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IRList Digest Volume 4 Number 48
IRList Digest Sunday, 28 August 1988 Volume 4 : Issue 48
Today's Topics:
Call for Papers - Panels for IJCAI '89
Abstracts - Dissertations selected by S. Humphrey [Part 5 of 5]
News addresses are
Internet: fox@fox.cs.vt.edu or fox%fox.cs.vt.edu@dcssvx.cc.vt.edu
BITNET: foxea@vtcc1.bitnet (replaces foxea@vtvax3)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Thu, 18 Aug 88 09:15:45 EDT
From: schmolze%cs.tufts.edu@RELAY.CS.NET
Subject: Call for Panels for IJCAI-89
The IJCAI committee requests the submission of proposals for panel sessions
to be presented at IJCAI-89. A panel session allows from three to five
people to present their views and/or results on a common theme, issue or
question. The panel topic must be both relevant and interesting to the AI
community. The panel members must have substantive experience with the
topic. However, the members need not be members of the AI community.
Preference will be given to panels that demonstrate broad, preferably
international, participation.
A panel topic must be specified clearly and narrowly so it can be adequately
addressed in a single session. Panel sessions run for 75 minutes. The
format usually consists of an introduction by the chairperson with the
purpose of providing the audience with a background for the ensuing
discussion. The panel members, including possibly the chairperson, then
present their views and/or results, followed by interchange between the
participants and, finally, by interchange between the panelists and the
audience. Preferably, the session ends with an overview by the chairperson.
Panels may primarily serve to present information on a specific topic, such
as recent important results or the status of important projects. Panels may
focus on alternative approaches or views to a common question, where
panelists present their approaches or views and the results they produced.
Also, panels may be critical, where some members present an approach or view
and other members criticize them, allowing time for rebuttals.
REQUIREMENTS FOR SUBMISSION
A proposal consists of a cover page, an overall summary and a summary of each
member's presentation.
The cover page should contain the following.
o At the top of the first page, write "PANEL PROPOSAL".
o Title of panel: The length should be similar to the lengths of titles of
papers.
o Chairperson: Name, affiliation, phone number, postal mailing address and
electronic mailing address. Please give phone number and address for
correspondence from the United States.
o Members: Names, affiliations, phone numbers, postal mailing addresses and
electronic mailing addresses. Please give phone numbers and addresses for
correspondence from the United States.
The overall summary should be brief, giving a clear description of the panel
topic such that members of the general AI community can understand and
appreciate it. It should explain how the member's presentations will be
integrated. In addition, it should address the following questions.
o What is the relevance and/or significance of the panel, including both
the topic and the members?
o What is the general AI interest in the topic? Please give evidence, such
as recent important papers, workshops, etc.
o How does the panel membership demonstrate broad, preferably
international, participation? If it does not, why is narrow
participation preferable?
o If your topic has been discussed by another panel in a recent national or
international AI conference, how will your panel differ from it?
The overall summary should be from 500 to 1000 words in length.
The final part of the proposal should be a brief summary of each member's
presentation. This includes the chairperson if she or he will give a
presentation. Each such summary should give a clear description of the
member's view or approach, summarize results if appropriate, and demonstrate
the connections to the panel topic. Where appropriate, each summary should
support the arguments given in the overall summary. These summaries,
including the overall summary, should be coordinated such that the panel
proposal is a sensible whole and not a loosely coupled collection of parts.
Each member's summary should be approximately 500 words.
Please submit six (6) copies of the proposal (cover page, overall summary and
member summaries) no later than December 12, 1988 to:
IJCAI 89
c/o AAAI
445 Burgess Drive
Menlo Park, CA 94025-3496 USA
Chairpersons for proposals will be notified of the final decisions by March
27, 1989. The proposals selected for presentation will be published in the
proceedings. Chairpersons and members of these panels will be allowed to
submit extended versions of their summaries. Revised versions will be due by
April 27, 1989.
------------------------------
Date: Wed, 3 Aug 88 13:36:58 EDT
From: "Susanne M. HUMPHREY" <humphrey@MCS.NLM.NIH.GOV>
Subject: dissertation abstracts [Note: Part 5 of 5 - Ed.]
.[
AN University Microfilms Order Number ADGD--80234.
AU OBEID, NADIM.
IN University of Essex (United Kingdom) Ph.D 1987, 113 pages.
TI A MODEL OF INFORMATION GROWTH.
DE Computer Science.
AB Available from UMI in association with The British Library.
Requires signed TDF.
