LAWS@SRI-AI.ARPA (07/25/85)
From: AIList Moderator Kenneth Laws <AIList-REQUEST@SRI-AI> AIList Digest Thursday, 25 Jul 1985 Volume 3 : Issue 97 Today's Topics: News - SIGART Chapter Forming, Seminars - Speech Acts and Rationality (SRI) & Design Expert Systems (CMU) & Typed Logical Calculus (SU) & Correcting Misconceptions (Penn) & Time and Causation (SRI) & Realism in Cognitive AI (CSLI) & Reformulation of Knowledge (Rutgers) & Function from Form (Rutgers) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri 19 Jul 85 16:49:09-CDT From: David Throop <AI.THROOP@UTEXAS-20.ARPA> Subject: SIGART Chapter Forming A SIGART chapter is forming for Austin, Texas. SIGART is part of Association for Computing Machinery. It's the Special Interest Group on Artificial Intelligence. Monthly program and dinner meetings will start this fall. Each month an invited speaker from industry or academia will talk on some aspect of AI in Central Texas. Dr. Jonathan Slocum (MCC) will be our first dinner speaker. He will talk on Machine Translation of Natural Languages. That meeting will be Wed, Sept. 4th; the place has not yet been chosen. We have already chosen a board: Drs. Elaine Rich (MCC), Woodrow Bledsoe (MCC & UT), Doug Lenat (MCC), Harry Tennant (Texas Instruments) and Bruce Porter (UT) will serve. I am responsible for the initial organization. We are inviting strong participation from the several industrial AI groups in the area. Austin SIGART will provide a common ground the hardware people, the software people and the research people that are making AI happen here. If you want to help this organization get going, come to our business meeting. Our first one will be a dinner meeting on Thur, July 25, at 6:30 pm, at SIRLOIN STOCKADE 8828 Research Blvd (between Ohlen and Burnett) The dinner will be $8.00 for a full sirloin dinner. If you're coming, inform Rodney Lancaster, of TI Advanced Systems Software 250-6456 Dsg.Lancaster%CSL60%TI-CSL@CSnet-Relay.ARPA We need a rough advance count. The agenda will include: Ratifying our initial bylaws and officers Certifying ourselves as an active chapter to the national SIGART Securing a place for our program meetings Publicity and Membership Speakers and Programs We will also need assistance, as the time of our first program meeting approaches, getting sign-up sheets for the dinner circulated at the AI office sites in town. Membership will be open to all people in the area with an interest in AI; discounts will be available to those who have memberships in the ACM or the national SIGART. I'm looking forward to working with a strong SIGART program for Austin soon. ------------------------------ Date: Wed 17 Jul 85 14:12:17-PDT From: LANSKY@SRI-AI.ARPA Subject: Seminar - Speech Acts and Rationality (SRI) Speech Acts and Rationality Phil Cohen SRI AI Center 11:00 AM, Monday, July 22 SRI International, Building E, Room EJ232 This talk will describe how a theory of communication can be grounded in a theory of rational interaction. I will present a formalism, jointly developed with Hector Levesque, that characterizes how an agent's beliefs and goals eventually lead to action, and how goals to affect the beliefs and goals of other agents leads to communication. Communicative acts will be modelled along the lines of Grice's account of non-natural meaning. I will show how the speech acts of informing, requesting, and questioning can be defined (rather than stipulated) in this framework. Importantly, these definitions will allow one to distinguish insincere imperatives from true requests, and exam questions from real questions. ------------------------------ Date: 18 Jul 85 11:54:18 EDT From: Mary.Lou.Maher@CMU-RI-CIVE Subject: Seminar - Design Expert Systems (CMU) The next DRC seminar on expert systems for design applications is Tuesday July 23 in the Adamson Wing at 1:30. Refreshments will be served at 1:15. HYBRID KNOWLEDGE-BASED SYSTEMS: REQUIREMENTS AND ADVANTAGES Rene Banares-Alcantara Experiments with the application of knowledge-based systems to engineering design have shown us that the use of hybrid systems is necessary. Hybrid knowledge-based systems make it possible to take full advantage of the existing programs, and also allow the automization of a larger portion of the design process. Hybridity is a concept that can be achieved in several dimensions: knowledge representation and abstraction, implementation languages, problem solving methods, etc. In order to construct hybrid systems it is necessary to be able to mix different components (programming languages, modules, programs, levels of abstraction, etc.) into