IRList Digest Saturday, 12 November 1988 Volume 4 : Issue 50 Today's Topics: Email - Help with IRList - BITNET mail failure Query - Citations to RABBITT work at Xerox - More like "Hypertext on Hypertext" - Bibliographic software - Info for AI geneology and bibliography Call for Papers - ASIS Midyear 1989 News addresses are Internet: fox@vtopus.cs.vt.edu BITNET: foxea@vtcc1.bitnet (replaces foxea@vtvax3) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Sat, 12 Nov 88 06:48:56 EST From: Edward A. Fox Subject: Help needed - IRList Delays and Mail Handling Dear Readers, I apologize for the fact the IRList has not been coming out very often. I need some help. Here are some points of explanation: 1) Mailing list maintenance has become a real mess. I have been trying to use Apple's version of A/UX on a Mac II to manage IRlist mail, and am afraid there are a number of problems which I hope Apple will fix in their next release. So, recently, I have been trying to switch to use several VAX systems, and while I think I now have a reliable scheme to try, am afraid that people may have missed a number of issues. I suggest that people use FTP or use our Listserv archive to get missed issues if they know how to do that. Instructions on FTP are in the Welcome msg I send everyone - let me know if you need a copy. I invite anyone who can explain it to send instructions on how to use Listserv to access the complete database of IRList messages we have accessible that way. I also ask that as much as possible, people sign all submissions and requests for address changes with an address that I can use and recirculate - it sometimes takes several days of trying to figure out from the "From:" field how to get back to someone. 2) I am finding it difficult to keep up with all the address changes and errors. I would welcome a volunteer to take over the address list maintenance, and even the moderator job, if such is desired. As ACM Press Database and Electronic Products continues to develop, I will have even less time to handle the address problems. And I am sure someone else must have a better arrangement than I have here -- involving a Mac II and 3 VAXen and an IBM mainframe whenever I have to update addresses. 3) I am afraid that UUCP mailing of IRList has not been very reliable. Please note that there is a USENET group (I am not sure if that has been getting through either, though): comp.theory.info-retrieval UUCP users may want to refer to that instead of getting private messages which I am now sending via BITNET since other means cause our mailers to fail. Thanks for your patience as I try to eradicate our backlog and get issues sent out reliably. - Ed. ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 31 Oct 88 14:14:15 EDT Reply-To: Pat Reber Sender: Link failure announcements Subject: Lost Mail Files at CUNYVM Internet Gateway Due to a system malfunction, all mail files awaiting delivery to the Internet via the CUNYVM gateway as of 1:00 p.m., October 31st have been lost. This affected between 1500 and 1800 mail files. (It did not affect mail over 3 days old -- that had either been delivered or returned as undeliverable.) We regret this inconvenience. ------- Pat Reber, Info Rep/CUNY Director of User Services The City University of New York/University Computer Center 555 W. 57th Street New York, NY 10019 212-903-3622 ------------------------------ From: Prof Keith Van Rijsbergen Date: Thu, 20 Oct 88 14:06:57 BST Subject: Citations on RABBITT work at Xerox Can anyone send me recent citations to the RABBIT work done by TOU, WILLIAMS etc at Xerox. keith van rijsbergen ------------------------------ Date: 4 Nov 88 19:12 EST From: JNEVINS%HERC.decnet@ge-crd.arpa Subject: Query.. Do you have more items like "HYPERTEXT ON HYPERTEXT"? To: Ed Fox , Editor ACM Press Database and Electronic Products From: Jim Nevins, Programmer at GE 53 Appleton St, Apt 3 Arlington, MA 02174 Subject: The "HYPERTEXT ON HYPERTEXT" for the IBMpc is GREAT !! (especially mouse version) I especially enjoyed your HYPERTEXT item because I recently worked on PROJECT ALBERT here at GE where we touched on Electronic manuals. Project Albert is a small, portable, Ai-based, diagnostic system that in addition has on-line electronic manuals. All of ALBERT is in a prototype mode. Funny thing is our potential customer thought that the best part of our system wasn't the AI.... wasn't the diagnostics... wasn't even ALBERT ! They were excited about the Electronic manuals !! Do you know what language HYPERTIES was written in at the University of Maryland ?? Do you have other educational products for sale that run on IBMpc/xt/at/386 based machines ?? [Note: Regarding other products, there are versions of Hypertext on Hypertext for Mac under HyperCard, and for SUNs and Apollos under KMS. There may be a version using OWL's Guide which runs on IBM PCs and Macs. I hope Ben Shneiderman at U. Maryland, who was editor in charge of Hyperties version, will