Date: Thu 2 Jun 1988 00:18-EDT From: AIList Moderator Nick Papadakis Reply-To: AIList@AI.AI.MIT.EDU Us-Mail: MIT Mail Stop 38-390, Cambridge MA 02139 Phone: (617) 253-2737 Subject: AIList Digest V7 #11 To: AIList@AI.AI.MIT.EDU Status: R AIList Digest Thursday, 2 Jun 1988 Volume 7 : Issue 11 Today's Topics: Seminars and Announcements ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: 10 May 88 05:09:30 GMT From: csli!nash@labrea.stanford.edu (Ron Nash) Subject: CSLI Reports The Spring 1988 catalog of reports published by The Center for the Study of Language and Information at Stanford University is now available online, in HyperCard format (for Macintosh computers). Abstracts are included. This is an update of (not a supplement to) the previous catalog. So if you missed the last edition, this one contains the complete list. The file is available by anonymous ftp from csli.stanford.edu The relevant file is: pub/csli-abstracts.hqx Those without internet access can send a 3.5" disk and a self-addressed envelope to: Publications CSLI Ventura Hall Stanford University Stanford, CA 94305-4115 (CSLI was founded in 1983 by researchers from Stanford University, SRI International, and Xerox PARC to further research and development of integrated theories of language, information, and computation.) ------------------------------------------------------------------- Ron Nash Center for the Study of Language and Information Stanford University nash@russell.stanford.edu ------------------------------ Date: 16 May 88 05:29:57 GMT From: mind!harnad@princeton.edu (Stevan Harnad) Subject: Qualified referees for connectionist material BBS (Behavioral & Brain Sciences), published by Cambridge university Press, is an international, interdisciplinary journal devoted exclusively to Open Peer Commentary on important and controversial current target articles in the biobehavioral and cognitive sciences. Because of the growing volume of connectionist and connectionism-related submissions now being received at BBS, we are looking for more referees who are qualified and willing to evaluate submitted manuscripts. If you are professionally qualified in connectionism, parallel distributed processing, associative networks, neural modeling etc., and wish to serve as a referee for BBS, please send your CV to the email or USmail address below. Individuals who are already BBS Associates need only specify that this is a specialty area that they wish to review in. USMAIL: BBS, 20 Nassau Street, Rm. 240, Princeton NJ 08542 -- Stevan Harnad ARPANET: harnad@mind.princeton.edu or harnad%princeton.mind.edu@princeton.edu UUCP: princeton!mind!harnad CSNET: harnad%mind.princeton.edu@relay.cs.net BITNET: harnad%mind.princeton.edu@pucc.bitnet ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 17 May 88 11:19:18 From: Dana S. Nau Subject: Special SIGART issue on Knowledge Acquisition Papers are being solicited for a special issue of the ACM SIGART Newsletter on knowledge acquisition. Send technical papers (5000 words), extended abstracts (1000 words), and any correspondence by September 26, 1988 to Christopher Westphal, Knowledge Acquisition Material, The BDM Corporation, 7915 Jones Branch Drive, McLean, VA 22102; (703) 848-7910. ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 24 May 88 17:16:02 PDT From: Greg Jordan Subject: Westex-88 Announcement EXPERT SPEAKERS ON EXPERT SYSTEMS ANNOUNCED FOR WESTEX-88 Three special, all-day tutorials and a two day program featuring well-known invited speakers and contributed papers from the artificial intelligence community are planned for WESTEX-88, the third annual WESTEX Conference sponsored by the Western Committee of the Computer Society of the IEEE and the IEEE Los Angeles Council. It will be held June 28-30 at the Anaheim Marriott Hotel in Anaheim, California. Professor Edward Feigenbaum of Stanford University has been announced as featured speaker for WESTEX-88. In a special presentation on Wednesday, June 29, the internationally prominent Feigenbaum will present new observations and predictions regarding expert systems drawn from his decades of leadership and experience in the field. His topic will be "Expert Systems: Payoffs and Promises." This year's conference and exposition will give special emphasis to management issues associated with fielding successful applications in expert systems. All-day tutorials focusing on three different tracks will be offered on Tuesday, June 28. Tutorial