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AIList Digest Volume 3 Issue 011
AIList Digest Friday, 1 Feb 1985 Volume 3 : Issue 11
Today's Topics:
Business - Symbolics Stock Price,
Symbolic Algebra - Laplace Transform Answer,
Graphics - Special Issue of CG&A,n
Expert Systems - Availability of Steamer Software,
Publications - Recent Reports & Artificial Intelligence Abstracts &
New-and-Trendy Word Collection,
Seminars - Procedural Knowledge (SU) &
Reasoning about Actions and Processes (CSLI)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Thu, 31 Jan 85 10:26:25 PST
From: Marty Cohen <mcohen%NRTC@USC-ECL.ARPA>
Subject: Symbolics stock price
At the AI conference at Denver in December,
I heard that Symbolics had gone public.
Their stock was then under $7 a share.
It is now up to $12 a share.
Any idea why the surge?
(I expected it to rise, but not that fast.)
------------------------------
Date: Friday, 1-Feb-85 8:56:48-GMT
From: GORDON JOLY (on ERCC DEC-10) <GCJ%edxa@ucl-cs.arpa>
Subject: re: $20 to the first person ...
--------
We believe the answer to be (see Vol3 #10)
s + ir
/
|
1 | pt 1
f(t) = ----- lim | e ------------------- dp
2 pi i r->inf | p cosh (A sqrt(p))
/
s - ir
where s is chosen so that all singular points of the
integrand lie on the left hand side of the straight
line Real(p) = s.
------------------------------
Date: Wed, 30 Jan 85 10:55 EST
From: Paul Fishwick
<Fishwick%UPenn-Graphics%upenn.csnet@csnet-relay.arpa>
Subject: Special Issue of CG&A
Forwarded From: Norm Badler <Badler@UPenn-Graphics> on Tue 15 Jan 1985 at 11:15
IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications is planning a Special Issue on Computer
Graphics and Expert Systems. Papers addressing any relevant topic along the
following general lines are invited:
* expert systems used in computer-aided design,
* expert systems using graphical displays as an essential part of
reasoning or analysis systems, or
* graphical interfaces to expert systems.
Publication is scheduled for October 1985 The submission deadline is
April 1, 1985. IEEE CG&A publishes color graphics in a magazine format,
but all papers are reviewed. Republication (after revision) of very low
circulation conference papers is also permitted.
Please submit four copies of the paper, preferably in IEEE format, to:
Dr. Norman I. Badler
Associate Editor, IEEE CG&A
CIS - Moore School D2
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, PA 19104
(Net address: Badler%UPENN@CSNET-Relay)
(215) 898-5862
------------------------------
Date: Friday, 1 February 1985, 07:32-PST
From: Jim Hollan <hollan@nprdc>
Subject: Availability of Steamer Software
Some readers of this list may be interested in knowing that a
tape of the source code for the Steamer training system can be obtained
from the National Technical Information Service. This includes code for
the basic Steamer system and an associated object-based graphics editor.
Steamer was recently described (Hollan, Hutchins, & Weitzman, 1984) in
the Summer issue of AI Magazine. It is written in Zetalisp and currently
runs on Symbolics lisp machines. We would be interested in bug reports
but do not have time to offer any support or information services. Send
bug reports to hollan@nprdc.
The charge for a 9-track 1600bpi tape is $240. The order number
for the tape is AD-A146757. It can be obtained from
National Technical Information Service
5285 Port Royal Road
Springfield, Virginia 22161
Jim Hollan
------------------------------
Date: Tue, 29 Jan 85 09:45:33 cst
From: Laurence Leff <leff%smu.csnet@csnet-relay.arpa>
Subject: Recent Reports
Technical Reports from Carnegie Mellon University
Masaru Tomita: An Efficient All-paths Parsing Algorithm for Natural Languages
October 1984
Ellen Lowenfeld Walker, Takeo Kanade: Shape Recovery of a Solid of Revolution
From Apparent Distortions of Patterns
C. E. Thorpe: FIDO: Vison and Navigation for a Robot Rover
------------------------------
Date: 30 Jan 1985 02:29:36 EST
From: BASKEYFIELDM@USC-ISI.ARPA
Subject: Report - Knowledge-Based Command and Control
ABSTRACT
KNOWLEDGE BASED MODELS FOR COMMAND AND CONTROL
Dennis Cooper
General Research Corporation
P.O. Box 6770
Santa Barbara, CA 93160-6770
In the last two years, there has been a growing interest in the
field of Artificial Intelligence. More specifically, an area known as
"Expert Systems" or "Knowledge Engineering" has received much attention.
Expert systems are computer programs that can perform at a human expert
level in some narrow domain (e.g., infectious blood diseases, VAX 11/780
computer performance, etc.). Expert systems are currently being developed
to deal with a variety of problems. In the last six years General Research
Corporation has been developing technologies that support the definition
and construction of decision-making models. The technology makes use of
techniques drawn from the expert systems field. Our decision-making model
have been principally applied to Army and Air Force analytical simulations
and wargaming models of military combat. The emphasis is thus placed not
on developing expert models of command and control but on developing
fast, reasonable models of decision-making behavior.
