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AIList Digest Volume 1 Issue 070
AIList Digest Tuesday, 4 Oct 1983 Volume 1 : Issue 70
Today's Topics:
Technology Transfer & Research Ownership - Clarification,
AI at Edinburgh - Description
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Date: Mon 3 Oct 83 11:55:41-PDT
From: David Rogers <DRogers@SUMEX-AIM.ARPA>
Subject: recent flame
I would like to clarify my recent comments on the disclaimer published
with the conference announcement for the "Intelligent Systems and Machines"
conference to be given at Oakland University. I did not mean to suggest
that the organizers of this particular conference are the targets of my
criticism; indeed, I congratulate them for informing potential attendees
of their obligations under the law. I sincerely apologize for not making
this obvious in my original note.
I also realize that most conferences will have to deal with this issue
in the future, and meant my message not as a "call to action", but rather,
as a "call to discussion" of the proper role of goverment in AI and science
in general. I believe that we should follow these rules, but should
also participate in informed discussion of their long-range effect and
direction.
Apologies and regards,
David Rogers
DRogers@SUMEX-AIM.ARPA
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Date: Friday, 30-Sep-83 14:17:58-BST
From: BUNDY HPS (on ERCC DEC-10) <bundy@edxa>
Reply-to: bundy@rutgers.arpa
Subject: Does Edinburgh AI exist?
A while back someone in your digest asked whether the AI
dept at Edinburgh still exists. The short answer is yes it flourishes.
The long answer is contained in the departmental description that follows.
Alan Bundy
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Date: Friday, 30-Sep-83 14:20:00-BST
From: BUNDY HPS (on ERCC DEC-10) <bundy@edxa>
Reply-to: bundy@rutgers.arpa
Subject: Edinburgh AI Dept - A Description
THE DEPARTMENT OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AT EDINBURGH UNIVERSITY
Artificial Intelligence was recognised as a separate discipline by Edinburgh
University in 1966. The Department in its present form was created in 1974.
During its existence it has steadily built up a programme of undergraduate and
post-graduate teaching and engaged in a vigorous research programme. As the
only Department of Artificial Intelligence in any university, and as an
organisation which has made a major contribution to the development of the
subject, it is poised to play a unique role in the advance of Information
Technology which is seen to be a national necessity.
The Department collaborates closely with other departments within the
University in two distinct groupings. Departments concerned with Cognitive
Science, namely A.I., Linguistics, Philosophy and Psychology all participate
in the School of Epistemics, which dates from the early 70's. A new
development is an active involvement with Computer Science and Electrical
Engineering. The 3 departments form the basis of the School of Information
Technology. A joint MSc in Information Technology began in 1983.
A.I. are involved in collaborative activities with other institutions
which are significant in that they involve the transfer of people,
ideas and software. In particular this involves MIT (robotics),
Stanford (natural language), Carnegie-Mellon (the PERQ machine) and
Grenoble (robotics).
Relationships with industry are progressing. As well as a number of
development contracts, A.I. have recently had a teaching post funded by the
software house Systems Designers Ltd. There, however, is a natural limit to
the extent to which a University Department can provide a service to industry:
consequently a proposal to create an Artificial Intelligence Applications
Institute has been put forward and is at an advanced stage of planning. This
will operate as a revenue earning laboratory, performing a technology transfer
function on the model of organisations like the Stanford Research Institute or
Bolt Beranek and Newman.
Research in A.I.
A.I. is a new subject so that there is a very close relationship between
teaching at all levels, and research. Artificial Intelligence is about making
machines behave in ways which exhibit some of the characteristics of
intelligence, and about how to integrate such capabilities into larger
coherent systems. The vehicle for such studies has been the digital computer,
chosen for its flexibility.
A.I. Languages and Systems.
The development of high level programming languages has been crucial to all
aspects of computing because of the consequent easing of the task of
communicating with these machines. Artificial Intelligence has given birth to
a distinctive series of languages which satisfy different design constraints
to those developed by Computer Scientists whose primary concern has been to
develop languages in which to write reliable and efficient programming systems
to perform standard computing tasks. Languages developed in the Artificial
Intelligence field have been intended to allow people readily to try out ideas
about how a particular cognitive process can be mechanised. Consequently they
have provided symbolic computation as well as numeric, and have allowed
program code and data to be equally manipulable. They are also highly
interactive, and often integrated with a sophisticated text editor, so that
the iteration time for trying out a new idea can be rapid.
Edinburgh has made a substantial contribution to A.I. programming languages
(with significant cross fertilisation to the Computer Science world) and will
continue to do so. POP-2 was designed and developed in the A.I. Department
by Popplestone and Burstall. The development of Prolog has been more complex.
