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

From: [email-masked]
Date: Tue, 5 Nov 85 05:13:16 est

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Subject: AIList Digest   V3 #161
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AIList Digest            Tuesday, 5 Nov 1985      Volume 3 : Issue 161

Today's Topics:
  Queries - DAI Contacts & Abduction & User Modelling Panel &
    ATNS vs. ATTs & Vision Systems and American Sign Language,
  AI Tools - LISP Workstation Help Facilities,
  Literature - Proc. 5th Int. Workshop on Expert Systems,
  Programming Languages - Object-Oriented Language Semantics

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

Date: Wed, 30 Oct 85 14:12:36 pst
From: Cindy Mason <[email-masked]>
Subject: DAI contacts

I have been reading a lot of articles in the area of Distributed
Artificial Intelligence (DAI) and would appreciate getting in
touch with others who have similar interests to discuss articles and
toss around ideas.  Thanks.

Cindy Mason (clm@lll-crg)

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

Date: Fri, 1 Nov 85 10:01:23 cst
From: Alan Wexelblat <[email-masked]>
Subject: Abduction

Will someone please explain to me what is meant by this word?
My dictionary gives two definition:  one has to do with kidnapping,
the other has to do with exercising certain thigh muscles.  I assume
that AI'ers have a third definition (!?).  Replies directly to me,
please.
--Alan Wexelblat
[email-masked]

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

Date: Fri 1 Nov 85 11:49:21-EST
From: John C. Akbari <[email-masked]>
Subject: User Modelling Panel

Does anyone have notes on the User Modelling panel held at IJCAI-85 in
August?

THanks in advance.

john akbari

[email-masked]

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

Date: Fri, 1 Nov 85 18:11:58 pst
From: decvax!ittatc!dcdwest!sdcsvax!sdcrdcf!polyslo!cburdor
      @ucb-vax.berkeley.edu (Christopher Burdorf)
Subject: ATNS vs. ATTs

     I am currently working on a master's thesis in natural language
processing.  I am currently deciding whether to use ATNs or ATTs to do
the parsing. If anyone out there has any feelings one way or the other
as to which method is better, please let me know.

Chris burdorf
Cal poly slo.

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

Date: Mon,  4 Nov 85 09:58:29 GMT
From: [email-masked]
Subject: Vision Systems and American Sign Language

One of goals of AI research is to  produce speech recognition systems.
Has there been a proposal to produce a vision system that can ``read''
ASL?

Gordon Joly
[email-masked]

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

Date: 1 Nov 1985  01:35 CST (Fri)
From: Paul Fuqua <FUQUA@ti-csl60>
Subject: LISP Workstations

Some comments in response to:

    Date: Thursday, 24 October 1985  13:53-CDT
    From: Liz Allen <liz at tove.umd.edu>
    To:   AIList at MIT-MC
    Re:   LISP Workstations

           What I really needed was to see the files that were listed
    off the bottom of the screen...

    The other big problem I had was in using emacs -- I learned about
    apropos pretty quickly, but it was not a lot of help.  My favorite
    example is when I wanted to pick up some text without modifying
    the existing buffer.

On the Texas Instruments Explorer (the third of the MIT-derived lispms), we
have a system called Suggestions that occupies a small menu strip on your
window with a selection of, well, suggestions.  Some of the menu items are
commands, some switch to more detailed menus of classes of commands, some do
other things.

As a whole, the suggestions menus are supposed to track the state you're in
-- in Zmacs, there are Zmacs menus, with headings like cursor movement,
deleting and moving text, font commands, etc;  in Dired, there is a menu of
the Dired-specific Zmacs commands;  in the Lisp Listener, there are
input-editing menus, window-switching menus, and so on.  (Sorry about the
vagueness, but with two years of pre-TI lispm experience, I've never used
Suggestions myself;  I just gripe about the implementation.)