one, Basic concepts, will be taught by Kenneth Modesitt, Rockwell International and will cover the concepts and benefits of expert systems. It is designed to provide analysts and developers with an overview of the most important concepts and techniques, and to suggest pragmatic ways of using the new techniques. Tutorial two, Advanced Concepts, will be taught by Avron Barr, Aldo Ventures. This tutorial will cover the expert systems development process with particular emphasis on managing the process, including self-management of the knowledge engineer. Tutorial three, Special Topics, taught by Miriam Bischoff, Teknowledge Inc., will cover actual experiences in screening applications for expert systems as well as special topics for those who have already made the commitment for the use and/or development of expert systems. June 29 Sessions Focus on Management of Expert Systems The two-day program beginning June 29 will focus on management of expert systems and will include presentations by Steve Lukasik, Northrop Corp., on "Expert Systems Genesis at DARPA, Its Progress and Future", and George Friedman, Northrop Corp., on "Fundamental Management Issues of Expert Systems." Peter Friedland of NASA Ames will speak on "An Overview of AI Activity at NASA Ames" during the noon luncheon. Invited conference presentations on major expert systems management issues will cover "A Systems Engineering View of Expert Systems," Ed Taylor, TRW; "Testing and Evaluation of Expert Systems," K. L. Bellman, Aerospace Corp., and "ADA and Expert Systems Integrated into Large Scale Systems," Douglas Flaherty, McDonnell Douglas. Two invited presentations exploring the subject "Deployment in ADA: Problem or Solution?" will explore "Ada and Expert Systems, Experience with Large Projects," from Mark Miller, Computer and Thought, and "An Ada-Based Expert Systems Building Tool," from Brad Allen, Inference Corp. June 30 Sessions Track Management and Implementation Issues Invited presentations for the Thursday, June 30 program include "Real-time Expert Systems," presented by Mike Buckley, Rockwell International; "Multiprocessor Architectures for Expert Systems," presented by Harold Brown, Stanford University; "An Infrastructure for Integration and Synchronization of Multiple Expert Systems," from James Greenwood, ADS; "ABE: An Environment for Large Scale Intelligent System Integration," from Lee Erman, Teknowledge Inc., and "SMNET as a Development Environment," presented by Michael Fielding, Perceptronics. Allen Sears of DARPA will speak on "Intelligent Systems and Military Applications" during the noon luncheon. Thursday afternoon's program will feature a number of contributed papers focusing in two areas: expert systems techniques and implementation issues. Advance registration fees for Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) members are $140 for technical sessions, luncheon and proceedings; $115 for the June 28 tutorials, luncheon and texts. Advance registration fees for non-IEEE members are $185 for technical sessions, luncheon and proceedings, $160 for June 28 tutorials, luncheon and texts. Advance registration must be postmarked no later than June 10, 1988. For more information contact Marti Wolf at 213/777-2965. WESTEX-88 is sponsored by Western Committee of the Computer Society of the IEEE and IEEE Los Angeles Council and is managed by Electronic Conventions Management, Los Angeles, California. ------------------------------ Date: 25 May 88 04:26:51 GMT From: mind!harnad@princeton.edu (Stevan Harnad) Subject: Language Learnability: BBS Call for Commentators Below is the abstract of a forthcoming target article to appear in Behavioral and Brain Sciences (BBS), an international journal of "open peer commentary" in the biobehavioral and cognitive sciences, published by Cambridge University Press. For information on how to serve as a commentator or to nominate qualified professionals in these fields as commentators, please send email to: harnad@mind.princeton.edu or write to: BBS, 20 Nassau Street, #240, Princeton NJ 08542 [tel: 609-921-7771] ----------------------------------------------------------------------- The Child's Trigger Experience: "Degree-0" Learnability David Lightfoot Linguistics Department University of Maryland A selective model of human language capacities holds that people come to know more than they experience. The discrepancy between experience and eventual capacity is bridged by genetically