reply regarding the language used for development - I will guess that they used "C". We are planning a series of other products and welcome your comments and suggestions (and any volunteering of assistance! There are various CD-ROM and diskette and SUN cartridge tape distribution plans but it would be very nice to have an expression of user preferences so we can prioritize our efforts appropriately. Thanks for the interest - Ed.] Also... I read that you are directing the creation of the Virginia Disc Series of CD-ROM products. Do you have any CD-ROM products for sale. I have a CD-ROM player at home and we have a couple here at work that we are using for research/education. At one point we looked at adding a CD-ROM drive to ALBERT but the power/size requirements are to much for ALBERT to bear. [Note: Virginia Discs are free - would you like one? We are finally close to pressing Virginia Disc One - have added the Windows Version of Personal Librarian, a new version of TOPIC, and are adding more IR test collections - an old collection from TIME, the LISA collection from Sheffield, and the Rutgers collection of Dialog records used in a large set of experiments by Saracevic et al. If we can get all the remaining missing files ... - Ed.] -- JIM NEVINS Email: CBSVAX::JNEVINS%HERC.decnet@GE-CRD.ARPA ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 05 Nov 88 17:54:32 CST From: Gerald Kutish Subject: bibliographic software Can anyone give me some information on the all time best BIBLIOGRAPHIC program on MS-DOS or Macintosh which does the following: -takes bibliographic citation -abstract -extract by key-word -sort by author etc -reformat the citation to fit publication -database like thanks--gerald kutish ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 20 Oct 88 14:32:25 PDT From: rik%cs@ucsd.edu (Rik Belew) Subject: Request for information for AI genealogy, bibliography AI GENEALOGY Building an AI family tree Over the past several years we have been developing a collection of bibliographic references to the literature of artificial intelligence and cognitive science. We are also in the process of developing a system, called BIBLIO, to make this information available to researchers over Internet. My initial work was aimed at developing INDEXING methods which would allow access to these citations by appropriate keywords. More recently, we have explored the use of inter-document CITATIONS, made by the author of one document to previous articles, and TAXONOMIC CLASSIFICATIONS, developed by editors and librarians to describe the entire literature. We would now like to augment this database of bibliographic information with "cultural" information, specifically a family tree of the intellectual lineage of the authors. I propose to operationalize this tree in terms of each author's THESIS ADVISOR and COMMITTEE MEMBERS, and also the RESEARCH INSTITUTIONS where they work. It is our thesis that this factual information, in conjuction with bibliographic information about the AI literature, can be used to characterize important intellectual developments within AI, and thereby provide evidence about general processes of scientific discovery. A nice practical consequence is that it will help to make information retrievals from bibliographic databases, using BIBLIO, smarter. I am sending a query out to several EMail lists to ask for your help in this enterprise. If you have a Ph.D. and consider yourself a researcher in AI, I would like you to send me information about where you got your degree, who your advisor and committee members were, and where you have worked since then. Also, please forward this query to any of your colleagues that may not see this mailing list. The specific questions are contained in a brief questionnaire below, and this is followed by an example. I would appreciate it if you could "snip" this (soft copy) questionnaire, fill it in and send back to me intact because this will make my parsing job easier. Also, if you know some of these facts about your advisor (committee members), and their advisors, etc., I would appreciate it if you could send me that information as well. One of my goals is to trace the genealogy of today's researchers back as far as possible, to (for example) participants in the Dartmouth conference of 1956, as well as connections to other disciplines. If you do have any of this information, simply duplicate the questionnaire and fill in a separate copy for each person. Let me anticipate some concerns you may have. First, I apologize for the Ph.D. bias. It is most certainly not meant to suggest that only Ph.D.'s are involved in AI research. Rather, it is a simplification designed to make the notion of "lineage" more precise. Also, be advised that this is very much a not-for-profit operation. The results of this query will be combined (into an "AI family tree") and made publically available as part of our BIBLIO system. If you have any questions, or