In this paper, we present a description of our still developing
technology and illustrate its capabilities from examples taken from the
TAC ASSESSOR model, CORDIVEM Cap design, and McClintic Theater model.
We will also describe two artificial intelligence tools, TIMM and KATIE,
which have facilitated knowledge-based model development.
Requests for this paper should be directed to the author or
I will provide a copy (as long as the number doesn't get outrageous):
BASKEYFIELDM@USC_ISI.ARPA
------------------------------
Date: Wed, 30 Jan 85 14:31:31 cst
From: Laurence Leff <leff%smu.csnet@csnet-relay.arpa>
Subject: Recent Reports - University of Illinois
University of Illinois Technical Report List
Schang, Thierry "A Rule-Based Manager for the GPSI Environment" File 923
(Rule manager for an expert system environment)
Challou, Daniel J. "Towards a Knowledge Based Data Restructing Aid" 924
system to assist in development in of data structures and type definitions
Cohen, Seth M. "Object Identification Using Keyword Matching" File No 925
user interfaces for AI systems
------------------------------
Date: Fri 1 Feb 85 02:09:06-EST
From: Wayne McGuire <MDC.WAYNE%MIT-OZ@MIT-MC.ARPA>
Subject: Artificial Intelligence Abstracts
I perused recently the premier issue of Artificial Intelligence
Abstracts, published by EIC/Intelligence in New York. Following is a
brief description and review.
Artificial Intelligence Abstracts will be published monthly, for
an annual price of $295. The first issue is 62 pages long, and prints
just over 300 abstracts.
Document types abstracted include academic reports, association
reports, conference papers, federal government reports, journal
articles, news articles, newsletter articles, and patents.
Some representative serials abstracted in the first issue: AI
Magazine, Artificial Intelligence, Business Week, Byte, Cognitive
Science, Computerworld, Datamation, The Economist, Electronic News,
Electronics Week, Financial Times of London, High Technology, IEEE
Transactions on Systems, Man & Cybernetics, Journal of Logic
Programming, MIS Week, The New York Times, Science, Scientific
American, Signal, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post.
Abstracts of the entire proceedings of the 1984 AAAI National
Conference appear to be included in this issue.
Abstracts are organized under the following major categories:
Markets & Issues: Business & Economics, International News, Human
Factors, General; Applications: Specialty Applications, Automation &
Robotics, Knowledge-Based Systems; Research: Computer Architecture,
Programming & Software, Sensors, Human Machine Interface, Cognitive
Sciences.
The publication is generously indexed, and abstracts can by
accessed by author, subject, source (serial title), or industry or
corporation topic. An Events & Meetings section in each issue
provides basic information about forthcoming meetings and conferences
related to artificial intelligence scheduled to occur during the next
12 months.
Although the abstracts in this publication are uniformly useful
(the attention to developments in supercomputing is particularly
valuable), its coverage could be significantly broadened. The
emphasis of AIA seems to be more on the popular and trade press, than
on the academic, scientific, and technical literature. Computer &
Control Abstracts, for instance, captures much important AI-related
literature in all major languages from around the world which AIA's
editorial policy apparently excludes or overlooks.
AIA's coverage of cognitive science--the AI-relevant literature
from philosophy, linguistics, psychology, and educational research--is
especially weak. Perhaps there is a need for a special new
publication entitled Cognitive Science Abstracts which will do the job
for which AIA lacks the interest or space.
Any habitual reader of AIList Digest would, I suspect, find
Artificial Intelligence Abstracts to be a worthwhile tool. A sample
copy can be obtained by writing EIC/Intelligence at 48 West 38th
Street, New York, NY 10018, or calling (800) 223-6275. AIList Digest
readers might also want to examine EIC's Robomatix Reporter (which
abstracts the robotics literature), CAD/CAM Abstracts, and
Telecommunications Abstracts.
-- Wayne McGuire <wayne%mit-oz@mit-mc>
------------------------------
Date: 30 Jan 1985 1325-PST (Wednesday)
From: Miriam Blatt <blatt@amadeus>
Subject: new and trendy word collection
[Forwarded from the Stanford bboard by Laws@SRI-AI.]
A friend of mine is looking for words to put in a dictionary she is
working on. Some examples of words we have already suggested are
"WYSIWYG" - what you see is what you get, and "RISC" - reduced
instruction set computer. If you have some words to suggest, or
think some may occur to you in the next few days, please save the
form at the end of this message and mail it back.
Here is the original letter:
Hi,
We are starting on a new, exciting project and we need your help. The
project is a business dictionary - working title "Essential Terms:
Today's Business Vocabulary - to be published by Franklin Watts (part
of Grolier, they started as a children's house and now do adult books
as well) and the help we need is a list of words.
