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

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Date: Fri, 14 Mar 86 04:42:09 est

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Subject: AIList Digest   V4 #52
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AIList Digest           Thursday, 13 Mar 1986      Volume 4 : Issue 52

Today's Topics:
  Query - Satishe Thatte Net Address,
  Seminars - Interpretation of Prolog Programs (Edinburgh) &
    Explanation-Based Learning (CMU) &
    Referential Gestures in Guugu Yimidhirr (UCB) &
    Models, Metaphysics, and Empiricism (CSLI),
  Conference - Expert Systems in Process Safety

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

Date: Wed, 12 Mar 86 21:53:26 PST
From: Basuki Soetarman <[email-masked]>
Subject: Satishe Thatte net address ...

>
>          PERSISTENT OBJECT SYSTEM FOR SYMBOLIC COMPUTERS
>               Satishe Thatte
>               Texas Instruments
>               Thurs. Feb 27th at 4:15 pm.
>               (Part of Distributed Systems Group Project meeting)
>
>The advent of automatically managed, garbage-collected virtual memory
>was crucial to the development of today's symbolic processing.  No
>analogous capability has yet been developed in the domain of
>"persistent" objects managed by a file system or database.  As a
>consequence, the programmer is forced to flatten rich structures of
> ...............................

This announcement was posted sometimes ago in the mod.ai. Does anybody
know the author's net address ? Any info will be appreciated.
Thanks.

[email-masked]     or
..!{ucbvax,cepu,trwspp,ihnp4}!ucla-cs!basuki

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

Date: Tue, 11 Mar 86 11:58:47 GMT
From: Gideon Sahar <[email-masked]>
Subject: Seminar - Interpretation of Prolog Programs (Edinburgh)

EDINBURGH AI SEMINARS

Date:   Wednesday, 12th March l986
Time:   2.00 p.m.
Place:  Department of Artificial Intelligence
        Seminar Room - F10
        80 South Bridge
        EDINBURGH.

Dr. C.S. Mellish, Cognitive Studies Programme, University of Sussex
will give a seminar entitled  -  "Interpretation of Prolog Programs".

This talk discusses work on proving properties of Prolog programs,
which has been able to derive automatically the following information:

l.  Mode declarations (information about the instantiation modes in
    which predicates are used).

2.  Determinacy information (information about the number of solutions
    that predicates can produce).

3.  Information about shared structures (this can be used, for
    instance, to indicate places where "occur checks" might be
    desirable.

We would like to formalise our work on Prolog programs in terms of
ABSTRACT INTERPRETATIONS.   The notion of using abstract
interpretations to prove properties of programs has been used
successfully with other languages (e.g. work by Cousot and Cousot,
Mycroft and Sintzoff).   The basic idea is to start with a precise
description of the meaning of Prolog programs in terms of the normal
execution strategy.   This description can then be given the STANDARD
INTERPRETATION, which characterises exactly what and how the program
computes but may not allow interesting properties to be proved in a
computationally feasible way.   Alternatively, it can be given
consistent ABSTRACT INTERPRETATIONS, in which the program is thought of
as computing in an abstract domain where less information about the
data objects is taken account of.   Results of computations in this
abstract domain then reflect properties of the program operating in the
standard way.

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

Date: 12 March 1986 1133-EST
From: Betsy [email-masked]
Subject: Seminar - Explanation-Based Learning (CMU)

Speaker:   Gerald DeJong, University of Illinois
Date:      Wednesday, April 2 (Note special day/time)
Place:     5409 Wean Hall
Time:      11:30 - 1:00
Title:     Explanation Based Learning

                        Abstract:

               The schema learning  group  at  Illinois  is  exploring
          artificial  intelligence  techniques that will enable a com-
          puter system to learn general world knowledge in   the  form
          of  "schemata"  through  its  interactions  with an external
          environment.  A schema is a data structure  that  specifies,
          in  conceptual  terms,  a  particular  real world situation.
          Schemata can be very  useful  in  problem  solving,  natural
          language  processing and other AI areas.   It is claimed, in
          this paradigm, that much intelligent behavior  can  be  cap-
          tured by using a large number of such schemata.

               The explanation-based  method  represents  a  departure
          from  the  usual  approaches  to machine learning in several
          ways.  First, it is very knowledge-based.  That is, the sys-
          tem  must  possess  much  knowledge before it can aquire new
          knowledge.  Second, it is  capable  of  one-trial  learning.
          The  results so far are promising.  Explanation-based learn-
          ing takes us a large step closer to building an  intelligent
          system capable of learning on its own.

               A number computer systems have been designed and imple-
          mented   based   on   Explanatory   Schema  Acquisition,  an
          explanation-based learning paradigm.  The  domain  areas  of
          these   projects include natural language processing, robot-
          ics, theorem proving,  physics  problem-solving  and  theory
          refinement.   Several  of  the systems will be discussed  in
          the context of theoretical advantages and difficulties  with
          explanation-based learning.