a common working space. Although no complete solution has been developed to accomplish this goal, the blackboard model seems to be the ideal paradigm for this purpose. DECADE (Design Expert for CAtalyst Development) will be presented as one system that partially illustrates the above ideas. [Automization? Hybridity? The latter >>is<< listed in the American Heritage dictionary, but do we need it? -- KIL] ------------------------------ Date: 19 Jul 85 1359 PDT From: Carolyn Talcott <CLT@SU-AI.ARPA> Subject: Seminar - Typed Logical Calculus (SU) There will be as short series of talks given by visitors to the computer science department from Japan. The seminars will occur on Thursdays at 4pm. The announcement for the first seminar is below. Speaker: Prof. Masahiko Sato, University of Tokyo Title: Typed Logical Calculus Time: Thursday, July 25, 4:00-5:00 pm Place: Room 352 Margaret Jacks Hall (Computer Science Department), Stanford We present a typed formal system QJ which is intended both as a logical system and a program- ming system. QJ is a constructive system based on free intuitionistic logic. QJ is a typed system where forms play the roles of both formulas and terms of conventional logical systems. The logic of QJ is free in the sense that forms (considered as terms) may fail to denote. The type structure of QJ is rich enough to include such data types as integers, lists, trees and function spaces. A form of QJ, when considered as a term, becomes a program in the usual sense. As a programming language, QJ becomes a typed func- tional language somewhat similar to ML. A form of QJ, when viewed as a formula, may be used to specify a program. We can also verify programs in QJ. By implementing QJ on a computer, we will have a uniform environment where we can specify, execute and verify programs. ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 22 Jul 85 21:56 EDT From: Tim Finin <Tim%upenn.csnet@csnet-relay.arpa> Subject: dissertation defense - Correcting Misconceptions (Penn) Dissertation Defense CORRECTING OBJECT RELATED MISCONCEPTIONS Kathleen Filliben McCoy 10:00 am, Monday July 29, 1985 554 Moore, University on Pennsylvania Analysis of a corpus of naturally occurring data shows that users conversing with a database or expert system are likely to reveal misconceptions about the objects modelled by the system. Further analysis reveals that the sort of responses given when such misconceptions are encountered depends greatly on the discourse context. This work develops a context-sensitive method for automatically generating responses to object-related misconceptions with the goal of incorporating a correction module in the front-end of a database or expert system. The method is demonstrated through the ROMPER system (Responding to Object-related Misconceptions using PERspective) which is able to generate responses to two classes of object-related misconceptions: misclassifications and misattributions. The transcript analysis reveals a number of specific strategies used by human experts to correct misconceptions, where each different strategy refutes a different kind of support for the misconception. In this work each strategy is paired with a structural specification of the kind of support it refutes. ROMPER uses this specification, and a model of the user, to determine which kind of support is most likely. The corresponding response strategy is then instantiated. The above process is made context sensitive by a proposed addition to standard knowledge-representation systems termed object perspective. Object perspective is introduced as a method for augmenting a standard knowledge-representation system to reflect the highlighting affects of previous discourse. It is shown how this resulting highlighting can be used to account for the context-sensitive requirements of the correction process. Advisors: Aravind Joshi, Bonnie Webber Committee: Tim Finin, Ellen Prince, Ralph Weischedel ------------------------------ Date: Wed 24 Jul 85 13:59:10-PDT From: LANSKY@SRI-AI.ARPA Subject: Seminar - Time and Causation (SRI) Title: Time and Causation from the Standpoint of AI. Nontitle: The Frame Problem is not. Yoav Shoham Yale University, SRI-AI 11:00 AM, Monday, July 29 SRI International, Building E, Room EJ232 Most tasks undertaken by AI researchers involve reasoning about time in one way or another. In particular, the somewhat ill-defined areas of planning and naive physics reasoning rely crucially on the passage of time and the taking place of change. I am aiming at a general and yet rigorous theory of time and change. I am primarily interested in a useful notational device. Psychological plausibility is only an added benefit, and philosophical truth is something over which I lose little sleep. The talk is structured as follows: 1. A first-order theory of time, which could be viewed as a generalization of James Allen's theory. 