provided information. Hence any hypothesis about the linguistic genotype (or "Universal Grammar," UG) has consequences for what experience is needed and what form people's mature capacities (or "grammars") will take. This BBS target article discusses the "trigger experience," i.e., the experience that actually affects a child's linguistic development. It is argued that this must be a subset of a child's total linguistic experience and hence that much of what a child hears has no consequence for the form of the eventual grammar. UG filters experience and provides an upper bound on what constitutes the triggering experience. This filtering effect can often be seen in the way linguistic capacity can change between generations. Children only need access to robust structures of minimal ("degree-0") complexity. Everything can be learned from simple, unembedded "domains" (a grammatical concept involved in defining an expression's logical form). Children do not need access to more complex structures. -- Stevan Harnad ARPANET: harnad@mind.princeton.edu or harnad%princeton.mind.edu@princeton.edu UUCP: princeton!mind!harnad CSNET: harnad%mind.princeton.edu@relay.cs.net BITNET: harnad%mind.princeton.edu@pucc.bitnet ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 25 May 88 10:46:34 EDT From: Maureen Searle Subject: Call for Papers Reminder -------- UNIVERSITY OF WATERLOO CENTRE FOR THE NEW OXFORD ENGLISH DICTIONARY 4TH ANNUAL CONFERENCE CALL FOR PAPERS - CALL FOR PANELISTS INFORMATION IN TEXT October 27-28, 1988 Waterloo, Canada This year's conference will focus on ways that text stored as electronic data allows information to be restructured and extracted in response to individualized needs. For example, text databases can be used to: - expand the information potential of existing text - create and maintain new information resources - generate new print information Papers presenting original research on theoretical and applied aspects of this theme are being sought. Typical but not exclusive areas of interest include computational lexicology, computational linguistics, syntactic and semantic analysis, lexicography, grammar defined databases, lexical databases and machine-readable dictionaries and reference works. Submissions will be refereed by a program committee. Authors should send seven copies of a detailed abstract (5 to 10 double-spaced pages) by June 10, 1988 to the Committee Chairman, Dr. Gaston Gonnet, at: UW Centre for the New OED University of Waterloo Waterloo, Ontario Canada, N2L 3G1 Late submissions risk rejection without consideration. Authors will be notified of acceptance or rejection by July 22, 1988. A working draft of the paper, not exceeding 15 pages, will be due by September 6, 1988 for inclusion in proceedings which will be made available at the conference. One conference session will be devoted to a panel discussion entitled MEDIUM AND MESSAGE: THE FUTURE OF THE ELECTRONIC BOOK. The Centre invites individuals who are interested in participating as panel members to submit a brief statement (approximately 150 words) expressing their major position on this topic. Please submit statements not later than June 10, 1988 to the Administrative Director, Donna Lee Berg, at the above address. Selection of panel members will be made by July 22, 1988. The Centre is interested in specialists or generalists in both academic and professional fields (including editors, publishers, software designers and distributors) who have strongly held views on the information potential of the electronic book. PROGRAM COMMITTEE Roy Byrd (IBM Corporation) Michael Lesk (Bell Communications Research) Reinhard Hartmann (Univ. of Exeter) Beth Levin (Northwestern University) Ian Lancashire (Univ. of Toronto) Richard Venezky (Univ. of Delaware) Chairman: Gaston Gonnet (Univ. of Waterloo) ------------------------------ Date: 25 May 88 19:05:03 GMT From: feifer@locus.ucla.edu Subject: AAAI-88: last call for student volunteers ANNOUNCEMENT: Last Call: Student Volunteers Needed for AAAI-88 DEADLINE: July 1, 1988 AAAI-88 will be held August 20-26, 1988 in beautiful St. Paul, Minnesota. Student volunteers are needed to help with local arrangements and staffing of the conference. To be eligible for a Volunteer position, an individual must be an undergraduate or graduate student in any field at any college or university. This is an excellent opportunity for students to participate in the conference. Volunteers receive FREE