The idea is to try to relate concepts that the user already has in mind to
commands or groups of commands.  The target person is someone who knows what
he wants to do, but not how to do it.  Suggestions is by no means perfect;
for one thing, it doesn't explain scroll bars.  However, it's a start.

    The documentation is good if you either already know the vocabulary
    or have someone who can tell you the right word for what you want.

So one obvious goal of good documentation is to lead the way to the
vocabulary.  The most useful feature of the red/black/blue/grey/green/orange
Lisp Machine Manual is its concept index.  At least it lands me in
approximately the right section of the manual, where I can pick up the proper
terms for the next time.

                              pf

ps  I'm not any sort of official TI spokesman, but no one else here was
    taking a shot at the issue.

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

Date: 1 Nov 1985 16:55-CST
From: [email-masked]
Subject: 5th Int. Workshop on Expert Systems and Their Applications

Some time ago, I sent a list to this digest of the papers presented at
the Fifth International Workshop on Expert Systems and Their
Applications at Avignon, France on May 13-15, 1985.  I have
tracked down the ordering information for those proceedings.  I am
posting the details here since I have received mail from many individuals
who needed articles from there and thus this info is of general
info:

To order write to:
  Marie Martine Sainflou
  Agence de l'Informatique
  Tour Fiat-Cedex 16
  92084 Paris la Defense, France

They accepted our purchase order and billed us for 800 French Francs.

If you try and order via Interlibrary loan here is the information
from the OCLC entry:

OCLC: 12661613

 1 100
 2 040    ISM c ISM
 3 020    2865810283
 4 041 0  freeng
 5 090    TK7885.A1 b P7 1985
 6 049    ISMM
 7 245 00 [Proceedings] / C Expert ?Systems & Tehir Applicatoins. 5th
International Workshop
 8 260 0  [Paris] : b AGence de l'Informatique c 1985
 9 300    2 v. : b ill. ; c 24 cm
10 500    French and English.
11 500    5 `emes Journbees Internationals, les Syst`emes Experts &
Leurs Applications
12 504    Includes bibliographies
13 650 0  Computer engineering x Congresses.
14 711 20 International Workshop on Expert Systems and their
Applications n (5th : d 1985 : c Avignon, France)

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

Date: Wed, 30 Oct 85 16:16:30 est
From: "Dennis R. Bahler" <[email-masked]>
Subject: replies to OOL semantics request

>       Does anyone have pointers to work done on
>formal specification and/or formal semantic definition of
>object-oriented languages or systems such as Smalltalk-80?

        Well, the traffic has died away on my request about formal
semantics of OOLs and a number of folks have asked to see what I got,
so this is it.

Dennis Bahler

Usenet:  ...cbosgd!uvacs!drb                    Dept. of Computer Science
CSnet: drb@virginia                             Thornton Hall
ARPA:  drb.virginia@csnet-relay                 University of Virginia
                                                Charlottesville, VA 22903
-------

From: [email-masked] (Alex Colvin)

You might check on the work done on PLASMA, an actor ( ~ object) language,
mostly applicative.  I asked the net about this some time ago, but got no
response.

Then there's Act I, another MIT-AI project.  And who knows what else?

Lastly, some folks (Lisp types, mostly), model objects as closures.
This leads to flavors.

%A Carl Hewitt
%T Viewing Control Structures as Patterns of Passing Messages
%J Artificial Intelligence
%V 8
%D 1977
%P 323-364
%X especially section 7.