Kowalski first formulated the crucial idea of predicate logic as a programming
language during his period in the A.I. Department. Prolog itself was designed
and first implemented in Marseille, as a result of Kowalski's interaction with
a research group there. This was followed by a re-implementation at
Edinburgh, which demonstrated its potential as a practical tool.
To date the A.I. Department have supplied implementations of A.I. languages
to over 200 laboratories around the world, and are involved in an active
programme of Prolog systems development.
The current development in languages is being undertaken by a group supported
by the SERC, led by Robert Rae, and supervised by Dr Howe. The concern of the
group is to provide language support for A.I. research nationwide, and to
develop A.I. software for a single user machine, the ICL PERQ. The major goal
of this project is to provide the superior symbolic programming capability of
Prolog, in a user environment of the quality to be found in modern personal
computers with improved interactive capabilities.
Mathematical Reasoning.
If Artificial Intelligence is about mechanising reasoning, it has a close
relationship with logic which is about formalising mathematical reasoning, and
with the work of those philosophers who are concerned with formalising
every-day reasoning. The development of Mathematical Logic during the 20th
century has provided a part of the theoretical basis for A.I. Logic provides a
rigorous specification of what may in principle be deduced - it says little
about what may usefully be deduced. And while it may superficially appear
straightforward to render ordinary language into logic, on closer examination
it can be seen to be anything but easy.
Nevertheless, logic has played a central role in the development of A.I. in
Edinburgh and elsewhere. An early attempt to provide some control over the
direction of deduction was the resolution principle, which introduced a sort
of matching procedure called unification between parts of the axioms and parts
of a theorem to be proved. While this principle was inadequate as a means of
guiding a machine in the proof of significant theorems, it survives in Prolog
whose equivalent of procedure call is a restricted form of resolution.
A.I. practioners still regard the automation of mathematical reasoning to
be a crucial area in A.I., but have moved from earlier attempts to find uniform
procedures for an efficient search of the space of possible deductions to the
creation of systems which embody expert knowledge about specific domains. For
example if such a system is trying to solve a (non linear) equation, it may
adopt a strategy of using the axioms of algebra to bring two instances of the
unknown closer together with the "intention" of getting them to coalesce.
Work in mathematical reasoning is under the direction of Dr Bundy.
Robotics.
The Department has always had a lively interest in robotics, in particular in
the use of robots for assembly. This includes the use of vision and force
sensing, and the design of languages for programming assembly robots. Because
of the potential usefulness of fast moving robots, the Department has
undertaken a study of their dynamics behaviour, design and control. The work
of the robot group is directed by Mr Popplestone.
A robot command language RAPT is under development: this is intended to make
it easy for non-computer experts to program an assembly robot. The idea is
that the assembly task should be programmed in terms of the job that is to be
done and how the objects are to be fitted together, rather than in terms of
how the manipulator should be moved. This SERC funded work is steered by a
Robot Language Working Party which consists of industrialists and academics;
the recently formed Tripartite Study Group on Robot Languages extends the
interest to France and Germany.
An intelligent robot needs to have an internal representation of its world
which is sufficiently accurate to allow it to predict the results of planned
actions. This means that, among other things, it needs a good representation
of the shapes of bodies. While conventional shape modelling techniques permit
a hypothetical world to be represented in a computer they are not ideal for
robot applications, and the aim at Edinburgh is to combine techniques of shape
modelling with techniques used in A.I. so that the advantages of both may be
used. This will include the ability to deal effectively with uncertainty.
Recently, in collaboration with GEC, the robotics group have begun to consider
how the techniques of spatial inference which have been developed can be
extended into the area of mechanical design, based on the observation that the
essence of any design is the relationship between part features, rather than
the specific quantitative details. A proposal is being persued for a
demonstrator project to produce a small scale, but highly integrated "Design
and Make" system on these lines.
Work on robot dynamics, also funded by the SERC, has resulted in the
development of highly efficient algorithms for simulating standard serial
robots, and in a novel representation of spatial quantities, which greatly
simplifies the mathematics.
Vision and Remote Sensing.
The interpretation of data derived from sensors depends on expectations about
the structure of the world which may be of a general nature, for example that
continuous surfaces occupy much of the scene, or specific. In manufacture the
prior expectations will be highly specific: one will know what objects are
likely to be present and how they are likely to be related to each other. One
vision project in the A.I. Department is taking advantage of this in
integrating vision with the RAPT development in robotics - the prior
expectations are expressed by defining body geometry in RAPT, and by defining
the expected inter-body relationships in the same medium.
A robot operating in a natural environment will have much less specific
expectations, and the A.I. Department collaborate with the Heriot Watt
University to study the sonar based control of a submersible. This involves
building a world representation by integrating stable echo patterns, which are
interpreted as objects.
Natural Language.