registration at AAAI-88, conference proceedings, "STAFF" T-shirt, and are invited to the volunteer party. More importantly, by participating as a volunteer, you become more involved and meet students and researchers with similar interests. Volunteer responsibilities are varied, including conference preparation, registration, staffing of sessions and tutorials and organizational tasks. Each volunteer will be assigned twelve (12) hours. If you are interested in participating in AAAI-88 as a Student Volunteer, apply by sending the following information: Name Electronic Mail Address (for mailing from arpa site) USMail Address Telephone Number(s) Dates Available Student Affiliation Advisor's Name to: valerie@SEAS.UCLA.EDU or Valerie Aylett 3531-K Boelter Hall Computer Science Dept. UCLA Los Angeles, California 90024-1596 Thanks, and I hope you join us this year! Richard Feifer Student Volunteer Coordinator AAAI-88 Staff ----------------------------------------------------------------- Richard G. Feifer feifer@cs.ucla.edu UCLA 145 Moore Hall -- Los Angeles -- Ca 90024 ------------------------------ Date: Thu 26 May 88 14:21:38-EDT From: Marc Vilain Subject: BBN AI Seminar: Josh Tennenberg BBN Science Development Program AI Seminar Series Lecture ABSTRACTION IN SYMBOLIC PLANNING Josh Tennenberg University of Rochester (josh@cs.rochester.edu) BBN Labs 10 Moulton Street 2nd floor large conference room 10:30 am, Tuesday May 31 The use of abstraction in planning is explored in order to simplify the task of reasoning about the effects of an agent's actions within a complex world. Two representational issues emerge which form the basis of this research. First, the abstract views must sanction plan construction for frequently occurring problems, yet never sanction the deduction of contradictory assertions. Second, a correspondence between the abstract and concrete views must be maintained so that abstract solutions bear a precise relationship to the concrete level solutions derived from them. These issues are explored within two different settings. In the first, an abstraction hierarchy is induced by relaxing some of the constraints on the application of actions. In the second, a predicate mapping function is defined which extends the notion of inheritance from object types to arbitrary relations and actions. ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 26 May 88 16:04:31 From: GOLUMBIC%ISRAEARN.BITNET@CORNELLC.CCS.CORNELL.EDU Date: 26 May 88, 16:03:16 IDT From: Martin Charles Golumbic 972 4 296282 GOLUMBIC at ISRAEARN To: AILIST at AI.AI.MIT "Pre-announcement announcement" ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Annals of Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence Arrangements have been finalized with the J. C. Baltzer Scientific Publishing Company to form a new publication series entitled the "Annals of Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence". Martin Golumbic will serve as the editor-in-chief. This new series will be parallel (maybe orthogonal) to the existing "Annals of Operations Research", and Peter Hammer will be general editor of the overall series which will include both. The Annals of Math and AI will be devoted to reporting significant contributions on the interaction of mathematical and computational techniques reflecting the evolving disciplines of artificial intelligence. The Annals will publish monographs, edited volumes of original manuscripts, survey articles and well-refereed conference proceedings of the highest caliber within this increasingly important field. All papers will be subjected to peer refereeing at the standard of the major scientific journals. It is our intent to represent a wide range of topics of concern to the scholars applying quantitative, combinatorial, logical and algebraic methods to areas as diverse as decision support, automatic deduction, reasoning, knowledge-based systems, machine learning, computer vision, robotics and motion planning as well as influencing the growth potential of new areas of applied mathematics and computational theory generated by this cross-fertilization. This new series will be similar in format to the Annals of OR which first appeared in 1984 and is now publishing at a rate of six volumes per year. The Annals will serve as a permanent record of research developments, with each issue or volume focused on a topic and featuring one or more guest editors. In coordination with the editorial