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Date: Fri, 28 Feb 86 22:47:26 est

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Subject: AIList Digest   V4 #39
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AIList Digest           Thursday, 27 Feb 1986      Volume 4 : Issue 39

Today's Topics:
  Seminars - Hierarchical Planning and Allocation (USC) &
    Cerebral Lateralization (UCB) &
    Off-Line Programming of Robots (UPenn) &
    The Limits of Calculative Rationality (SU) &
    Intelligent Concept Design Assistant (Edinburgh) &
    The Purposes of Vision (Edinburgh)

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Date: 26 Feb 1986 13:09-PST
From: usc-cse.usc.edu@gasser
Subject: Seminar - Hierarchical Planning and Allocation (USC)

         USC DISTRIBUTED PROBLEM SOLVING GROUP MEETING:

    Planning and Resource Allocation in Time- and Cost-Constrained
             Environments : A Hierarchical Approach

                         Norman Sadeh
                  Ph.D. Student, CS Dept., USC

             Wednesday, 3/5/86, 3:00 - 4:00 PM

                          Seaver 319

Real-life planners should be provided with an ability to allocate resources
in time and cost constrained environments. A flexible manufacturing system
is an example of such an environment.

We will describe a hierarchical approach to the problem of allocating
resources during the planning process. We believe that the concept of
resource is directly related to the level of detail of the plan.  A same
object can be considered as a resource at a higher level of abstraction
and as a common object at a lower level. By allowing the planner to decide
upon which particular instances of certain  high level resources to allocate
to some high level tasks, taking into account time and cost constaints
posted on the overall plan, we will drastically reduce the search space to
be investigated.

Both centralized and distributed approaches will be considered.

Questions: Dr. Les Gasser, CS Dept., USC (213) 743-7794 or

            Norman Sadeh: [email-masked]

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

Date: Wed, 26 Feb 86 15:54:31 PST
From: [email-masked] (Cognitive Science Program)
Subject: Seminar - Cerebral Lateralization (UCB)

                     BERKELEY COGNITIVE SCIENCE PROGRAM
                    Cognitive Science Seminar -- IDS 237B
                       Tuesday, March 4, 11:00 - 12:30
                              2515 Tolman Hall
                          Discussion: 12:30 - 1:30
                          3105 Tolman (Beach Room)

            ``COGNITIVE MODELS OF HUMAN CEREBRAL LATERALIZATION:
                             A TUTORIAL REVIEW''

                              Curtis Hardyck

              Department of Psychology and School of Education,
                    University of California at Berkeley

            Models of human  cerebral  functioning  have  ranged  from
       notions  of extreme anatomical specificity to beliefs in global
       functioning.
            Within the field of cerebral lateralization, opinions have
       ranged  from  positions favoring extreme lateralization (almost
       all functions localized in one hemisphere) to  bilateralization
       (almost  all functions existing in both hemispheres). Intermin-
       gled with these positions have been promulgations of hemispher-
       icity  as  polar opposites, e.g. right brain (creative insight-
       fulness) vs left brain (lackluster drudgery), which  have  been
       adopted into popular culture.
            I will provide a brief historical review of  this  problem
       and  a discussion of current cognitive models of lateralization
       appropriate for examination within a cognitive  science  frame-
       work.

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

Date: Wed, 26 Feb 86 12:40 EST
From: Tim Finin <[email-masked]>
Subject: Seminar - Off-Line Programming of Robots (UPenn)

                                Colloquium
                      3pm Thursday, February 27, 1986
               216 Moore School, University of Pennsylvania

               TOPICS IN THE OFF-LINE PROGRAMMING OF ROBOTS
                              Vincent Hayward
           Computer Vision and Robotics Lab., McGill University

Programming  robots  is  a  difficult  task,  even  in the case of the simplest
applications.  For this reason, research in robot programming has been evolving
in two distinct directions.  The first one is aimed at constructing goal driven
automated robot programming systems.  Another  trend  is  to  design  so-called
off-line  programming  systems  to  ease  the work of a human robot programmer.
These systems include a set of programming aids  such  as  graphic  facilities,
reporting  of  performances,  interfaces  to CAD/CAM systems, and pleasant user
interfaces.  In the view of developing off-line  programming  systems,  I  will
first  present  solutions to the problem of collision detection.  These methods
belong to  a  continuum  of  schemes  according  to  the  method  selected  for
representing  the  workspace  and  the  robot,  and  the amount of computations
performed before testing a particular trajectory.  I will then discuss a method
based  on  a  recursive  decomposition of the workspace, also referred to as an
octree model, as a good tradeoff for a class of  applications.    I  will  then
present  a  project  currently underway aimed at the construction of CAD models
from range data which will also facilitate the programming of robots.  Finally,
I will discuss the adequacy of current robot programming primitives and propose
a new scheme based on how sensors interact with robot control systems.

