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AIList Digest Volume 2 Issue 179
AIList Digest Wednesday, 19 Dec 1984 Volume 2 : Issue 179
Today's Topics:
AI Tools - Micro-PROLOG & SmallTalk AI Systems,
Applications - Expert Legal Systems & Intelligent Skimmer,
Planning - Constraint Propagation and Design,
Reports - SEAI Publications,
Politics - Visitors from USSR,
Lab Description - NRL,
Workshop - Logic and Computer Science
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Mon, 17 Dec 1984 17:36 EST
From: Chunka Mui <CHUNKA%MIT-OZ@MIT-MC.ARPA>
Subject: micro-PROLOG info request
We are looking for PROLOG packages which run on micros, especially the
IBM PC. If you are familiar with any PROLOG interpreters for the PC,
especially one with a tutorial package, I appreciate any information
that you could give me.
Thanks,
Chunka Mui
Chunka%mit-oz@mit-mc
------------------------------
Date: 17 Dec 84 12:21:53 EST
From: Mike.Rychener@CMU-RI-ISL2
Subject: SmallTalk AI systems?
[Forwarded from the CMU bboard by Laws@SRI-AI.]
Does anyone know of any successful AI applications coded in SmallTalk?
This was stimulated by the new Tektronix AI machine, whose blurb touts
its SmallTalk as useful for developing expert systems.
------------------------------
Date: 17 Dec 1984 12:21-EST
From: Alexander.Hauptmann@CMU-CS-G.ARPA
Subject: expert legal systems?
I am looking for references to publications about expert systems for
legal reasoning. If you know of anybody who has done work in this area,
please let me know (Alexander.Hauptmann@CMU-CS-G.ARPA). Among other
things, I have heard that Roger Schank has done work in this area, but have
been unable to find citations. Thanks.
Alex.
------------------------------
Date: 17 Dec 84 06:44:45 EST
From: Robert.Thibadeau@CMU-CS-H
Subject: expert legal system
[Forwarded from the CMU bboard by Laws@SRI-AI.]
Extensive work in legal reasoning was done by Thorne McCarty. Thorne published
in the Harvard Law Review back in 1977ish. His topic was legal reasoning
in corporate tax law -- one of the areas where the Supreme Court effectively
makes the law. Thorne, educated at Harvard in Law and Stanford in AI,
and a tenured professor of Law at Rochester, evaluated Yale, way back,
but decided to do his AI work at Rutgers. While I regard Roger Shank as
absolutely excellent, I find it unfortunate that like natural language
understanding systems vis a vis Yorick Wilks, belief systems vis a vis
Chuck Schmidt and N. Sridharan, Memory vis a vis 100 years of thought
in German and British psychology, we find now Roger implied at the leading
edge in legal reasoning. Roger does good work, but he takes a long time
to see the light and he tends to ignore his surround.
I would hope the people on the frontiers not be forgotten this time around.
------------------------------
Date: 17 Dec 84 16:05:04 EST
From: BIESEL@RUTGERS.ARPA
Subject: Intelligent skimmer suggestion.
As the volume of mail in this and other lists increases I find that
I spend more and more time only skimming the text, searching for the
message or two that is of interest to me. It occurs to me that an
intelligent program for skimming text would be of some help in this.
This program would scan a message, break up its sentences into
grammatical tokens, and would first display only nouns and verbs - in
their correct places on the screen. As the text scrolls upward adjectives,
adverbs and pronouns appear, and by the time the text has traversed
2/3 of the screen, all words in each sentence are filled in. A smarter
system would also keep track of the rate at which CTL-s/CTL-Q is sent,
and adjust its transfer rate accordingly. A really smart program would
keep track of keywords in those pieces of text which the user actually
reads, determined by how often he slows down the skimming presentation,
and would automatically present more fleshed out versions of messages
which contained such keywords.
There is no good reason why text has to be displayed in a letter-
sequential form. We have a whole 2-D array to work with; let's try
to use it to enhance rather than obfuscate communication.
Biesel@rutgers
------------------------------
Date: Saturday, 15 December 1984 03:46:38 EST
From: Duvvuru.Sriram@cmu-ri-cive.arpa
Subject: Planning, Constraint Propagation and Design
A part of the January 1983 SIGART newsletter was dedicated to Planning.
A number of abstracts on (then) current research was compiled by
Ann Robinson.
