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AIList Digest Volume 5 Issue 028
AIList Digest Monday, 2 Feb 1987 Volume 5 : Issue 28
Today's Topics:
Queries- OPS5 for 4.2BSD & Tutorial References & Common Lisp Code,
Policy - Revised Policy on AI Expert Sources,
Description - Telesophy Project,
Seminars - Knowledge-Based Reasoning Toolkit (CMU) &
Understanding How Devices Work (CMU),
Conference - Conceptual Information Processing
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: 29 Jan 87 20:02:25 GMT
From: Bill Roberts <bill%ncar.csnet@RELAY.CS.NET>
Subject: OPS5 for 4.2BSD?
Does anyone know of a public domain version of OPS5 (with Lisp as its
implementation language) that runs under UNIX 4.2/4.3BSD? We have 4.2BSD with
Franz Lisp and I would like to port some "stuff" from my Mac over to the VAX.
Thanks in advance for information on this.
Bill Roberts
NCAR/HAO
Boulder, CO
UUCP:...!hao!bill
------------------------------
Date: 29 Jan 87 19:52:14 GMT
From: atux01!jlc@rutgers.rutgers.edu (J. Collymore)
Subject: Need References to VERY BASIC Concepts of AI & Preferred
Comp. Langs.
I am interested in being pointed in the right direction to some VERY BASIC
concepts of how AI is used, what has gone before, which computer languages are
used for AI development, which aren't and why, basic concepts of mathematical
models used for simulating cognitive judgements and appropriate responses
(e.g. I feel bad vs. I don't feel too bad).
If you know of some good books in this area, please send me e-mail. If any-
one else is interested, I'll post my responses.
Thanks.
Jim Collymore
------------------------------
Date: Sat 31 Jan 87 18:31:04-EST
From: John C. Akbari <AKBARI@CS.COLUMBIA.EDU>
Subject: common lisp code
anyone have common lisp or zetalisp versions of any (or all) of the
code from the yale group, a la SAM, PAM, CA, etc... from
Schank,R. & Riesbeck,C. _Inside Computer Understanding: Five programs
Plus Miniatures_. Erlbaum 1981.
also, a cl or zetalisp implementation of a reasonable ATN implementation
would be appreciated.
thanks in advance.
john c akbari
akbari@cs.columbia.edu
------------------------------
Date: Fri 30 Jan 87 08:17:26-PST
From: Stephen Barnard <BARNARD@SRI-IU.ARPA>
Subject: enough already
These listings really are outrageous. Is this a plot to make
philosophical tracts seem amusing?
------------------------------
Date: 31 Jan 87 16:40 EST (Sat)
From: Tom Fawcett <FAWCETT@RED.RUTGERS.EDU>
Subject: Code on AIList
>The bulk of this code mailing does bother me, but there seems to be
>at least as much interest in it as in the seminar notices, bibliographies,
>and philosophy discussions. AIList reaches thousands of students, and
>a fair proportion are no doubt interested in examining the code. The
>initial offer of the code drew only positive feedback, so far as I
>know.
> ...
>
>Suggestions are welcome.
> -- Ken Laws
OK, here's one - resurrect the idea of splitting the AIList.
One list for code and philosophy, another for seminar notices and real
discussion.
Ironically, the people who like the endless discussions about consciousness
are probably the same people who would be interested in this vast amount of
code.
-Tom Fawcett
------------------------------
Date: 28 Jan 87 18:42:31 GMT
From: pyramid!amdahl!meccts!meccsd!mecc!sewilco@decwrl.dec.com (Scot
E. Wilcoxon)
Subject: Re: posting of AI Expert magazine sources
Unfortunately, putting those interesting (to me) sources in comp.ai required
that I save them manually. The source groups are archived automatically here
and at many other sites. Scattering sources makes them harder to keep.
If these sources will be regularly posted, a comp.ai.sources group will
help the problem.
--
Scot E. Wilcoxon Minn Ed Comp Corp {quest,dayton,meccts}!mecc!sewilco
(612)481-3507 sewilco@MECC.COM ihnp4!meccts!mecc!sewilco
"Who's that lurking over there? Is that Merv Griffin?"