board, the guest editors will be personally responsible for the collection of papers to appear in that volume, for the refereeing process and for the time schedule. Smaller collections of papers will be published in separate issues and combined into volumes of approximately 400 pages. Larger collections will be published as full volumes. Collections on the following topics are currently under preparation to appear during 1989/90: AI and Statistics (W. Gale and D. Hand), Motion Planning (M. Sharir), Mathematical Stability in Computer Vision (R. Hummel), Logic and Intelligent Database Systems (S. Tsur), Formal aspects of semantic networks (J. Sowa), and several others are under consideration. Proposals are invited for additional collections on topics within intelligent systems that show a strong foundational component. For further information, conference organizers and potential guest editors may contact Prof. Martin Charles Golumbic Editor-in-chief Annals of Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence IBM Israel Scientific Center Technion City Haifa, ISRAEL ------------------------------ Date: Fri 27 May 88 10:37:36-EDT From: adelson%cs.tufts.edu@relay.cs.net Reply-to: adelson%cs.tufts.edu@relay.cs.net Subject: FYI -- CAI Conference at Tufts SOFTWARE, IMAGINATION, EDUCATION: Educationally Effective Curricular Software in Higher Education SPEAKERS: Jon Barwise John Kemeny John Seely Brown Seymour Papert Marc H. Brown Judah L. Schwartz Daniel C. Dennett George Smith Mitchell Kapor Edwin Taylor Alan Kay Effective educational software is rare indeed--hard to create, and hard to recognize. This conference will address the difficult questions: What software actually works with students, and why? Leading thinkers will explore the possibilities and limitations of computers in higher education, and discuss demonstrations of the best existing software. CONFERENCE HELD MAY 31 THROUGH JUNE 3, 1988 For reservations and information about fees and location phone or mail: Judy Medler 617-628-5000 X 5209 CSNET: BARNEY%CC.TUFTS.EDU BITNET: JCMEDLER@TUFTS Sponsored by the Curricular Software Studio, with major funding by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. ------------------------------ Date: Mon 30 May 88 20:01:01-EDT From: Ben Olasov Subject: LISP BBoard For the benefit of any AI reseachers or LISP people who are working with, or considering working with the LISP interpreter in the AutoCAD CAD package on AI/ CAD interfaces of some kind, there is a dialup bulletin board in New York City intended to provide LISP tools for just such work/ research. The primary aim of the CAD section on this board is to be a resource for AutoLISP (and LISP) developers generally, with some emphasis on applying knowledge representation techniques in AutoCAD's LISP environment. The dial-up number in New York City is (212) 980-0770. There is no registration fee or on-line time charge required to use this board. ------------------------------ Date: 31 May 88 21:56:46 GMT From: BOSCO.BERKELEY.EDU!grossman@ucbvax.berkeley.edu Subject: AI and DECS A list of talks follows: Workshop On AI and Discrete Event Control Systems July 7 and 8, 1988 NASA-Ames Research Center Moffett Field, California Hamid Berenji, NASA-Ames Research Center The Role of Approximate Reasoning in AI-based Control Peter Caines, McGill University Dynamical Logic Observers for Finite Automata, Part 1 James Demmel, Courant Institute Hierarchical Control Studies in Dextrous Manipulation Using the Utah/MIT Hand Russel Greiner, University of Toronto Dynamical Logic Observers for Finite Automata, Part 2 Robert Hermann, NASA-Ames Research Center and Boston University The Scott Theory of Fixed Points Symbolic Control Michael Heymann, Israel Institute of Technology Real-Time Discrete Event Processes Peter Ramadge, Princeton University Discrete Event Systems, Modeling and Complexity Stan Rosenschein, CSLI, Stanford University Real Time AI Systems Gerry Sussman, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Automatic Extraction of Features From Dynamical Systems For more information, please contact: Robert Grossman (415) 642-8196 Department of Mathematics (415) 642-6526 (messages) University of California, Berkeley grossman@cartan.berkeley.edu Berkeley, CA 94720 grossman@ucbcarta.bitnet Robert Grossman Department of Mathematics University of California, Berkeley Berkeley, CA 94720 ------------------------------ End of AIList Digest ********************