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AIList Digest Volume 2 Issue 182
AIList Digest Wednesday, 26 Dec 1984 Volume 2 : Issue 182
Today's Topics:
AI Tools - Prolog for PCs,
Linguistics - Oxymorons,
Humor - Malgorithm Contest,
Bindings - Navy Center for Applied Research in AI,
News - Recent Articles,
Opinion - Personal Assistants,
Workstations - Very Inexpensive LISP Machine,
Courses - Intelligent Tutoring Systems (SU) &
Computational Semantics (SU)
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Date: Sat, 22 Dec 84 21:12 EST
From: Tim Finin <Tim%upenn.csnet@csnet-relay.arpa>
Subject: Prolog for PC-type machines
Expert Systems Limited has a prolog for PC-type machines that seems
pretty good. It is Clocksin&Melish compatible. We've run it with
no problems on both a IBM-PC and a DEC Rainbow, so it will probably
run on any MS-DOS machine. There is also a CP/M version. This is the
prolog that Technowledge used to implement M1 in. The home address for
the company is:
Expert Systems Limited
9 West Way
Oxford OX2 OJB
England
There is a U.S. affiliate, located in the Philadelphia area, that
has the US rights. I don't have the address at the moment.
------------------------------
Date: Sat, 22 Dec 84 21:29 EST
From: Tim Finin <Tim%upenn.csnet@csnet-relay.arpa>
Subject: Oxymorons, Pleonasms and various forms of Bull
Saul Gorn has published a compendium of material related to the recent
note on "Oxymorons, Pleonasms and various forms of Bull" that he has
collected in his 50 year career as a mathematician and computer
scientist. It is available as "Self-Annihilating Sentences; Saul
Gorn's Compendium of Rarely Used Cliches"; Technical Report
MS-CIS-83-22. It can be obtained by writing:
Publications
Computer and Information Science
The Moore School
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, PA 19104
Tim
------------------------------
Date: Fri, 21 Dec 84 14:53:45 mst
From: jlg@LANL (Jim Giles)
Subject: Contest
It's the first annual Complete the Book Title Contest ( no prizes awarded,
none were donated).
'Malgorithms + Data Scrambling = ___________________'
First prize (which is worth twice as much as the other prizes) will be
awarded to the person who guesses the author of the above work.
Send answers to jlg@lanl.ARPA and I will summarize.
------------------------------
Date: Wed, 19 Dec 84 10:25:36 est
From: Dennis Perzanowski <dennisp@nrl-aic>
Subject: erratum
Please be advised of the following correction in the address for the
Navy Center for Applied Research in Artificial Intelligence which was
recently broadcast:
U.S. Navy Center for Applied Research in Artificial Intelligence
Naval Research Laboratory - Code 7510
Washington, DC 20375-5000
The address of the Civilian Personnel Office to which all resumes and
inquiries should be sent is correct as printed in the announcement.
Sorry for any inconvenience. Thank you.
------------------------------
Date: Sun, 23 Dec 84 12:46:37 cst
From: Laurence Leff <leff%smu.csnet@csnet-relay.arpa>
Subject: AI News
The Institute, Volume 9 Number 1 January 1985 Page 10
Experts Envision New Applications for AI Technology on the Shop Floor
Describes work for automatically constructing part programs for milling.
Also discusses applications of AI to such industries as paperboard packaging
Proccedings on an Expert System Session of Autofact 6 are available
from SME, One SME Drive, P. O. Box 930, Dearborn, Mich. 48121 which includes
papers on these subjects.
Electronics Week, October 15 1984 page 14
Discusses various Fifth Generation projects in America and Japan
IEEE Computer November 1984 Volume 17 No. 11
Page 117 Three-paragraph review of the National Conference on Artificial
Intelligence in Austin by Elaine Rich
Page 114 summarizes talk by Robert Miller, senior vice president at Data
General, on "personal expert systems"
Page 65 The Library of Computer and Information Science is again offering
the three volume Handbook of Artificial Intelligence for only $4.95 as
a sign up bonus.
Electronics Week October 29, 1984, page 34
Discusses Quintus Computer Systems Prolog systems and development environments
for Prolog.
Electronics Week September 24, 1984 page 59
Interview with Larry Harris who is president of Artificial Intelligence
Corp., the people behind the Intellect natural language database interface
Communications of the ACM December 1984 Volume 27 Number 12 page 1227
Discusses a solution to the travelling salesman problem with thousands
of nodes. The solution was used for determing paths in drilling holes in
PC boards. Uses a cluster-based approach.