It is beyond controversy that reasoning about knowledge and belief
is a major research issue in Artificial Intelligence (AI). It is
also notable that a study of knowledge/belief is included in any
AI system irrespective of its aims and motivations. Therefore, for
any AI system to have some degree of flexibility, generality and
extendability, it must somehow embody some knowledge about how
knowledge/belief can be represented, used and possibly revised.
In this thesis we introduce a model, called "a model of
information growth", which aims at capturing the activity of a
rational agent capable of drawing some conclusions from incomplete
and/or imprecise information about the domain of concern. The main
components of the model consist of: a state representing what the
agent accepts at a certain moment, an accessibility relation which
determines the set of states which the agent considers possible
and a change function which represents its revision policies.
In chapter two we introduce the model, discuss its general
features and some of the particular choices that are made
regarding different concepts such as truth vis-a-vis acceptance
and conditionals vis-a-vis acceptance-conditionals. In chapter
three we present two nonmonotonic logics that are suitable to
reason with incomplete and/or imprecise information. Both logics
are proven to be sound and complete with respect to their
respective semantics. In chapter four, the non-monotonic logics
presented in chapter three are extended with a notion of
conditionals in order to represent the agent revision strategies.
The resulting logics are proven to be complete and sound. A
comparison with Lewis's and Stalnaker's conditionals is made. The
model is useful at both theoretical and practical level. Its
applications include any branch or area of research in AI that
requires reasoning about knowledge and belief.
.]
.[
AN University Microfilms Order Number ADGDX-80375.
AU PENSULO, EMILIUS MWAPE.
IN University of Aston in Birmingham (United Kingdom) Ph.D 1987
308 pages.
TI INTEGRATING COMPUTER-AIDED ENGINEERING FUNCTIONS: THE MANAGEMENT OF
INFORMATION.
DE Engineering, System Science.
AB Available from UMI in association with The British Library.
The integration of computer aided engineering functions is one of
the most pressing requirements in the industrial computing field
today, as evidenced by the interest shown in the concept of
computer integrated manufacturing (CIM). However, major obstacles
exist at many levels. Within individual enterprises, the main
problem seems to be the inability of discrete software systems to
share data effectively. This was the problem addressed in this
research work. The solution was seen to lie in a full analysis and
centralized management of the common data in the system.
There are three main sections in this thesis. Firstly, the
formulation of a generalized methodology for the realization of a
discrete mechanical product is outlined in order to expose the
domain for integration. Specific proposals are then presented
regarding the design of integrated CAE systems based on the
database approach to information management. These proposals arose
from a study of the specific nature of engineering data and
activities and also from those of discrete mechanical products.
The main problem identified was the maintenance of data integrity
in an engineering database: this led to the two main proposals
made in the thesis i.e. the introduction of deductive capacities
in the conventional database system architecture and the layering
of the database structure into a global and several local
components. The last section of the thesis concerns the design,
implementation and evaluation of an integrated CAE system, created
in order to enable an objective evaluation of the proposals
arising from the research to be carried out. The specific
application chosen was the design of industrial gearboxes.
It is now generally recognized that integration has to involve
some form of centralized database management. The subject of this
thesis is therefore likely to remain of interest for sometime to
come.
.]
.[
AN University Microfilms Order Number ADG88-03441.
AU GRICE, ROGER ALAN.
IN Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Ph.D 1987, 438 pages.
TI TECHNICAL COMMUNICATION IN THE COMPUTER INDUSTRY: AN
INFORMATION-DEVELOPMENT PROCESS TO TRACK, MEASURE, AND ENSURE
QUALITY.
DE Information Science.
AB The needs of the information society have thrust into prominence
those who produce the technical information needed to work with
computers. As a consequence of society's need for technical
information, those who develop and produce that information are
called upon to translate the technical capabilities of complex
computer systems into a form that enables readers to perform
needed tasks.
Since the information they produce is an integral part of the
product, it follows that these "information developers" must work
as an integral part of the product-development team, not as
post-facto wordsmiths who clean up the writing done by product
developers. To function in this capacity, they need an
information-development process that is consistent with the
product-development process. They must adapt their writing skills
and strategies to the product-development environment in which
they work, while at the same time meeting the needs of their
audiences, a group that continues to grow in number and diversity
as the use of computers evolves.
Developing information in this environment is not simply following
a set of rules for communicating correctly, but is a process for
converting detailed technical information into information that
enables users of high-technology products to do the tasks that
they want or need to do; it is not merely describing the structure
of those products and the functions that are available. Rather, it
is a rich, detailed process that involves gathering requirements;
setting objectives; producing specifications to meet those
objectives; producing drafts according to those specifications;
editing, reviewing, and testing those drafts; producing final
versions of the information and distributing them to customers;
updating and redistributing that information in response to
product changes and reader response; and measuring and assessing
the quality of the information that has been produced and the
process used to produce it.
