LAWS@SRI-AI.ARPA (03/06/85)
From: AIList Moderator Kenneth Laws <AIList-REQUEST@SRI-AI.ARPA> AIList Digest Wednesday, 6 Mar 1985 Volume 3 : Issue 30 Today's Topics: Network Lists - New Software Engineering List, Seminars - Automated Ada Programming using Icons and Prolog (SU) & INTERNIST Scoring Schemes (SU) & Modelling Discourse Structure (UCB) & Semantic Prototyping System (Boston SICPLAN) & Language Comprehension (UCF) & A Reductionist Semantics (UCB) & Motivation Analysis (UCF) & Intuitionistic Logic (CMU) & Domains and Intuitionistic Logic (CMU), Conference - Evolution, Games, and Learning ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue 26 Feb 85 10:40:42-EST From: Mark S. Day <MDAY@MIT-XX.ARPA> Subject: New Soft-Eng List SOFT-ENG@MIT-XX Soft-Eng is a list for discussion of software engineering and related topics, covering such areas as: Requirements Specification Design Testing Maintenance Enhancement Languages Methodologies Tools Verification Validation Reliability Debugging Testing Testing Tools Error handling Recovery Programming Environments Modelling Documentation Extensibility Practices Standards Protection mechanisms Portability Complexity Performance Software science Management Cost estimation Productivity Rapid prototyping Reusable software Professional ethics Configuration mgmt. Quality assurance Staffing Systems analysis Training & education Human factors Software: legal issues Real-time systems Hardware/software tradeoffs Software fault-tolerance Any and all contributions are welcome (e.g. questions, ideas, "war stories", proposals, humor, abstracts, conference reports, bibliographies, problems, reviews, tutorials, solutions, planned or completed projects). The list is currently unmoderated, but may become a digest if the volume of mail warrants it. All requests to be added to or deleted from this list, problems, questions, etc., should be sent to Soft-Eng-Request@MIT-XX. [Rather than compete with this list, I shall no longer forward items about programming languages, environments, man-machine interfaces, etc., unless they relate specifically to AI and information science. LISP and PROLOG articles will still be carried in AIList, of course. -- KIL] ------------------------------ Date: 22 Feb 85 0933 PST From: Rosemary Brock <RBA@SU-AI.ARPA> Subject: Seminar - Automated Ada Programming using Icons and Prolog (SU) [Forwarded from the Stanford AI bboard by Laws@SRI-AI.] TITLE: "CAEDE - Carleton Embedded System Design Environment - An Experimental Design Environment for Ada Using Icons and Prolog" SPEAKER: Professor Ray Buhr Department of Systems and Computer Engineering Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada. PLACE: ERL 401, Monday Feb. 25th, 2:30 pm. This informal talk will provide an overview of CAEDE's approach, status and capabilities. With CAEDE, multitasking design structures are entered iconically on the screen of a SUN workstation, using a notation described in the speaker's "System Design With Ada" book (PH, 1984). The structures are automatically converted into Prolog facts. Prolog programs process these facts to generate skeleton Ada programs and to perform structural and temporal analysis of the designs represented by the facts. Temporal analysis is based on Prolog descriptions of the temporal properties of the Ada rendezvous and of the temporal behaviour of tasks. The talk will describe the iconic interface and the nature of the Prolog representations and tools. CAEDE is part of a research program at Carleton into environments and tools for embedded real time systems, with particular emphasis on communication protocol systems. ------------------------------ Date: Fri 1 Mar 85 11:46:00-PST From: Alison Grant <GRANT@SUMEX-AIM.ARPA> Subject: Seminar - INTERNIST Scoring Schemes (SU) [Forwarded from the Stanford AI bboard by Laws@SRI-AI.] Medical Information Sciences Colloquium Tuesday, March 5, 1985 Stanford University Medical Center Room M-106 1:15 - 1:45 P.M. Speaker: David Heckerman Title: Probabilistic Interpretation of Two Ad Hoc Scoring Schemes I will present a new formulation of Bayes' theorem with the usual assumptions that evidence is conditionally independent and that hypotheses are mutually exclusive and exhaustive. Within this formulation, I define a quantity called the Measure of Confirmation (MC). I will show that MC's satisfy all the axioms of MYCIN's certainty factors. I will also show that a quantity closely related to MC behaves similarly to the weighting factors in the INTERNIST-1 scoring scheme. Thus, a probabilistic interpretation will be provided for these two evidence combination schemes that have been labeled ad hoc. ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 4 Mar 85 16:03:04 pst From: chertok%ucbcogsci@Berkeley (Paula Chertok) Subject: Seminar - Modelling Discourse Structure (UCB) BERKELEY LINGUISTICS LUNCHBAG COLLOQUIUM DAY: Thursday March 7, 1985 TIME: 11 - 12:30 PLACE: 200 Bldg. T-4 SPEAKER: Dr. Livia Polanyi, English Department, University of Amsterdam; BBN Laboratories TITLE: ``Modelling Discourse Syntactic and Semantic Structure'' ABSTRACT: The ultimate goal of the research to be discussed is to characterize the structural and semantic relationships obtaining among individual clauses in natural discourse. In this talk,a formal linguistic model of discourse structure will be sketched which is designed to account for the ability of language users to assign proper semantic interpretations to clauses in naturally occurring interactively constructed talk despite the interruptions, resumptions, repairs, and other disfluencies which characterize performance. ------------------------------ Date: 5 Mar 1985 00:08:40-EST From: psm@Mitre-Bedford Subject: Seminar - Semantic Prototyping System (Boston SICPLAN) Boston SICPLAN (Special Interest Committee on Programming Languages) is a local affiliate of the ACM SIGPLAN group and vaguely associated with and chartered by the Greater Boston area chapter of the ACM. It normally meets once a month, usually on the first Thursday, almost always at 8 p.m., and normally at either BBN or Intermetrics. Its talks are often of interest to people working in the fields of programming languages and compilers, environments, artificial intelligence, and data/knowledge base management. [...] ACM GREATER BOSTON CHAPTER SICPLAN Thursday, March 7, 1985 8 P.M. Intermetrics Atrium 733 Concord Ave., Cambridge A Semantic Prototyping System Mitchell Wand Indiana University and Brandeis University Denotational semantics seems to be a useful language for specifying the behavior of programming languages. The talk will describe a set of computer programs that Dr. Wand developed for testing and exercising programming language specifications given in this style. It will also give an introduction to the method of denotational semantics and an overview of how these tools can be used to construct rapid prototypes of programming languages. Our March speaker, Mitch Wand, is one of the leading innovators in applying formal methods to language design and the analysis of programs and language systems. He is spending the year at Brandeis University, on leave from the University of Indiana, where he is a professor. [...] Our group customarily meets for dinner at Joyce Chen's restaurant, 390 Rindge Ave., Cambridge at 6:00 P.M. (just before the meeting). If you wish to come, please call Carolyn Elson at Intermetrics 661-1840 as early as possible so we can make the appropriate dinner reservation. Peter Mager chairperson, Boston SICPLAN ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 5 Mar 85 18:31:45 est From: "Robert C. Bethel" <bethel%ucf.csnet@csnet-relay.arpa> Subject: Seminar - Language Comprehension (UCF) Date & Time: Tuesday - April 9, 1985 at 6pm. Location : Computer Center II, Rm #103 University of Central Florida, Orlando, Florida. Speaker : Eugene Charniak Subject : Language Comprehension from an Artificial Intelligence Perspective In the first half of this talk will review the work which has been done on language comprehension within the Artificial Intelligence Community. Despite the often heated controversy surrounding the area, there is, in fact, agreement on what the basic model must look like. Furthermore this model is not, except in retrospect, a completely obvious one. Unfortunately, in retrospect the model is rather obvious, and offers little real guidance for someone trying to build such a system. In the second part of the lecture will suggest how the model should be extended to answer some of the problems left open in the consensus version. This will include issues such as the relative importance of syntax and semantics, limits on inference, and the role of logic. Robert C. Bethel University of Central Florida uucp: {duke,decvax,akgua}!ucf-cs!bethel ARPA: bethel.ucf-cs@csnet.relay.CSNET csnet: bethel@ucf.CSNET ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 5 Mar 85 17:54:05 pst From: chertok%ucbcogsci@Berkeley (Paula Chertok) Subject: Seminar - A Reductionist Semantics (UCB) BERKELEY COGNITIVE SCIENCE PROGRAM Spring 1985 Cognitive Science Seminar -- IDS 237B TIME: Tuesday, March 12, 11:00 - 12:30 PLACE: 240 Bechtel Engineering Center (followed by) DISCUSSION: 12:30 - 1:30 in 200 Building T-4 SPEAKER: Ned Block, CSLI and MIT TITLE: ``A Reductionist Semantics'' There are two quite different families of approaches to seman- tics: REDUCTIONIST approaches attempt to characterize the semantic in non-semantic terms NON-REDUCTIONIST approaches are more concerned with relations among meaningS than with the nature of meaning itself. The non-reductionist approaches are the more familiar ones (eg, Montague, the model- theoretic aspect of situation semantics, Davidson, Katz). The reduction- ist approaches come in 4 major categories: 1. Theories that reduce meaning to the mental (This is what is common to Grice and Searle). 