%A Carl Hewitt
%A Brian Smith
%T Towards A Programming Apprentice
%J IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
%V 1
%N 1
%D March 1975
%P 26-45
%X describes meta-evaluation to justify contracts on implementations
%X featuring the Actor Induction Principle

%A Henry Lieberman
%T A Preview of Act I
%R AI Memo 625
%I MIT AI Lab
%D June 1981
%X describes the actor model of computation based on message passing

%A Henry Lieberman
%T Thinking About Lots of Things At Once Without Getting Confused
%R AI Memo 626
%I MIT AI Lab
%D May 1981
%X synchronization and concurrency in Act I

%A C. Hewitt
%A G. Attardi
%A H. Lieberman
%T Specifying and Proving Properties of Guardians for Distributed Systems
%B Semantics of Concurrent Computation
%S Lecture Notes in Computer Science
%V 70
%I Springer Verlag
%C Berlin
%D 1979
%X synchronization device

Since you're just down the hall from me, you can check out my copies.

------

>From johnson%p.cs.uiuc.edu@CSNET-RELAY Thu Oct 10 00:18:08 1985

You recently asked a question on the net about work in semantics for
OOLs.  I am interested in semantics for OOL, though I haven't done
anything worth talking about, so I would appreciate any responses
that you get.  In general, I don't think that inheritance makes semantics
any more difficult, although Smalltalk (which is my interest) has weird
"functions that can goto creating environment" things called blocks
that require continuation semantics.  I least, I think they require
continuation semantics, I haven't completely solve the problem yet.

I have done some work in type systems for Smalltalk, but I haven't
written it up yet.  Are you interested in such things?

Ralph Johnson

-------

>From sokol%mitre.arpa@CSNET-RELAY Fri Oct 11 00:22:09 1985

Dennis
We have been using RAND's Rule Oriented Simulation System for about 4 years
now and have been very happy with it.  You can pick it up in a morning, and
can decipher other people's code immediately,  It`s a lovely system.
For more information, see  Rand publication R-3160-AF (1984) and N-1854-AF
(1982), or contact Phil Klahr at Rand.  He also gives out source code to
universities and the like for research.
Lisa Sokol  (sokol@mitre)

[ ROSS was written up in Proc. IJCAI-81 too if I remember -- drb ]

-------

>From jisdale%omnilax.arpa@CSNET-RELAY Fri Oct 11 00:22:46 1985

I saw your note in AILIST-DIGEST and it struck a responsive note.  I
just finished a UCLA Extension class on formal semantics that required
a term paper. For that paper I chose to attempt some formalization of
"Little Smalltalk", a stripped down Smalltalk-80 that is written in C
and does not require (or support) fancy graphics, etc. It is available
from Univ. of Arizona for a modest fee.

The paper did not really do any formal specification. Since it was
limited to 10 pages, I spent most of it giving an intro to OOL & some
of the difficulties in formalizing the syntax and semantics. The main
point on formalization I found was the ability of Smalltalk to be
self-defined.  The book "Smalltalk-80, The Language and Its
Implementation" does provide a formal specification of the semantics in
Smalltalk-80 in Part Four.  This was an interesting example of the
power of Smalltalk, since very few languages can be self-defining.
However, the definition is much longer than the self definition of LISP.

I did think there is potential for defining Smalltalk in VDL or other
language, but given the time I had (and the level of the class) I did
not invest much time on this.
I am interested in any responses you get about such formalizations.

Jerry Isdale

CSNET (X.25 site):      jisdale@omnilax
        from phonenet:  jisdale%omnilax@CSNET-RELAY
                        (I think thats right but not sure).

US Snail:
        Omnibus Computer Graphics,
        Studio G, Paramount Pictures
        5555 Melrose Ave,
        Hollywood, CA. 90038

        (213) 468-4694

(Omnibus is a commercial computer animation house with offices in NYC,
        Toronto and Hollyweird).

-------

>From mct%gandalf.cs.cmu.edu@CSNET-RELAY Sat Oct 12 00:13:48 1985

        A Semantics of Multiple Inheritance
            Luca Cardelli
        in,
            Semantics of Data Types,
                <some conference in France, June 1984>
            SpringerVerlag,
            Lecture Notes in CS, #173

has a nice treatment of multiple inheritance.

-- Mark Tucker

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

End of AIList Digest
********************