While the process is well defined in many of its aspects, it also
possesses many implications for further research and development
efforts by academic researchers and industrial practitioners
alike.
.]
.[
AN University Microfilms Order Number ADG88-03073.
AU HU, CHENGREN.
IN University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Ph.D 1987, 277
pages.
TI AN EVALUATION OF ONLINE DATABASE SELECTION BY A GATEWAY SYSTEM WITH
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE TECHNIQUES.
DE Information Science.
AB The tremendous growth of computer-readable databases makes
automated database selection very desirable in online services.
Gateway systems as components in online networks convert
information among online systems and aid the users in various ways
including database selection. An evaluation of online database
selection by an existing gateway system (InfoMaster, a version of
EasyNet) was performed, comparing database selections made by
experienced reference librarians with those made by inexperienced
searchers aided by InfoMaster for the same set of queries. The
results show that automated database selection by InfoMaster still
heavily depends on a human decision concerning the broad subject
area into which a query falls. When the gateway user properly
selects the subject area for a particular query, InfoMaster can do
automated database selection as well as the human intermediaries.
Artificial intelligence techniques (AI) for automated database
selection by gateway systems were studied and a framework of AI
techniques for this particular function was outlined based on the
analysis of the evaluation results.
.]
.[
AN University Microfilms Order Number ADG88-03517.
AU STERN, RICHARD ELLIOT.
IN Rutgers University The State U. of New Jersey (New Brunswick)
Ph.D 1987, 129 pages.
TI UNCITEDNESS IN THE BIOMEDICAL LITERATURE: AN EXPLORATION OF
BIBLIOGRAPHIC CORRELATES.
DE Information Science.
AB The purpose of the study was to determine if selected
bibliographic characteristics of biomedical journal papers are
associated with the subsequent uncitedness of the papers. Two
characteristics specific to the biomedical literature and seven
general characteristics were examined. The biomedical
characteristics include whether or not the research was funded by
the National Institutes of Health and the biomedical research
level which is a four level classification of journals according
to their research orientation: Level 1, Clinical Observation;
Level 2, Clinical Mix, Level 3, Clinical Investigation, and Level
4, Basic Research. The general characteristics include the number
of authors, title words, key title words, and references; also,
the age, price, and circulation of the journal in which the paper
was published. The rate of uncitedness, using the 275 source
journal set as the citing set is 13.3%. The rate of uncitedness
using the Science Citation Index as the citing set is estimated to
be 4.4%.
Research support and biomedical research level are significantly
associated with uncitedness. Uncitedness is lower for
NIH-supported papers. Uncitedness decreases with biomedical
research level, with uncitedness lowest among papers published in
basic research journals.
A discriminant analysis function with the general bibliographic
characteristics correctly predicted cited and uncited papers with
70% accuracy. Uncited papers alone were predicted with 75%
accuracy. In partitioning the components of the discriminant
model, the number of references accounted for 76.4% of
variability, and the number of authors accounted for an additional
9.7% of the variability. This reinforces the finding that the
number of references and authors are significantly related to
uncitedness. Uncitedness papers have fewer references and authors
compared to cited papers.
Future studies of uncitedness should proceed in two directions.
One, additional bibliographic characteristics such as author
affiliation and length of paper ought to be tested. Second,
further study of the significantly associated characteristics
ought to be examined more closely to determine whether their
numbers differentiate between levels of quality in papers or
whether there is some other mechanism at work that accounts for
the significant differences in rates of uncitedness.
.]
.[
AN University Microfilms Order Number ADG88-03222.
AU THORNBURG, GAIL ELLEN.
IN University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Ph.D 1987, 111
pages.
TI LOOK: IMPLEMENTATION OF AN EXPERT SYSTEM IN INFORMATION RETRIEVAL
FOR DATABASE SELECTION.
DE Information Science.
AB This project was designed to construct an advisory or expert
system in one area of online information retrieval, specifically,
choice of online database. Problems of this domain include
proliferation of potentially expensive databases, and the
difficulty of predicting the specific database(s) most likely to
yield optimum results in the climate of extreme "information
compartmentalization." This implementation made use of an
integrated set of software tools developed in the Artificial
Intelligence Lab of the Department of Computer Science at the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The system was
designed to reflect as closely as possible the decision-making
expertise of academic online searchers in life sciences.