2. Causal semantics--theories that see semantic values as derived from causal chains leading from the world to our words. (Field's combination of Kripke and Tarski) 3. Indicator semantics--theories that see natural and non-natural meaning as importantly similar. Their paradigm of meaning is the way the rings on the tree stump represent the age of the tree when cut down. (Dretske/Stampe) 4. Functional role semantics--theories that see meaning in terms of the func- tional role of linguistic expressions in thought, reasoning, and planning, and in general in the way they mediate between sensory inputs and behavioral outputs. After sketching the difference between the reductionist and non-reductionist approaches, I will focus on functional role semantics, a view that has independently arisen in philosophy (where its sources are Wittgenstein's idea of meaning as use, and pragmatism) and cognitive science (where it is known as procedural semantics). Instead of devoting the talk to trying to answer certain well known criticisms of functionalist views, I will concentrate on what one particular version of the doctrine can DO (if the cri- ticisms can be answered): viz., illuminate acquisition of and knowledge of meaning, principles of charity, how meaning is relevant to explanation of behavior, the intrinsic/observer- relative distinction, the relation between meaning and the brain, and the relativity of meaning to representational sys- tem. The point is to give a sense of the fertility and power of the view, and so to provide a rationale for working on solu- tions to its problems. Finally, I will sketch some reasons to prefer functional role semantics to the other reductionist theories. A copy of a paper which the talk draws on will be in the cogni- tive science library. UPCOMING ELSEWHERE ON CAMPUS Andy diSessa (Computer Science Lab at MIT) will be speaking on ``Knowledge in Pieces: Intuitive Knowledge in Physics and Other Things'' at 4pm on Friday, March 8, in the Beach Room, third floor, Tolman Hall. ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 5 Mar 85 18:31:45 est From: "Robert C. Bethel" <bethel%ucf.csnet@csnet-relay.arpa> Subject: Seminar - Motivation Analysis (UCF) Date & Time: Wednesday - April 10, 1985 (time - to be announced on tuesday) Location : Computer Center II, Rm #103 University of Central Florida, Orlando, Florida. Speaker : Eugene Charniak Subject : Motivation Analysis, Abductive Unification, and Non-monotonic Equality Motivation analysis in story comprehension requires matching an action mentioned in the story against actions which might be predicted by possible explanitory motivations. This matching requires matching constants from the story against skolem functions in the possible motivations (assuming a normal first order representation of stories, plans, etc.). We will show that extending unification to allow for unifying two things if they are non-monotonically equal does exactly what is needed in such cases. We also show that such a procedure allows for a clean method of noun-phrase reference determination. Robert C. Bethel University of Central Florida uucp: {duke,decvax,akgua}!ucf-cs!bethel ARPA: bethel.ucf-cs@csnet.relay.CSNET csnet: bethel@ucf.CSNET ------------------------------ Date: 5 Mar 1985 0903-EST From: Lydia Defilippo <DEFILIPPO@CMU-CS-C.ARPA> Subject: Seminar - Intuitionistic Logic (CMU) [Forwarded from the CMU bboard by Laws@SRI-AI.] Speaker: Dana Scott Date: Wednesday, March 6 Time: 2:00 Place: 2105 DH Topic: Intuitionistic logic and some models Abstract: The lambda calculus as usually presented is an equational theory, but it is also supposed to be a theory of functions. One way to understand its scope is to discuss models for lambda calculus in intuitionistic logic and to relate it to the notion of function appropriate within that framework. However, this first talk will be just about intuitionistic logic and some of its interpretations. ------------------------------ Date: 5 Mar 1985 0904-EST From: Lydia Defilippo <DEFILIPPO@CMU-CS-C.ARPA> Subject: Seminar - Domains and Intuitionistic Logic (CMU) [Forwarded from the CMU bboard by Laws@SRI-AI.] Speaker: Dana Scott Date: Monday, March 11 Time: 2:00 Place: 324 Scaife Hall Topic: Domains and intuitionistic logic (I) Abstract: Kleene's realizability interpretation in one very explicit approach to intuitionistic logic. The basics of the interpretation will be discussed, and it will be explained how computability theory gets a logical form. In particular, the effectively given domains become just sets (of a special kind). Some results from McCarty and others on realizability will be explained. The way domain models for lambda calculus behave from this point of view will also be discussed. ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 1 Mar 85 09:27:39 mst From: bbw@LANL.ARPA (Burton Wendroff) Subject: Conference - Evolution, Games, and Learning [Forwarded by Golub@SU-SCORE and Buchanan@SUMEX-AIM.] CONFERENCE ANNOUNCEMENT Title - EVOLUTION, GAMES, AND LEARNING: Adaptation in Machines and Nature Date - May 20 - 24, 1985 Place - Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, New Mexico Topics include - biological evolution, deterministic and random automata, learning algorithms, neural networks, computer game programs, game theory, allocation mechanisms, and brain function. Speakers include - J. ANDERSON, H. BERLINER, M. CONRAD, J. H. CONWAY, J. D. COWAN, M. DAVIS, J. L. DENEUBOURG, M. W. FELDMAN, P. FREY, I. J. GOOD, J. H. HOLLAND, J. HOPFIELD, B. HUBERMAN, S. KAUFFMAN, S. KIRKPATRICK, N. PACKARD, S. REITER, G.-C. ROTA, A. SAMUEL, P. SCHUSTER, T. J. SEJNOWSKI, J. MAYNARD SMITH, J. W. VALENTINE, L. G. VALIANT, S. WOLFRAM Registration fee - $50 Contact - For registration information and forms write or call Evolution, Games ,and Learning Los Alamos National Laboratory P. O. Box 1663, MS-B258 Los Alamos, NM 87545, USA Tel. 505-667-1444 ------------------------------ End of AIList Digest ********************