A group working in the Department of A.I. and related departments in the School
of Epistemics is studying the development of computational models of language
production, the process whereby communicative intent is transformed into
speech. The most difficult problems to be faced when pursuing this goal cover
the fundamental issues of computation: structure and process. In the domain
of linguistic modelling, these are the questions of representation of
linguistic and real world knowledge, and the understanding of the planning
process which underlies speaking.
Many sorts of knowledge are employed in speaking - linguistic knowledge of how
words sound, of how to order the parts of a sentence to communicate who did
what to whom, of the meaning of words and phrases, and common sense knowledge
of the world. Representing all of these is prerequisite to using them in a
model of language production.
On the other hand, planning provides the basis for approaching the issue of
organizing and controlling the production process, for the mind seems to
produce utterances as the synthetic, simultaneous resolution of numerous
partially conflicting goals - communicative goals, social goals, purely
linguistic goals - all variously determined and related.
The potential for dramatic change in the study of human language which is made
possible by this injection of dynamic concerns into what has heretofore been
an essentially static enterprise is vast, and the A.I. Department sees its
work as attempting to realise some of that potential. The study of natural
language processing in the department is under the direction of Dr Thompson.
Planning Systems.
General purpose planning systems for automatically producing plans of action
for execution by robots have been a long standing theme of A.I. research. The
A.I. Department at Edinburgh had a very active programme of planning research
in the mid 1970s and was one of the leading international centres in this
area. The Edinburgh planners were applied to the generation of project plans
for large industrial activities (such as electricity turbine overhaul
procedures). These planners have continued to provide an important source of
ideas for later research and development in the field. A prototype planner in
use at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory which can schedule the activities of a
Voyager-type planetary probe is based on Edinburgh work.
New work on planning has recently begun in the Department and is mainly
concerned with the interrelationships between planning, plan execution and
monitoring. The commercial exploitation of the techniques is also being
discussed. The Department's planning work is under the direction of Dr Tate.
Knowledge Based and Expert Systems.
Much of the A.I. Department's work uses techniques often referred to as
Intelligent Knowledge Based Systems (IKBS) - this includes robotics, natural
language, planning and other activities. However, researchers in the
Department of A.I. are also directly concerned with the creation of Expert
Systems in Ecological Modelling, User Aids for Operating Systems, Sonar Data
Interpretation, etc.
Computers in Education.
The Department has pioneered in this country an approach to the use of
computers in schools in which children can engage in an active and creative
interaction with the computer without needing to acquire abstract concepts and
manipulative skills for which they are not yet ready. The vehicle for this
work has been the LOGO language, which has a simple syntax making few demands
on the typing skills of children. While LOGO is in fact equivalent to a
substantial subset of LISP, a child can get moving with a very small subset of
the language, and one which makes the actions of the computer immediately
concrete in the form of the movements of a "turtle" which can either be
steered around a VDU or in the form of a small mobile robot.
This approach has a significant value in Special Education. For example in
one study an autistic boy found he was able to communicate with a "turtle",
which apparently acted as a metaphor for communicating with people, resulting
in his being able to use language spontaneously for the first time. In
another study involving mildly mentally and physically handicapped youngsters
a touch screen device invoked procedures for manipulating pictorial materials
designed to teach word attack skills to non-readers. More recent projects
include a diagnostic spelling program for dyslexic children, and a suite of
programs which deaf children can use to manipulate text to improve their
ability to use language expressively. Much of the Department's Computers in
Education work is under the direction Dr Howe.
Teaching in the Department of A.I.
The Department is involved in an active teaching programme at undergraduate
and postgraduate level. At undergraduate level, there are A.I. first, second
and third year courses. There is a joint honours degree with the Department
of Linguistics. A large number of students are registered with the Department
for postgraduate degrees. An MSc/PhD in Cognitive Science is provided in
collaboration with the departments of Linguistics, Philosophy and Psychology
under the aegis of the School of Epistemics. The Department contributes two
modules on this: Symbolic Computation and Computational Linguistics. This
course has been accepted as a SERC supported conversion course. In October
1983 a new MSc programme in IT started. This is a joint activity with the
Departments of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering. It has a large
IKBS content which is supported by SERC.
Computing Facilities in the Department of A.I.
Computing requirements of researchers are being met largely through the
SERC DEC-10 situated at the Edinburgh Regional Computing Centre or residually
through use of UGC facilities. Undergraduate computing for A.I. courses is
supported by the EMAS facilities at ERCC. Postgraduate computing on courses
is mainly provided through a VAX 11/750 Berkeley 4.1BSD UNIX system within the
Department. Several groups in the Department use the ICL PERQ single user
machine. A growth in the use of this and other single user machines is
envisaged over the next few years. The provision of shared resources to these
systems in a way which allows for this growth in an orderly fashion is a
problem the Department wishes to solve.
It is anticipated that several further multi-user computers will soon be
installed - one at each site of the Department - to act as the hub of future
computing provision for the research pursued in Artificial Intelligence.
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End of AIList Digest
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