------------------------------
Date: Fri 21 Dec 84 20:40:13-EST
From: Wayne McGuire <MDC.WAYNE@MIT-OZ>
Subject: Personal Assistants
I agree with Henry Spencer that many claims from the AI community
are overblown, and that we need to maintain a healthy stance of
skepticism about the Next Big Revolutionary Breakthroughs that are
forecast every week. However:
(1) I don't think the present generation of outliners, natural
language interfaces, and free-form databases, which are some of the
basic building blocks of idea processors, are, as you insist, a "fad."
Products like Thinktank and Intellect are not vaporware: they have
firmly established themselves in the marketplace, and are not going to
disappear. They are a permanent and welcome fixture in the world of
microcomputer and (in the case of Intellect) mainframe software.
(2) Mitch Kapor's remarks about AI are not, as you put it, a lot
of "marketing hype." As I understand it, a company has been spun off
from Lotus which is doing serious research in natural language
processing. That company will probably develop a product somewhat
like Intellect or Clout which will become an essential element in
future integrated software from Lotus.
(3) A pencil and paper is fine, but I much prefer a Model 100 as
a portable device for recording and shaping notes and ideas. A Model
100 with significantly greater memory, built-in idea processing
software, and a connecter to an optical disk storage device would, I
suspect, wean many people away from paper and pencils for good.
(4) Building a powerful idea processor is very much a function of
available memory. Framework, for instance, would be a much more
effective product if the quality of its word processor and database
management system could be raised to the level of ZyWrite II Plus and
MDBS III. To acquire that kind of power would require an extra
megabyte or two of memory.
(5) The privacy issue in regard to optical disks is a red
herring. The federal government already has easy access to much of
the sensitive information which would be stored on a personal disk. A
biodisk might give individuals an opportunity to know as much about
themselves as the government does.
-- Wayne McGuire <wayne%mit-oz@mit-mc>
------------------------------
Date: 24 Dec 1984 00:07-EST
From: Todd.Kueny@CMU-CS-G.ARPA
Subject: Very Inexpensive LISP Machine
I have recently been toying with the idea of very inexpensive lisp
machines (VILM). The ideal VILM would support a hi-res display,
a keyboard, mouse, RS-232/422 interface, floppies (5 1/4 or 3 1/2 inch),
support interpreter, compiler, plus other handy functions (fasl,
debugger, trace, maybe an object language), provide a window package
(mulitple fonts, editor, etc.), be portable (so I can drag it back
and forth to work easily), and be able to support
as some sort of options: virtual memory with a hard disk (10M, 20M, or
whatever is cheap), ethernet, and different size physical memory (512K, 1M,
2M).
As I see it, the technology exists right now to build such a beast (by
"right now" I mean "order it from BYTE magazine"). The hi-res display,
keyboard, mouse, r2-232/422 and floppies are supplied by an Apple MacIntosh
(approximately $1700-2800). The remaining non-optional stuff would be
supplied (initially) by a box similar in size to the Mac containing an
8 slot Multi-Bus card rack, power supply, fan,
M68010 processor card, ROM card (interpreter, compiler, other handy
stuff), RAM card or cards (512K or more), interface logic to talk to the
Mac (total < $5,000).
The LISP would be Portable Standard Lisp (PSL) which is
cheap, avaiable, and could be loaded into ROMS. The Mac would
handle the display and filing functions. It would be portable
since the Mac will zip into a bag and so could the additional box.
Total cost would be around $8,500 to build from scratch (the
Imagine IMPRINT laser printers use this concept, so I know it's
workable).
Some tense hacking plus a disk controller card and 10-30M Winchester
could make a single process, virtual memory system possible
for an additional $5,000 (total price ~ $13,500).
Enhancements could include a bit-slice processor board with a real
instruction set, tape cartridge backup, more disk, and a real
operating system with files, multple processes, and ether/arc/apple
net.
My goal is a VILM which is affordable, flexible, and
able to support truly tense lisp hacking in a useful way. Is there
any such thing out there? I would like to correspond with anyone
having interest in VILMs (ideas, designs, hardware and software
implementations).
-Todd K.
