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AIList Digest Volume 4 Issue 052
AIList Digest Thursday, 13 Mar 1986 Volume 4 : Issue 52
Today's Topics:
Query - Satishe Thatte Net Address,
Seminars - Interpretation of Prolog Programs (Edinburgh) &
Explanation-Based Learning (CMU) &
Referential Gestures in Guugu Yimidhirr (UCB) &
Models, Metaphysics, and Empiricism (CSLI),
Conference - Expert Systems in Process Safety
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Wed, 12 Mar 86 21:53:26 PST
From: Basuki Soetarman <basuki@LOCUS.UCLA.EDU>
Subject: Satishe Thatte net address ...
>
> PERSISTENT OBJECT SYSTEM FOR SYMBOLIC COMPUTERS
> Satishe Thatte
> Texas Instruments
> Thurs. Feb 27th at 4:15 pm.
> (Part of Distributed Systems Group Project meeting)
>
>The advent of automatically managed, garbage-collected virtual memory
>was crucial to the development of today's symbolic processing. No
>analogous capability has yet been developed in the domain of
>"persistent" objects managed by a file system or database. As a
>consequence, the programmer is forced to flatten rich structures of
> ...............................
This announcement was posted sometimes ago in the mod.ai. Does anybody
know the author's net address ? Any info will be appreciated.
Thanks.
basuki@locus.ucla.edu or
..!{ucbvax,cepu,trwspp,ihnp4}!ucla-cs!basuki
------------------------------
Date: Tue, 11 Mar 86 11:58:47 GMT
From: Gideon Sahar <gideon%edai.edinburgh.ac.uk@ucl-cs.arpa>
Subject: Seminar - Interpretation of Prolog Programs (Edinburgh)
EDINBURGH AI SEMINARS
Date: Wednesday, 12th March l986
Time: 2.00 p.m.
Place: Department of Artificial Intelligence
Seminar Room - F10
80 South Bridge
EDINBURGH.
Dr. C.S. Mellish, Cognitive Studies Programme, University of Sussex
will give a seminar entitled - "Interpretation of Prolog Programs".
This talk discusses work on proving properties of Prolog programs,
which has been able to derive automatically the following information:
l. Mode declarations (information about the instantiation modes in
which predicates are used).
2. Determinacy information (information about the number of solutions
that predicates can produce).
3. Information about shared structures (this can be used, for
instance, to indicate places where "occur checks" might be
desirable.
We would like to formalise our work on Prolog programs in terms of
ABSTRACT INTERPRETATIONS. The notion of using abstract
interpretations to prove properties of programs has been used
successfully with other languages (e.g. work by Cousot and Cousot,
Mycroft and Sintzoff). The basic idea is to start with a precise
description of the meaning of Prolog programs in terms of the normal
execution strategy. This description can then be given the STANDARD
INTERPRETATION, which characterises exactly what and how the program
computes but may not allow interesting properties to be proved in a
computationally feasible way. Alternatively, it can be given
consistent ABSTRACT INTERPRETATIONS, in which the program is thought of
as computing in an abstract domain where less information about the
data objects is taken account of. Results of computations in this
abstract domain then reflect properties of the program operating in the
standard way.
------------------------------
Date: 12 March 1986 1133-EST
From: Betsy Herk@A.CS.CMU.EDU
Subject: Seminar - Explanation-Based Learning (CMU)
Speaker: Gerald DeJong, University of Illinois
Date: Wednesday, April 2 (Note special day/time)
Place: 5409 Wean Hall
Time: 11:30 - 1:00
Title: Explanation Based Learning
Abstract:
The schema learning group at Illinois is exploring
artificial intelligence techniques that will enable a com-
puter system to learn general world knowledge in the form
of "schemata" through its interactions with an external
environment. A schema is a data structure that specifies,
in conceptual terms, a particular real world situation.
Schemata can be very useful in problem solving, natural
language processing and other AI areas. It is claimed, in
this paradigm, that much intelligent behavior can be cap-
tured by using a large number of such schemata.
The explanation-based method represents a departure
from the usual approaches to machine learning in several
ways. First, it is very knowledge-based. That is, the sys-
tem must possess much knowledge before it can aquire new
knowledge. Second, it is capable of one-trial learning.
The results so far are promising. Explanation-based learn-
ing takes us a large step closer to building an intelligent
system capable of learning on its own.
A number computer systems have been designed and imple-
mented based on Explanatory Schema Acquisition, an
explanation-based learning paradigm. The domain areas of
these projects include natural language processing, robot-
ics, theorem proving, physics problem-solving and theory
refinement. Several of the systems will be discussed in
the context of theoretical advantages and difficulties with
explanation-based learning.
