieval System for a Full Text Knowledge Base," J.
     Amer. Soc. Inf. Sci, vol. 35, no. 4, pp. 235-247, 1984.

15.  R. E. Williamson, "ANNOD -- A Navigator of Natural-Language
     Organized (Textual) Data," Proc. 8th SIGIR Meeting, pp. 252-266,
     Montreal, Quebec, 1985.

16.  M. E. Lesk, "Programming Languages for Text and Knowledge Pro-
     cessing," Ann. Rev. Inf. Sci. and Tech., vol. 19, pp. 97-128,
     1984.

17.  Janet Asteroff, "On Technical Writing and Technical Reading,"
     Information Technology and Libraries, vol. 4, no. 1, pp. 3-8,
     March 1985.

18.  Christine Borgmann, "The User's Mental Model of an Information
     Retrieval System," Proc. 8th SIGIR Meeting, pp. 268-273, Mont-
     real, Quebec, 1985.

19.  Marilyn Mantel and Nancy Haskell, "Autobiography of a First-Time
     Discretionary Microcomputer User," Human Factors in Computing
     Systems: Proc. CHI '83 Conference, pp. 286-290, 1983.

20.  Bill Swartout, "GIST English Generator," Proc. AAAI-82, pp. 404-
     409, Pittsburgh, Penn., 1982.

21.  Ariel Shattan and Jenny Hecker, "Documenting UNIX: Beyond Man
     Pages," Proc. Summer USENIX meeting, pp. 437-454, Portland, Ore.,
     1985.

22.  Karen Kukich, "Design of a Knowledge-Based Report Generator,"
     Proc. 21st Meeting ACL, pp. 145-50, 1983.

23.  E. Voorhees and G. Salton, "Automatic Assignment of Soft Boolean
     Operators," Proc. SIGIR Conf., pp. 54-69, 1985.

24.  L. L. Cherry and N. H. Macdonald, "The Unix Writer's Workbench
     Software," Byte, vol. 8, no. 10, pp. 241-248, Oct. 1983.

25.  G. E. Heidorn, K. Jensen, L. A. Miller, and R. J. Byrd, "The
     Epistle Text-Critiquing System," IBM Systems J., vol. 21, no. 3,
     pp. 305-326, 1982.

26.  M. O. Harris, Howto: An Amateur System for Program Counseling,
     1983.  private communication.

27.  J. R. Cowie, "Automatic Analysis of Descriptive Texts," Conf. on
     Applied Natural Language Processing, pp. 117-123, Santa Monica,
     Cal., Feb. 1-3, 1983.

28.  M. S. Tuttle, D. D. Sherertz, M. S. Blois, and S. Nelson,
     "Expertness from Structured Text? Reconsider: A Diagnostic
     Prompting System," Conf. on Applied Natural Language Processing,
     pp. 124-131, Santa Monica, Cal., Feb. 1-3, 1983.

29.  Patricia Wright, "Manual Dexterity: a user-oriented approach to
     creating computer documentation," Human Factors in Computing Sys-
     tems: Proc. CHI '83 Conference, pp. 11-18, 1983.

30.  T. G. Sticht, "Comprehending Reading at Work," in Cognitive
     Processes in Comprehension, ed. M. A. Just and P. A. Carpenter,
     Lawrence Erlbaum, 1977.

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

End of AIList Digest
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