2. A modal version of the same theory. Several interval-based modal logics will be presented, along with the few of their theoretical properties which I am beginning to understand. 3. The theory of causal counterfactuals, a particular theory of change that relies on part 1. I will demonstrate how this theory appears to avoid three major problems: a. The cross-world identification problem for time tokens. b. The frame problem. c. A nameless problem encountered in the philosophy literature. Also, in the spirit of recent "rigorous reconstructions" I will reformulate Ken Forbus' Qualitative Process theory in terms of causal counterfactuals. In the unlikely event of our having time left over I'll discuss Richard Waldinger's toy car. ------------------------------ Date: Wed 24 Jul 85 17:04:56-PDT From: Emma Pease <Emma@SU-CSLI.ARPA> Subject: Seminar - Realism in Cognitive AI (CSLI) [Excerpted from the CSLI Newsletter by Laws@SRI-AI.] David H. Helman, Department of Philosophy Case Western Reserve University ``Realism and Antirealism in Cognitive Artificial Intelligence'' Ventura Conference Room, Thursday, August 1, 2:15 pm In the philosophy of mind, one controversy between realists and antirealists concerns the semantics of sentences embedded in attitude reports. Antirealists believe that the interpretation or reference of a sentence embedded in an attitude report is a psychological state of the agent who is the subject of the attitude report. Realists believe that the interpretation or reference of a sentence is a state of the world and not a state of mind, whether or not the sentence is embedded in an attitude report. In this paper, I show how these two semantic analyses may be associated with different theories of mental representation in cognitive artificial intelligence. Realists in cognitive artificial intelligence describe the mind by supposing that agents partially represent objects' law-like interactions. Antirealism does not, perhaps, constitute a single well-defined research strategy in cognitive artificial intelligences. We may, however, certainly count as antirealists those researchers in cognitive artificial intelligence who attempt to simulate mental processes by means of procedures which mirror tenets of associationist psychology. I argue that acurate computational models of mind must contain elements from both realist and antirealist research programs. --David Helman ------------------------------ Date: 24 Jul 85 18:52:40 EDT From: Smadar <KEDAR-CABELLI@RUTGERS.ARPA> Subject: Seminar - Reformulation of Knowledge (Rutgers) REFORMULATION OF KNOWLEDGE Erik Van Releghem. AI Laboratory, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, and GTE Fundamental Research Laboratories We describe a system for reformulation of knowledge as a powerful extension of the knowledge representation system KRS. We define reformulation operators that change the structure of knowledge. A mathematical model describes the operators and shows their power and limitations. We show applications of reformulation in matters of defining analogies, definition of office procedures and computer vision in order to demonstrate the use of reformulation as a high-level AI tool. Date: Thursday, July 25, 1985 Time: 10:30-11:30 AM Place: Hill Center, Room 423 ------------------------------ Date: 24 Jul 85 18:52:40 EDT From: Smadar <KEDAR-CABELLI@RUTGERS.ARPA> Subject: Seminar - Function from Form (Rutgers) FUNCTION FROM FORM David J. Braunegg MIT AI Lab, and GTE Fundamental Research Laboratories I propose an approach to reasoning about the function of an object based on its shape. A particular domain, hand tools, is chosen to demonstrate this approach. The novelty of this approach is its combination of reasoning by analogy to the shapes of known tools with reasoning from the possible motions of tools. Each of these methods compensates for the deficiencies of the other. When combined with the use of domain heuristics, they form a powerful reasoning system for determining function from form. (WARNING: This talk concerns research which is in its early stages. No claims of results or working programs are expressed or implied.) Date: Thursday, July 25, 1985 Time: 11:30 AM-12:00 PM Place: Hill Center, Room 423 ------------------------------ End of AIList Digest ********************