I would like to add the following to Steinberg's equation about design:
Heuristic Knowledge (HK) + Well-structured Programs (Algorithms) (WP)
= Good Engineering Programs (GEP)
If we add Causal knowledge (CK) to the LHS of above equation then we have
HK + WP + CK = EEP (Effecient Engineering Programs)
Any comments?
Has anyone tried the task suspension method instead of constraint
propagation? Task suspension works in the following manner (there is more to
it):
IF a constraint in a certain part of the design cannot be satisfied
THEN suspend that task and get the values needed to satisfy the constraint
In other words if you are designing Module-1 and find that there is a
constraint relating Module-1 to Module-2 then suspend the task of performing
Module-1 and design that part of Module-2 which satisfies the constraint.
I tried this in structural design [1] using a Hearsay-type approach.
However, I ran into problems when a constraint involved interaction
between 3 or more components.
[1] ALL-RISE : A Case Study in Constraint-Directed Design, Working Paper,
Department of Civil Engineering, C-MU, Pittsburgh, PA 15213
Sriram
------------------------------
Date: Tue 18 Dec 84 10:47:20-PST
From: Ken Laws <Laws@SRI-AI.ARPA>
Subject: SEAI Publications
A brochure from the SEAI Institute has crossed my desk. They are offering
a two-volume survey of commercial and near-commercial AI systems as of
August 1984. The two 200-page surveys, AI Applications for Manufacturing
and AI Applications for Business Management, include 136 products and
in-house systems at over 100 corporations, including 28 expert-system
toolkits and 10 natural-language systems. The reports are $110 each, or
$200 together. SEAI also offers a three-volume set on Machine Vision for
Robotics and Automated Inspection and several other reports on robots
in industry, AI, expert systems, and automated guided vehicle systems.
You can contact them at Box 590, Madison, GA 30650, (404) 342-9638.
[Note: I have no connection with the company, and pass this along only in
the hopes that it will be of use to the Arpanet or AI research communities.
I obviously cannot report on every AI book offered by every publisher, but
see no harm in forwarding book reviews or notices about obscure reports.
Correspondence about this policy should be directed to AIList-Request@SRI-AI.
-- KIL]
------------------------------
Date: Tue, 18 Dec 84 21:34:41 PST
From: Judea Pearl <judea@UCLA-LOCUS.ARPA>
Subject: Visitors from USSR
I wish to share with the readers of the AI-Digest this
letter, which I wrote to Professor Viktor V. Aleksandrov,
Head, Leningraad Research Computer Center, who is currently
visiting the U.S. and who is particularly interested in
meeting AI researchers.
Dear Professor Alexandrov,
I would have liked very much to meet you during
your current visit to UCLA, but the following circumstances
will not allow me to do so in good faith:
I have received from the Association of Computing
Machinery (ACM) a long list of Soviet computer scientists who,
for the past several years, have been barred from scientific
activity and have been denied permission to participate
in scientific meetings, domestic as well as international.
Some of these people would like to present papers at the
International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
which will take place at UCLA, August 1985, but will be
prevented from leaving your country.
I am particularly familiar with the stories of:
Alexander Lerner, Moscow
Isai Goldstein, Tbilisi
Gregory Goldstein, Tbilisi
whom I met at the International Joint Conference on
Artificial Intelligence - 1973, Tbilisi, Georgia, and with
whom I tried to keep in touch. To my dismay, I find
these three cited in the 1984 Report of the ACM
Committee on Scientific Freedom and Human Rights as being
harrassed and prevented from engaging in scientific
activities. In 1973, I personally witnessed
Isai Goldstein being barred from entering the lecture hall of
the Tbilisi conference, so I feel obliged to express my
concern that today, eleven years later, the method of
professional deprivation is still practiced in your country.
Although I would like to contribute to improved
scientific cooperation between our two countries, my
understanding has been that a prerequisite to true
cooporation is the freedom for individuals to engage in
scientific pursuits and to communicate their findings to
other scientists. Your government apparently has a
different perception of cooperation, and I will be happy to
discuss with you these differences. However, because you are
an official Soviet visitor, I cannot meet with you in good
faith to engage in a purely professional discussion. To do
so would be to betray Professor Lerner, who personally
pleaded with me to refrain from participation in U.S.-USSR
cooperative programs until minimum standards of scientific
freedom are agreed upon.
I hope you understand my position and will
convey my regrets to your colleagues at the Leningrad
Computer Research Center.