------------------------------
Date: Sun 1 Feb 87 17:50:48-PST
From: Ken Laws <Laws@SRI-STRIPE.ARPA>
Reply-to: AIList-Request@SRI-AI.ARPA
Subject: Revised Code Policy
OK, I give up. I've only received about ten comments, and the
negative ones are balanced by ones like this:
By the way, discussions of consciousness, code, lengthy
rebuttals, bibliographies, etc.: I love it all.
but the volume of the code messages has started to offend even
my sensibilities. I'll halt distribution through the Arpanet
mail channels unless I get too many requests for copies of the
full text. Arpanetters who still want the code can FTP the
files <AILIST>AIE*.TXT from SRI-STRIPE (using ANONYMOUS login)
where * ranges from 1 through 22. (1 through 8 have been sent.)
Others who want the original nine 50K-char mesage files can send a
request to AIList-Request@SRI-STRIPE.ARPA. Try not to make multiple
requests from one site, although I realize that there's no good
coordination mechanism.
The lesson here seems to be that the AIList is a discussion
list rather than a distribution list. The code met my previous
criteria for inclusion -- it was a noncommercial submission,
relevant to AI, and of interest to a reasonable proportion of
the list membership. I had thought that the bulk was acceptable
for a one-shot event; this seems to have been the case on the
Usenet half of AIList, but not on the Arpanet half. There really
should be separate Arpanet lists for discussion and for seminar
and conference notices, bibliographies, code, and the like. (I'm
still waiting for volunteers ...)
I apologize for the awkwardness of this resolution. Having
started to provide the material, I find myself in the situation
of the man with the donkey who learned he couldn't please
everyone. There won't be an easy remedy for these situations
until someone develops netwide fileservers and FTP, or at
least a coordinated list system that allows people to register
their interest profiles without human intervention.
I should also point out that Usenet has its comp.sources distribution,
but that the Arpanet lacks any broadcast channel for sharing code.
Perhaps it shouldn't have one, given the current U.S. paranoia about
technology export, but there are definite advantages for shared
subroutine libraries over having each student, researcher, or
engineer reinvent from scratch. This exposure to "real code" may
also have had the beneficial effect of popping some illusions about
the nature of expert systems code, permitting the advantages of other
approaches (C, ADA, software engineering, sharable libraries, etc.)
to compete against the AI mystique.
-- Ken Laws
------------------------------
Date: 30 Jan 87 00:47:31 GMT
From: imagen!turner@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU (D'arc Angel)
Subject: posting of AI expert sources
When i offered to post the AI Expert source listings, I received a
few weeks of please post or please email or both, as i result i am
unsure who asked for mailings and got the subsequent postings and
who did not receive them, so... could the people who did not get
them off of comp.ai or were missing parts please send me email so i
can make sure everybody got what they wanted.
Also due to my unfamiliarity with IBM PC format (that's where they
came from) i included trailing CR's (^M) in the shar file, this
caused unshar to complain about missing control codes. to the best
of my knowledge this had no effect on the sources and future
postings will have the CR's stripped.
C'est la vie, C'est le guerre, C'est la pomme de terre
Mail: Imagen Corp. 2650 San Tomas Expressway Santa Clara, CA 95052-8101
UUCP: ...{decvax,ucbvax}!decwrl!imagen!turner AT&T: (408) 986-9400
------------------------------
Date: Mon, 26 Jan 87 14:40 EST
From: Tim Finin <Tim@cis.upenn.edu>
Subject: source postings from AI EXPERT magazine
If anyone is interested in the source code which goes with my AI EXPERT
articles on frame-based representation languages (Nov. and Dec '87, it can
be FTP'd from linc.cis.upenn.edu. The file ~tim/pfl/pfltar contains a tar
tape of all of neccessary files.
Tim
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 29 Jan 87 11:55:12 est
From: schatz@thumper.bellcore.com (Bruce R. Schatz at
thumper.bellcore.com)
Subject: Telesophy Project
Readers of this newsgroup may be interested in the following:
The Telesophy Project at Bell Communications Research is a
research effort to understand how to provide uniform access
to AnyThing AnyWhere and thus permit browsing the WorldNet.