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

Date: Wed, 12 Mar 86 16:33:14 PST
From: [email-masked] (Cognitive Science Program)
Subject: Seminar - Referential Gestures in Guugu Yimidhirr (UCB)

                    BERKELEY COGNITIVE SCIENCE PROGRAM

                                Spring 1986

                    Cognitive Science Seminar - IDS 237B

                      Tuesday, March 18, 11:00 - 12:30
                              2515 Tolman Hall
                          Discussion: 12:30 - 1:30
                          3105 Tolman (Beach Room)

              ``Complex Referential Gestures in Guugu Yimidhirr''
                               John B. Haviland
             Dept. of Anthropology, Australian National University
    (currently at Institute for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences)

            Ordinary  talk  depends  on  interlocutors'  abilities  to
       construct  and maintain some degree of shared perspective  over
       some  domain   of   shared  knowledge,  given  some  negotiated
       understanding  of what  the  circumstances are. Aspects of per-
       spective,  references  to   universes   of    discourse,    and
       pointers  to context are, of  course,  encoded  in  utterances.
       Routinely, though,  what  is  uttered   interacts   with   what
       remains   unsaid:   what   is  otherwise indicated, or what  is
       implicated  by  familiar   conversational  principles.  I  will
       begin  by  examining  the elaborate linguistic devices one Aus-
       tralian  language  provides  for  talking  about  location  and
       motion.  I  will  then connect the linguistic representation of
       space (and the  accompanying knowledge speakers  must  have  of
       space  and  geography)  to non-spoken devices --- pointing ges-
       tures --- that contribute to the bare referential   content  of
       narrative  performances. I will show that simply parsing a nar-
       rative, or tracking its course, requires attention to the  ges-
       ticulation  that  forms part of the process of utterance. More-
       over,  I  will  show  how,  in  this ethnographic context,  the
       meaning  of  a  gesture (or of  a  word,  for  that matter) may
       depend both on a practice of referring (only within which   can
       pointing  be pointing at something) and on the construction  of
       a  complex and shifting conceptual (often social) map.  Finally
       I   will   discuss   ways  that  the  full  import of a gesture
       (again, like a word) may, in context,  go  well  beyond  merely
       establishing its referent.

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

Date: Wed 12 Mar 86 16:31:56-PST
From: Emma Pease <[email-masked]>
Subject: Seminar - Models, Metaphysics, and Empiricism (CSLI)

         [Excerpted from the CSLI Newsletter by Laws@SRI-AI.]

            CSLI ACTIVITIES FOR NEXT THURSDAY, March 20, 1986
             12 noon, TINLunch, Ventura Hall Conference Room

           Models, Metaphysics and the Vagaries of Empiricism
                          by Marx W. Wartofsky
              Discussion led by Ivan Blair (Blair@su-csli)

      In the introduction to the collection of his articles from which
   the paper for this TINlunch is taken, Wartofsky says that his concern
   is with `the notion of representation, and in particular, the role and
   nature of the model, in the natural sciences, in theories of
   perception and cognition, and in art.'  In `Meaning, Metaphysics and
   the Vagaries of Empiricism,' he explores the existential commitment
   that should accompany the creation and use of a model, from the
   perspective of a critical empiricism.  Wartofsky considers six grades
   of existential commitment, or ways of construing the ontological
   claims of a model, ranging from the ad hoc analogy to a true
   description of reality.  Critical of the attempt by empiricists to
   reduce theoretical statements to assertions about sense perception,
   Wartofsky seeks to ground existence claims in what he calls the common
   understanding, which is associated with everyday language
   representations of experience.
      I intend the issues addressed in this article to provide the
   framework for a general discussion of the relation between ontology
   and epistemology.

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

Date: Mon 10 Mar 86 15:26:13-EST
From: V. Venkatasubramanian <[email-masked]>
Subject: Conference - Expert Systems in Process Safety

                        CALL FOR PAPERS

                        for the sessions on

      EXPERT SYSTEMS AND COMPUTATIONAL METHODS IN PROCESS SAFETY

        American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE) Meeting

                Houston, Texas, March 29 - April 2 1987.

Session Chair:                             Session Co-Chair:

Prof. V. Venkatasubramanian                Prof. E. J. Henley
Intelligent Process Engineering Lab        Dept. of Chemical Engineering
Dept. of Chemical Engineering              University of Houston
Columbia University                        University Park
New York, NY 10027.                        Houston, TX 77004.
Tel: (212)280-4453                         (713)749-4407

Papers  are solicited in the areas of Expert Systems and Computational
Methods in Process Safety for the Houston AIChE Meeting. Topics of
interest include  Process Plant Diagnosis, Process Safety and
Reliability, Process Risk Analysis etc. Please submit THREE copies of
a 300 word abstract by MAY 15, 1986 to the following address:

        Prof. V. Venkatasubramanian
        Intelligent Process Engineering Lab
        Dept. of Chemical Engineering
        Columbia University
        New York, NY 10027.
        Tel: (212)280-4453

Final manuscripts of the accepted papers are due by Oct 15, 1986.

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

End of AIList Digest
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