------------------------------
Date: Wed, 12 Mar 86 16:33:14 PST
From: admin%cogsci@berkeley.edu (Cognitive Science Program)
Subject: Seminar - Referential Gestures in Guugu Yimidhirr (UCB)
BERKELEY COGNITIVE SCIENCE PROGRAM
Spring 1986
Cognitive Science Seminar - IDS 237B
Tuesday, March 18, 11:00 - 12:30
2515 Tolman Hall
Discussion: 12:30 - 1:30
3105 Tolman (Beach Room)
``Complex Referential Gestures in Guugu Yimidhirr''
John B. Haviland
Dept. of Anthropology, Australian National University
(currently at Institute for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences)
Ordinary talk depends on interlocutors' abilities to
construct and maintain some degree of shared perspective over
some domain of shared knowledge, given some negotiated
understanding of what the circumstances are. Aspects of per-
spective, references to universes of discourse, and
pointers to context are, of course, encoded in utterances.
Routinely, though, what is uttered interacts with what
remains unsaid: what is otherwise indicated, or what is
implicated by familiar conversational principles. I will
begin by examining the elaborate linguistic devices one Aus-
tralian language provides for talking about location and
motion. I will then connect the linguistic representation of
space (and the accompanying knowledge speakers must have of
space and geography) to non-spoken devices --- pointing ges-
tures --- that contribute to the bare referential content of
narrative performances. I will show that simply parsing a nar-
rative, or tracking its course, requires attention to the ges-
ticulation that forms part of the process of utterance. More-
over, I will show how, in this ethnographic context, the
meaning of a gesture (or of a word, for that matter) may
depend both on a practice of referring (only within which can
pointing be pointing at something) and on the construction of
a complex and shifting conceptual (often social) map. Finally
I will discuss ways that the full import of a gesture
(again, like a word) may, in context, go well beyond merely
establishing its referent.
------------------------------
Date: Wed 12 Mar 86 16:31:56-PST
From: Emma Pease <Emma@SU-CSLI.ARPA>
Subject: Seminar - Models, Metaphysics, and Empiricism (CSLI)
[Excerpted from the CSLI Newsletter by Laws@SRI-AI.]
CSLI ACTIVITIES FOR NEXT THURSDAY, March 20, 1986
12 noon, TINLunch, Ventura Hall Conference Room
Models, Metaphysics and the Vagaries of Empiricism
by Marx W. Wartofsky
Discussion led by Ivan Blair (Blair@su-csli)
In the introduction to the collection of his articles from which
the paper for this TINlunch is taken, Wartofsky says that his concern
is with `the notion of representation, and in particular, the role and
nature of the model, in the natural sciences, in theories of
perception and cognition, and in art.' In `Meaning, Metaphysics and
the Vagaries of Empiricism,' he explores the existential commitment
that should accompany the creation and use of a model, from the
perspective of a critical empiricism. Wartofsky considers six grades
of existential commitment, or ways of construing the ontological
claims of a model, ranging from the ad hoc analogy to a true
description of reality. Critical of the attempt by empiricists to
reduce theoretical statements to assertions about sense perception,
Wartofsky seeks to ground existence claims in what he calls the common
understanding, which is associated with everyday language
representations of experience.
I intend the issues addressed in this article to provide the
framework for a general discussion of the relation between ontology
and epistemology.
------------------------------
Date: Mon 10 Mar 86 15:26:13-EST
From: V. Venkatasubramanian <VENKAT@CS.COLUMBIA.EDU>
Subject: Conference - Expert Systems in Process Safety
CALL FOR PAPERS
for the sessions on
EXPERT SYSTEMS AND COMPUTATIONAL METHODS IN PROCESS SAFETY
American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE) Meeting
Houston, Texas, March 29 - April 2 1987.
Session Chair: Session Co-Chair:
Prof. V. Venkatasubramanian Prof. E. J. Henley
Intelligent Process Engineering Lab Dept. of Chemical Engineering
Dept. of Chemical Engineering University of Houston
Columbia University University Park
New York, NY 10027. Houston, TX 77004.
Tel: (212)280-4453 (713)749-4407
Papers are solicited in the areas of Expert Systems and Computational
Methods in Process Safety for the Houston AIChE Meeting. Topics of
interest include Process Plant Diagnosis, Process Safety and
Reliability, Process Risk Analysis etc. Please submit THREE copies of
a 300 word abstract by MAY 15, 1986 to the following address:
Prof. V. Venkatasubramanian
Intelligent Process Engineering Lab
Dept. of Chemical Engineering
Columbia University
New York, NY 10027.
Tel: (212)280-4453
Final manuscripts of the accepted papers are due by Oct 15, 1986.
------------------------------
End of AIList Digest
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