A telesophy system transparently stores and retrieves
information of different types from different locations.
We have built a prototype on Sun workstation hardware, which
accesses multiple datatypes from multiple databases on multiple machines.
A set of databases have been obtained, ranging from Netnews
to journal citations to full-text magazines to color pictures,
and we are beginning to use the system on a daily basis.
The prototype attempts to achieve the full potential of networks of
bitmapped workstations. It provides a content-addressable distributed file
system coupled with local multi-media editing. Building such an
end-to-end system requires finding some workable solution to a myriad of
unsolved research problems.
We are seeking new colleagues to help build the telesophy prototype.
[...]
Bruce Schatz
schatz@bellcore.com
(decvax,ihnp4,ucbvax)!bellcore!schatz
------------------------------
Date: 30 Jan 87 10:39:15 EST
From: Marcella.Zaragoza@isl1.ri.cmu.edu
Subject: Seminar - Knowledge-Based Reasoning Toolkit (CMU)
AI SEMINAR
TOPIC: Knowledge-Based Reasoning at the Right Level of Abstraction:
A Generic Task Toolkit
SPEAKER: B. Chandrasekaran
Laboratory for Artificial Intelligence Research
Department of Computer and Information Science
The Ohio State University
Columbus, Ohio 43210
PLACE: Wean Hall 5409
DATE: Tuesday, February 3, 1987
TIME: 3:30 pm
ABSTRACT:
The first part of the talk is a critique of the level of abstraction of much
of the current discussion on knowledge-based systems. It will be argued
that the discussion at the level of rules-logic-frames-networks is the
"civil engineering" level, and there is a need for a level of abstraction
that corresponds to what the discipline of architecture does for
construction of buildings. The constructs in architecture, viewed as a
language of habitable spaces, can be @i(implemented ) using the constructs
of civil engineering, but are not reducible to them. Similarly, the level
of abstraction that we advocate is the language of generic tasks, types of
knowledge and control regimes.
In the second part of the talk, I will outline the elements of a framework
at this level of abstraction for expert system design that we have been
developing in our research group over the last several years. Complex
knowledge-based reasoning tasks can often be decomposed into a number of
@i(generic tasks each with associated types of knowledge and family of
control regimes). At different stages in reasoning, the system will
typically engage in one of the tasks, depending upon the knowledge available
and the state of problem solving. The advantages of this point of view are
manifold: (i) Since typically the generic tasks are at a much higher level
of abstraction than those associated with first generation expert system
languages, knowledge can be represented directly at the level appropriate to
the information processing task. (ii) Since each of the generic tasks has
an appropriate control regime, problem solving behavior may be more
perspicuously encoded. (iii) Because of a richer generic vocabulary in
terms of which knowledge and control are represented, explanation of problem
solving behavior is also more perspicuous. We briefly describe six generic
tasks that we have found very useful in our work on knowledge-based
reasoning: classification, state abstraction, knowledge-directed retrieval,
object synthesis by plan selection and refinement, hypothesis matching, and
assembly of compound hypotheses for abduction.
Finally, we will describe how the above approach leads naturally to
a new technology: a toolbox which helps one to build expert systems
by using higher level building blocks. We will review the toolbox,
and outline what sorts of systems can be build using the toolbox,
and what advantages accrue from this approach.
------------------------------
Date: 30 Jan 87 10:45:09 EST
From: Marcella.Zaragoza@isl1.ri.cmu.edu
Subject: Seminar - Understanding How Devices Work (CMU)
AI SEMINAR
TOPIC: Understanding How Devices Work: Functional Representation
of Devices and Compilation of Diagnostic Knowledge
SPEAKER: B. Chandrasekaran
Department of Computer & Information Science
The Ohio State University
Columbus, OH 43210
PLACE: Wean Hall 4605
DATE: Wednesday, February 4, 1987
TIME: 10:00 a.m.
ABSTRACT:
Where does diagnostic knowledge -- knowledge about malfunctions and their
relation to observations -- come from? One source of it is an agent's
understanding of how devices work, what has been called a ``deep model.''