suggestions, please let me know. Thank you for your help. Richard K. Belew Asst. Professor Computer Science & Engr. Dept. (C-014) Univ. Calif. - San Diego La Jolla, CA 92093 619/534-2601 619/534-5948 (messages) rik%cs@ucsd.edu -------------------------------------------------------------- AI Genealogy questionnaire Please complete and return to: rik%cs@ucsd.edu NAME: Ph.D. year: Ph.D. thesis title: Department: University: Univ. location: Thesis advisor: Advisor's department: Committee member: Member's department: Committee member: Member's department: Committee member: Member's department: Committee member: Member's department: Committee member: Member's department: Committee member: Member's department: Research institution: Inst. location: Dates: Research institution: Inst. location: Dates: Research institution: Inst. location: Dates: -------------------------------------------------------------- AI Genealogy questionnaire EXAMPLE NAME: Richard K. Belew Ph.D. year: 1986 Ph.D. thesis title: Adaptive information retrieval: machine learning in associative networks Department: Computer & Communication Sciences (CCS) University: University of Michigan Univ. location: Ann Arbor, Michigan Thesis advisor: Stephen Kaplan Advisor's department: Psychology Thesis advisor: Paul D. Scott Advisor's department: CCS Committee member: Michael D. Gordon Member's department: Mgmt. Info. Systems - Business School Committee member: John H. Holland Member's department: CCS Committee member: Robert K. Lindsay Member's department: Psychology Research institution: Univ. California - San Diego Computer Science & Engr. Dept. Inst. location La Jolla, CA Dates: 9/1/86 - present ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 31 Oct 88 11:10 PST From: Christine Borgman Subject: ASIS Mid-Year meeting MEETING ANNOUNCEMENT: Please forward to anyone who may be interested. Submitted by Christine Borgman, Graduate School of Library and Information Science, UCLA, Los Angeles, CA 90024, 213/825-1379. IIN4CLB@UCLAMVS Call for papers and session proposals THE USER INTERFACE 1989 American Society for Information Science Mid-Year Meeting May 21-24, 1989, San Diego THe 18th ASIS Mid-Year Meeting, May 21-24, 1989, in San Diego, California, will present the state-of-the art in the design of interfaces for information retrieval systems, online public access catalogs and other information technologies. We will identify major tendencies, trends, influences, and approaches in interface design and discuss their significance for the systems of the future. Particular focus will be placed on the major activities involved in the design of interfaces, such as tools and techniques for interface design, user models and their application, and the process of task and interaction analysis. Program ideas and contributions are invited in all related areas. Discussions and explorations of existing interfaces, particularly those that imply lessons for other designers, are also welcome. Major themes in *The User Interface*: Tools - Rapid prototyping systems - Design environments - User interface development and management tools Natural Language Interfaces - Interfaces that allow natural language input by users Artificial Intelligence Approaches - Expert systems and knowledge-based approaches Interface styles -Command, menu, or direct manipulation: their uses and advantages Adaptive-Adaptable Systems - Systems or systems features that are user-modifiable or that adapt to specific users Usability - Evaluation and testing of interfaces and interface ideas Guidelines and Standards for Interfaces - International, national, or in-house Interested presenters are encouraged to expand on any of these theme ideas. Acceptance will be based on the relevance of the topic, substantive nature of the presentation, and clarity. Proposals should take the following form: Contributed papers: Submit the title and a 250-word abstract Demonstration proposals: Submit a written description of a demonstration of a particular system related to the meeting topic. Include a statement of the equipment requirements to support the proposed demonstration. Panel discussion proposals: Submit a one-page description of a topic for a panel discussion and a list of possible speakers to address the topic. For fullest consideration, all proposals should be submitted by November 21, 1988. Notification of acceptance or rejection will be made by January 3, 1989. All proposals and inquiries should be submitted to: Martin Dillon, 1989 ASIS Mid-Year Meeting Director, Office of Research OCLC 6565 Frantz Road BITNET: MJD@OCLCRSUN ASIS Special Interest Groups wishing to sponsor SIG programs should contact Debora Shaw, Indiana University, at SHAW@IUBACS. ASIS SIG/UOI (User Online Interaction) is interested in co-sponsoring sessions. For further information contact Thomas Martin of Syracuse University at TMARTIN@SUVM. ------------------------------ END OF IRList Digest ********************