Yours Sincerely,
Judea Pearl
Professor, Computer Science Dpt.
University of California
Los Angeles
A note to the reader:
The 1984 report of the ACM Committee on Scientific
Freedom and Human Rights is available from my office. It is
scheduled for publication in the January-85 issue of the
Communications of the ACM.
If you meet with Professor Alexandrov, or other
Soviet visitors, you may find it appropriate to
express your sensitivity to two allegations made
in the ACM report:
1. That Soviet scientists are dismissed from their jobs
(or demoted) once they apply for exit visas.
2. That these scientists are prevented from attending
professional meetings (even in the privacy of their homes)
or from submitting papers to international meetings,
e.g., IJCAI-83.
If you kindly send me a summary of Professor
Alexandrov's replies, especially regarding the practices at
his own Institute, I will be glad to bring them to the
attention of the ACM Committee.
J.Pearl
<judea@ucla-locus.arpa>
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 13 Dec 84 16:30:45 est
From: Rod Johnson <johnson@nrl-css>
Subject: Lab Description - NRL (Computer Science & Systems Branch)
[Edited by Laws@SRI-AI.]
NAVAL RESEARCH LABORATORY
Computer Science and Systems Branch
The Computer Science and Systems Branch of NRL is active in:
>> software engineering >> computer security >> information theory
>> search theory >> expert systems >> message processing
>> software measurement >> speech and signal processing
>> formal software specifications.
Our interests also include performance modeling and evaluation, human-
computer interfaces, and program specification and verification tools.
OUR GROUP is small, close-knit, and informal, with a research staff
of 22 members; 9 hold PhDs. Attendance at conferences and publication
in the open literature are encouraged. There are ample opportunities
for educational support toward graduate degrees. Several branch
members also teach at local universities.
COMPUTING RESOURCES at NRL are being expanded to include a Cray
X-MP/12 system. This unique system will include a front end consisting
of a cluster of VAX 11/785s with connections to the ARPANET and to a
broadband network linking other NRL computers. The Branch maintains
VAX 11/780, Sun, and VAX 11/750 machines running UNIX and VMS, and a
Symbolics Lisp Computer. Each office includes a terminal with a
high-speed link to these systems, which are also linked to the ARPANET.
THE NAVAL RESEARCH LABORATORY is a government laboratory located on
a 129-acre campus on the banks of the Potomac River in Washington,
D.C. It was founded at the suggestion of Thomas Edison more than 60
years ago and carries out a wide variety of basic and applied
research. The Washington area offers a temperate climate and an
outstanding cultural environment, including the museums of the
Smithsonian Institution, the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts,
and several excellent professional and collegiate theatre groups.
For more information, contact:
Mr. S. H. Wilson
Head, Computer Science and Systems Branch
Code 7590 Phone: (202) 767-2518
Naval Research Laboratory Arpanet: Wilson@NRL-CSS
Washington, D.C. 20375 uucp: ...!decvax!nrl-css!wilson
------------------------------
Date: Mon, 10 Dec 84 16:07:59 est
From: ukma!marek@ANL-MCS.ARPA (Wiktor Marek)
Subject: Workshop - Logic and Computer Science
FIRST COMMUNICATION
Workshop on
LOGIC AND COMPUTER SCIENCE
Lexington,KY, June 9-14 1984.
In the first half of June 1985 a workshop on Logic and
Computer Science will take place in Lexington, Kentucky.
The workshop will take 4 and 1/2 working days.
The workshop will cover those parts of Computer Science
where an active part is played by logic-inclined research-
ers, in particular:
Theory of Computation
Theory of Databases
Artificial Intelligence
Theory of Operating Systems (Temporal Logic)
Program Verification
Logic Programming
All the inqueries should be sent to:
Logic and Computer Science
Department of Computer Science
University of Kentucky
Lexington, KY, 40506-0027
(606) 257-3961
or:
Logic and Computer Science
ARPA: "ukma!logic-and-cs"@ANL-MCS (Note the quote marks.)
UUCP-> unmvax -----------\
UUCP-> research ----------\____ !anlams --\
UUCP-> boulder -----------/ >-!ukma!logic-and-cs
UUCP-> decvax!ucbvax ----/ /
cbosgd!hasmed!qusavx --/
Organizational Committee:
Forbes Lewis Wiktor Marek Anil Nerode
Lexington, December 1984
------------------------------
End of AIList Digest
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