------------------------------
Date: Fri 14 Dec 84 23:29:42-PST
From: Derek Sleeman <SLEEMAN@SUMEX-AIM.ARPA>
Subject: Intelligent Tutoring Systems course - Winter Quarter
[Forwarded from the Stanford bboard by Laws@SRI-AI.]
This course was given for the first time last session; this year the
course will have more of a workshop flavour.
Topic: Some issues in Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITSs) CS 324X & Ed. 495X
Instructor: D Sleeman
Time/Location: Winter Quarter: Wednesday, 4-6 p.m., Room 334 Cubberley
Audience: Graduate Students in Computer Science, Education & Psychology.
Prerequisites: Consent of Instructor required
Number of units: 2-3
The seminar will highlight research problems which are encountered in
implementing automated teaching systems from principally, an AI perspective, and
secondly from Cognitive Science and instructional perspectives. In particular
we will review the "traditional" CAI systems and the more recent activities in
ITSs within these frameworks and point out the current perceived shortcomings
which include:
- inappropriate feedback due to inadequate students models
- inadequate conceptualization of the domain
- unprincipled tutoring strategies
- user interaction with the system is too restricted
The systems which have concentrated on the issue of inferring a student model,
namely BUGGY and PIXIE (formerly LMS), will be studied in some depth. Inferring
a model of a student's problem solving, even in a restricted domain, is very
complex as given N rules, there are potentially N! models to be considered. We
shall discuss how these modelling systems have addressed and "solved" the
combinatorial explosion problem. We will then consider how some of these
techniques could be applied to the more general problem of modelling a user of
computer system/package. The class will have access to several mini-versions of
ITSs which have very recently been transferred to the IBM PC -- these include a
version of BUGGY, PROUST and the instructor's PIXIE system. Indeed the
principal task for the class will be to implement a data-base for the PIXIE
system.
The course will conclude with a discussion of open research issues in the area.
Literature: Principal source will be Intelligent Tutoring Systems, Academic
Press l982, (eds. Sleeman and Brown). Additional BUGGY and LMS papers and
selected papers from Mental Models Erlbaum, l983, (eds. Gentner & Stevens).
Queries may be addressed to SLEEMAN@SUMEX, or 497-3257.
D. Sleeman, 10 December l984
------------------------------
Date: 18 Dec 84 1105 PST
From: Terry Winograd <TW@SU-AI.ARPA>
Subject: Course on Computational Semantics - Ling/CS 276
[Forwarded from the Stanford bboard by Laws@SRI-AI.]
Computer Science 276 / Linguistics 276
Computational Models for the Semantics of Natural Language
Winter 1985
Terry Winograd
MWF 10-11, Terman 156 (televized)
In this course we will develop the theoretical basis for the implementation
of computer systems dealing with the meaning of natural language. We
will cover a variety of semantic and pragmatic areas, developing three
aspects of each:
1) The formal theories relevant to the area, drawn from work in linguistics
and the philosophy of language
2) Computational issues that arise, and the computational mechanisms that
have been developed to augment or supplant the standard formal framework
3) Limitations of the formalization and problems in extending it to cover
the full range of related phenomena.
Areas covered will include lexical meaning, compositionality, quantification
and reference, temporality, speech acts, and schematic structures.
I will describe a number of existing AI systems in light of these
theoretical foundations, but will not attempt to provide a comprehensive
coverage of the currently available systems or to deal in depth with
details of implementation. The course is intended to serve as a basis for
understanding what is being done and what can be done, not as a practical
"how-to-do-it" course.
There will be three lectures a week, and some homework assignments. There
will be a mid-term and a final exam. No computer programming exercises or
project will be required.
There is no regular textbook. Course notes will be duplicated and made
available, based partly on a textbook I am writing.
The course will assume a background (either prior, or through additional
study during the course) in two areas: formal logic and basic techniques
of artificial intelligence. Two books are recommended:
Logic in Linguistics, by Allwood, Andersson and Dahl,is recommended to
anyone not already well versed in the logical formalisms used in
semantics, including basic set theory, propositional and predicate logic,
deduction rules, and rudiments of modal and intensional logic.
Principles of Artificial Intelligence, by Nils Nillson, is recommended
as an introduction to basic AI techniques for planning, deduction, and
representation.
We will not cover most of this material in class, but will provide
tutorial opportunities for those students who need to fill in the
background as we go. There are no other prerequisities in either
computation or linguistics, except for a general familiarity with concepts
of programming (as gained from any programming course or experience).
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End of AIList Digest
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