What will set our book apart from the ordinary business dictionary is
its emphasis on new and trendy words and ironic usages for old words or
terms. Some examples: "merged and purged" (what is done, via a computer
program, when combining mailing lists to eliminate from the final list,
duplicates and people who cannot tolerate direct mail advertising),
"socks and stocks" (Sears financial centers in retail stores), "big
blue" (IBM), "Kaufmanized" (the state of the financial markets after a
pronouncement about the direction of interest rates by Salomon
Brothers' economic guru, Henry Kaufman), "golden girdle" (the high tech
belt that crosses central Florida) and "valium picnic" (slow day on the
stock market).
With the exception of the last term, we saw all of these expressions in
print. However, to get more of them we need access to words that are so
new, so particular, and so irreverent that they have not yet been
published, and this is where we hope you can help.
What are the fun, interesting terms in your work - field and/or
industry? Would you please keep the attached form wherever it is most
likely to be at hand when a word "flashes" into your conversation, for
the next few days, and fill it with the words/terms and definitions
that make "Today's Business Vocabulary" so lively?
We appreciate the crucial nature of your help to our project, and will
be happy to acknowledge your contribution in our introduction.
Please circle February 8th on your calendar and leave a few minutes on
that Friday to mail back the list.
Thank you very much for your help.
Rachel Epstein and Nina Liebman
Name:
Phone:
Wish to be acknowledged: (Yes/No)
For each word, give its meaning and origin.
------------------------------
Date: Wed 30 Jan 85 09:50:15-PST
From: Paula Edmisten <Edmisten@SUMEX-AIM.ARPA>
Subject: Seminar - Procedural Knowledge (SU)
[Forwarded from the Stanford SIGLUNCH distribution by Laws@SRI-AI.]
Procedural Knowledge
SPEAKER: Michael Georgeff
A.I. Center, SRI International and,
Center for the Study of Language and Information,
Stanford University
DATE: Friday, February 1, 1985
LOCATION: Chemistry Gazebo, between Physical and Organic Chemistry
TIME: 12:05
Active intelligent systems need to be able to represent and reason
about actions and how those actions can be combined to achieve given
goals. This knowledge is often in the form of SEQUENCES of actions or
PROCEDURES for achieving given goals or reacting to certain
situations. For example, knowledge about kicking a football,
performing a certain dance movement, cooking a roast dinner, solving
Rubik's cube, or diagnosing an engine malfunction, is primarily
knowledge about procedures for accomplishing these tasks.
In this talk we describe a scheme for explicitly representing and
reasoning about procedural knowledge based on the notion of PROCESS.
The knowledge representation is sufficiently rich to describe the
effects of arbitrary sequences of tests and actions, and the inference
mechanism provides a means for directly using this knowledge to reach
desired operational goals. Furthermore, the knowledge representation
has a declarative semantics that provides for incremental changes to
the system, rich explanatory capabilities, and verifiability. The
scheme also provides a mechanism for reasoning about the use of this
knowledge, thus enabling the system to choose effectively between
alternative courses of action.
------------------------------
Date: Wed 30 Jan 85 17:26:40-PST
From: Emma Pease <Emma@SU-CSLI.ARPA>
Subject: Seminar - Reasoning about Actions and Processes (CSLI)
[Excerpted from the CSLI Newsletter by Laws@SRI-AI.]
``Reasoning About Actions and Processes''
Room G-19 Michael Georgeff, CSLI
2:15 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 7, Redwood Hall, Stanford
Active intelligent systems need to be able to represent and reason about
actions and how those actions can be combined to achieve given goals. For
example, knowledge about kicking a football, performing a certain dance
movement, cooking a roast dinner, solving Rubik's cube, or diagnosing an
engine malfunction, is primarily knowledge about sequences of actions or
procedures for achieving these goals. Within AI, there have been two
approaches to this problem, with a somewhat poor connection between the
two. In the first category, there is some work on theories of action, or
what an action is. This research has focused mainly on problems in natural
language understanding concerned with the meaning of action sentences.
Second, there is work on planning, i.e., the problem of constructing a plan
by searching for a sequence of actions that yields a given goal.
Surprisingly, there is almost no work in AI about the execution of
pre-formed plans -- yet this is the almost universal way in which humans go
about their day-to-day tasks, and probably the only way other animals do
so. In this talk we aim to set the foundation for a theory of action that:
(1) provides a suitable semantics for simple action sentences in natural
language, (2) provides a method of practical reasoning about how to achieve
given goals based on procedural knowledge, and (3) serves as a basis for
planning. The first of these aims is met by defining a suitable
declarative semantics for action, and the second by providing a suitable
operational semantics. The third rests on both of these, but in addition
requires that we have a means of searching the space of possible world
histories.
------------------------------
End of AIList Digest
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