We distinguish between deep models in the sense of scientific first
principles and deep cognitive models where the problem solver has a
qualitative symbolic representation of the system or device that accounts
qualtitatively for how the system ``works.'' We provide a typology of
different knowledge structures and reasoning processes that play a role in
qualitative or functional reasoning. We indicate where the work of Kuipers,
de Kleer and Brown, Davis, Forbus, Bylander, Sembugamoorthy and
Chandrasekaran fit in this typology and what types of information each of
them can produce. We elaborate on functional representations as deep
cognitive models for some aspects of causal reasoning in medicine.
Causal reasoning about devices or physical systems involves multiple types
of knowledge structures and reasoning mechanisms. Two broad types of
approaches can be distinguished. In one, causal reasoning is viewed mainly
as an ability to reason at different levels of detail: the work of Weiss and
Kulikowski, Patil and Pople come to mind. Any hierarchies in this line of
work have as organizing principle different levels of detail. In the other
strand of work, causal reasoning is viewed as reasoning from @i(structure)
of a device to its @i(behavior), from behavior to its @i(function), and from
all this to diagnostic conclusions. In this approach, the hierarchical
organization of the device or system naturally results in an ability to move
into more or less levels of detail. We discuss the primitives of such a
functional representation and show how it organizes an agent's understanding
of how a systems functions result from the behavior of the device, and how
such behavior results from the functions of the components and the structure
of the device. We also indicate how device-independent compilers can
process this representation and produce diagnostic knowledge organized in a
hiererchy that mirrors the functional hierarchy. Sticklen, Chandrasekaran
and Smith have work in progress that applies these notions to the medical
domain.
If you wish to meet with Dr. Chandrasekaran, please contact Marce at
x8818, or send mail to mlz@d.
------------------------------
Date: Fri, 30 Jan 87 14:28:03 EST
From: Jim Hendler <hendler@brillig.umd.edu>
Subject: Conference - Conceptual Information Processing
Call for Participation
Fourth Annual Workshop
on
Theoretical Issues in Conceptual Information Processing
Washington, D.C.
June 4-5, 1987
Sponsored by
American Association for Artificial Intelligence
and
University of Maryland Institute for
Advanced Computer Studies
Objectives:
The goal of the investigations under the title "conceptual information
processing" has been understanding intelligence and cognition
computationally, rather than merely the construction of performance programs
or formalization per se. Thus, this workshop will focus on an exploration
of issues common to representation and organization of knowledge and memory
for natural language understanding, planning, problem solving, explanation,
learning and other cognitive tasks. The approaches to be covered are united
by a concern with representation, organization and processing of conceptual
knowledge with an emphasis on empirical investigation of these phenomena by
experimentation and implementation of computer programs.
Format:
The TICIP workshop will be comprised of a combination of panels, invited
paper presentations, and "debates" designed to encourage lively and active
discussion. Not all participants will be invited to present, but all will
be expected to interact.
Attendance:
In order to maximize the interactive nature of this workshop, attendance
will be limited. Those interested in participating, either as speakers or
audience, are asked to submit a one-page summary of work in this area. A
small number of invitations will be extended to those who are interested in
the area but have not yet contributed. Those interested in such an
invitation should contact the Program Chair. A limited amount of financial
assistance will be available to graduate students invited to participate.
Review Process:
Invitation will be based on an informal review of submissions by the Program
Committee.
Workshop Information:
The conference chair is Prof. B. Chandrasekaran (Ohio State University). The
program committee consists of Prof.s R. Alterman (Brandeis), J. Carbonell
(CMU), M. Dyer (UCLA), and J. Hendler (U of Maryland, Chair).
Submission:
A one page abstract of recent work in the area should be submitted to the
Program Chair. The deadline for these submissions is April 15, 1987.
Applicants will be informed of their status soon thereafter. Send abstracts
(but please, no papers) to:
James Hendler
Computer Science Department
University of Maryland
College Park, Md. 20742.
hendler@brillig.umd.edu
hendler@maryland
------------------------------
End of AIList Digest
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