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

Date: 26 Feb 86  1534 PST
From: Matthew Ginsberg <[email-masked]>
Subject: Seminar - The Limits of Calculative Rationality (SU)

In light of what I expect will be department-wide interest in the
following talk, this week's research meeting/seminar of the KSL will
instead be a department-wide event.

The talk will run from 12.05 until 1.00 on February 28 and will be held
in the Chemistry Gazebo.  The room is fairly small, so anyone interested
in attending would be well advised to arrive early.

                                                Matt Ginsberg

        FROM SOCRATES TO EXPERT SYSTEMS:  THE LIMITS OF
                    CALCULATIVE RATIONALITY

                             BY

                        Hubert L. Dreyfus
                     University of California
                            Berkeley

An examination of the general epistemological assumptions behind
Artificial Intelligence research with special reference to recent
work in the development of expert systems.  All AI work assumes that
knowledge must be represented in the mind as symbolic descriptions.
Expert system builders further assume that expertise consists in
problem-solving and that problem-solving consists in analyzing a
situation in terms of objective features and then finding a situation-
action rule which determines what to do.

I will argue that expert system builders fail to recognize the real
character of expert intuitive understanding.  Expertise is acquired
in a five-step process:  The BEGINNER does, indeed, pick out objective
features and follow strict rules like a computer.  The ADVANCED BEGINNER,
however, responds to meaningful aspects of the situation which are
recognized as similar to prototypical cases, without similarity being
analyzed into objective features.  At the next stage, the COMPETENT
performer learns to figure out a strategy and to pay attention only
to features and aspects which are relevant to his plan.  The fourth
stage, PROFICIENCY, is achieved when the performer no longer has to
figure out his strategy but immediately sees the appropriate strategy.
Finally, the EXPERT, after many years of experience, is able to do what
works without facing a problem and without having to make any logical
calculations.  Experts presumably do this by storing many whole situations
and associated actions in memory and responding to their current situation
in terms of its overall similarity to a situation already successfully
dealt with.

On the basis of this model one can see that expert systems based
on rules extracted from experts do not capture the expert's expertise
and so cannot be expected to perform at expert level.

A review of the successes and failures of various expert systems confirms
this analysis.

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

Date: Thu, 27 Feb 86 10:43:01 GMT
From: Gideon Sahar <[email-masked]>
Subject: Seminar - Intelligent Concept Design Assistant (Edinburgh)

EDINBURGH AI SEMINARS

Date:   Wednesday, 26th February l986
Time:   2.00 p.m.
Place:  Department of Artificial Intelligence
        Seminar Room - F10
        80 South Bridge
        EDINBURGH.

Dr. K.J. MacCallum, Department of Ship & Marine Technology, University
of Strathclyde will give a seminar entitled - "An Intelligent Concept
Design Assistant".

This paper argues for the introduction of increased knowledge and
reasoning capabilities into computer based design systems in such a way
that they are able to enact the role of an intelligent assistant to the
designer.   It is shown that concept design involves a number of
different types of knowledge, the most difficult of which to represent
in a computer is "worldly" knowledge, either physical or commonsense.

Two systems which are being developed to tackle aspects of this
problem are described.   The first system, called DESIGNER, handles
numerical relationships;  the second called SPACES is concerned with
representing spatial arrangements.

Keyords:  Design, CAD, Knowledge Representation, Numerical
          Relationships, Spatial Arrangements.

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

Date: Thu, 27 Feb 86 10:43:39 GMT
From: Gideon Sahar <[email-masked]>
Subject: Seminar - The Purposes of Vision (Edinburgh)

EDINBURGH AI SEMINARS

Date:    Wednesday, 5th March l986
Time:    2.00 p.m.
Place:   Department of Artificial Intelligence, Seminar Room, Forrest
         Hill, Edinburgh.

Professor Aaron Sloman, School of Social Sciences, University of Sussex
will give a seminar entitled - "The Purposes of Vision and the
Architecture of a Mind".

It is often taken for granted that the purpose of vision is to take in one or
two static or changing 2-D arrays of information about the current optic field
and produce descriptions of the 3-D objects from which the light has been
reflected. This treats the visual system as having a narrowly defined set of
inputs and outputs and encourages a conception of the visual system as a
separable module in an intelligent mechanism, with relatively few channels of
communication with other modules.

The talk will reflect on the variety of visual inputs and outputs, the
possibility of integration with other senses at different levels, and how
these relate to the different purposes to which vision can be put. One
implication seems to be that the visual system may have an architecture and
relationship to other mental processes, very different from what is normally
assumed. Might we sometimes see with our ears and hear with our eyes?

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

End of AIList Digest
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