The implemented system, LOOK (non-acronymic), represented general
features of 18 online databases, and its advice succeeded in
satisfying the experts involved in its development. The system
used a rule-based representation, and advisory sessions were
guided by an inference algorithm featuring three phases of
evaluation. Issues discussed here include the numbers of variables
and values required to represent the domain with any adequacy, the
levels of abstraction apparent in these variables, and the
difficulty of separating domain from world knowledge in
constructing an apt representation.
.]
.[
AN University Microfilms Order Number ADG88-03480.
AU GOODIN, M. ELSPETH.
IN Rutgers University The State U. of New Jersey (New Brunswick)
Ph.D 1987, 186 pages.
TI THE TRANSFERABILITY OF LIBRARY RESEARCH SKILLS FROM HIGH SCHOOL TO
COLLEGE.
DE Library Science.
AB The specific purpose of this research was to investigate three
interrelated questions: First, can a program of instruction be
developed to teach high school seniors efficient and effective
search strategies and information-gathering skills useful to them
as college freshmen? Second, can these skills be reflected in a
research paper? Third, how can these skills be measured for
transferability?
A program of instruction was developed and taught by the high
school librarian that included the responses and recommendations
of 62 college faculty members to a questionnaire on
library-related course requirements.
Participants in the study, 159 seniors from the college
preparatory English classes of two comparable high schools, were
divided into one control and one experimental group for a pilot
test (Study I) and for a second test (Study II).
Students in the experimental groups were given a pre-test on basic
college library information knowledge, followed by a series of
lessons on the research process, the assignment of a research
paper, a post-test on basic college Library information knowledge,
and the return of their graded papers, the grading being completed
by two college English professors.
Students in the control groups were given the pre-test, the
research paper assignment, the post-test and the return of the
graded papers.
A Likert-type attitude scale questionnaire was administered to all
high school students, and to the participants in Study I during
their first semester in college.
High school students receiving the instruction scored
significantly higher on the post-test than did students not
receiveing the instruction. These skills were reflected in a
research paper acceptable at the college freshmen level. College
students exposed to the program of instruction indicated they were
able to effectively utilize the research skills learned in high
school when conducting research to meet course requirements. There
were no significant differences between the groups on the attitude
scale questionnaire, indicating an inability of this questionnaire
to adequately measure the transferability of research skills from
high school to college.
Finally, the high school librarian became a linking agent between
the high school and college libraries, by making the librarian in
the research setting approachable.
.]
.[
AN University Microfilms Order Number ADG88-03160.
AU OLDEN, EDWARD ANTHONY.
IN University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Ph.D 1987, 175
pages.
TI THE BENEFICIARIES OF LIBRARY AND INFORMATION POLICY IN BRITISH AND
EX-BRITISH AFRICA: STEPS FROM THE WHITE WOMEN'S LEAGUE TO THE
ELECTRONIC LIBRARY.
DE Library Science.
AB This dissertation examines the beginnings and early years of five
libraries set up with the stated aim of serving the public in
British and ex-British Africa, and argues that the beneficiaries
of library and information policy have not been the public at all
but only a small minority: the elite and the would-be elite. It
suggests a pattern from the 1920s and 1930s to the present: from
the fee-charging whites-only leisure reading libraries of the
settler colonies to the computerized information services
recommended for the use of the black "policy-makers" and
"decision-makers" of today.
Five episodes from Kenya, the Gold Coast, and Nigeria are used to
support the argument: the fee-charging whites-only service that
the Carnegie Corporation of New York--the champion of the free
public library--sponsored in Kenya Colony in the 1930s; the
fee-charging service for the white and black educated elite of
Lagos, Nigeria, that Carnegie money helped bring into being around
the same time; the fee-charging service that the British Council
introduced for the white and black educated elite of the Gold
Coast and Nigeria in the mid-1940s; the Northern Nigeria Regional
Library, set up in 1952, which with time concentrated more and
more on the capital and less and less on the rest of the region;
and the National Library of Nigeria, established with Ford
Foundation help in the 1960s to assist in the "responsible conduct
of modern government." Accounts are based on Carnegie, Ford, and
British Council archives, and on published sources. South African,
Rhodesian, and other examples are also mentioned.
The dissertation attempts to show that librarianship and
information science are very much part of the political context in
which they operate; that only a small percentage of the African
population has benefitted from the western-style libraries and
information services that have been introduced; and that the study
of such matters adds one more dimension to what is known about
cultural and other forms of dependency.
.]
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END OF IRList Digest
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