LAWS@SRI-AI.ARPA (12/27/84)
From: AIList Moderator Kenneth Laws <AIList-REQUEST@SRI-AI.ARPA> AIList Digest Wednesday, 26 Dec 1984 Volume 2 : Issue 182 Today's Topics: AI Tools - Prolog for PCs, Linguistics - Oxymorons, Humor - Malgorithm Contest, Bindings - Navy Center for Applied Research in AI, News - Recent Articles, Opinion - Personal Assistants, Workstations - Very Inexpensive LISP Machine, Courses - Intelligent Tutoring Systems (SU) & Computational Semantics (SU) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Sat, 22 Dec 84 21:12 EST From: Tim Finin <Tim%upenn.csnet@csnet-relay.arpa> Subject: Prolog for PC-type machines Expert Systems Limited has a prolog for PC-type machines that seems pretty good. It is Clocksin&Melish compatible. We've run it with no problems on both a IBM-PC and a DEC Rainbow, so it will probably run on any MS-DOS machine. There is also a CP/M version. This is the prolog that Technowledge used to implement M1 in. The home address for the company is: Expert Systems Limited 9 West Way Oxford OX2 OJB England There is a U.S. affiliate, located in the Philadelphia area, that has the US rights. I don't have the address at the moment. ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 22 Dec 84 21:29 EST From: Tim Finin <Tim%upenn.csnet@csnet-relay.arpa> Subject: Oxymorons, Pleonasms and various forms of Bull Saul Gorn has published a compendium of material related to the recent note on "Oxymorons, Pleonasms and various forms of Bull" that he has collected in his 50 year career as a mathematician and computer scientist. It is available as "Self-Annihilating Sentences; Saul Gorn's Compendium of Rarely Used Cliches"; Technical Report MS-CIS-83-22. It can be obtained by writing: Publications Computer and Information Science The Moore School University of Pennsylvania Philadelphia, PA 19104 Tim ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 21 Dec 84 14:53:45 mst From: jlg@LANL (Jim Giles) Subject: Contest It's the first annual Complete the Book Title Contest ( no prizes awarded, none were donated). 'Malgorithms + Data Scrambling = ___________________' First prize (which is worth twice as much as the other prizes) will be awarded to the person who guesses the author of the above work. Send answers to jlg@lanl.ARPA and I will summarize. ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 19 Dec 84 10:25:36 est From: Dennis Perzanowski <dennisp@nrl-aic> Subject: erratum Please be advised of the following correction in the address for the Navy Center for Applied Research in Artificial Intelligence which was recently broadcast: U.S. Navy Center for Applied Research in Artificial Intelligence Naval Research Laboratory - Code 7510 Washington, DC 20375-5000 The address of the Civilian Personnel Office to which all resumes and inquiries should be sent is correct as printed in the announcement. Sorry for any inconvenience. Thank you. ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 23 Dec 84 12:46:37 cst From: Laurence Leff <leff%smu.csnet@csnet-relay.arpa> Subject: AI News The Institute, Volume 9 Number 1 January 1985 Page 10 Experts Envision New Applications for AI Technology on the Shop Floor Describes work for automatically constructing part programs for milling. Also discusses applications of AI to such industries as paperboard packaging Proccedings on an Expert System Session of Autofact 6 are available from SME, One SME Drive, P. O. Box 930, Dearborn, Mich. 48121 which includes papers on these subjects. Electronics Week, October 15 1984 page 14 Discusses various Fifth Generation projects in America and Japan IEEE Computer November 1984 Volume 17 No. 11 Page 117 Three-paragraph review of the National Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Austin by Elaine Rich Page 114 summarizes talk by Robert Miller, senior vice president at Data General, on "personal expert systems" Page 65 The Library of Computer and Information Science is again offering the three volume Handbook of Artificial Intelligence for only $4.95 as a sign up bonus. Electronics Week October 29, 1984, page 34 Discusses Quintus Computer Systems Prolog systems and development environments for Prolog. Electronics Week September 24, 1984 page 59 Interview with Larry Harris who is president of Artificial Intelligence Corp., the people behind the Intellect natural language database interface Communications of the ACM December 1984 Volume 27 Number 12 page 1227 Discusses a solution to the travelling salesman problem with thousands of nodes. The solution was used for determing paths in drilling holes in PC boards. Uses a cluster-based approach. ------------------------------ Date: Fri 21 Dec 84 20:40:13-EST From: Wayne McGuire <MDC.WAYNE@MIT-OZ> Subject: Personal Assistants I agree with Henry Spencer that many claims from the AI community are overblown, and that we need to maintain a healthy stance of skepticism about the Next Big Revolutionary Breakthroughs that are forecast every week. However: (1) I don't think the present generation of outliners, natural language interfaces, and free-form databases, which are some of the basic building blocks of idea processors, are, as you insist, a "fad." Products like Thinktank and Intellect are not vaporware: they have firmly established themselves in the marketplace, and are not going to disappear. They are a permanent and welcome fixture in the world of microcomputer and (in the case of Intellect) mainframe software. (2) Mitch Kapor's remarks about AI are not, as you put it, a lot of "marketing hype." As I understand it, a company has been spun off from Lotus which is doing serious research in natural language processing. That company will probably develop a product somewhat like Intellect or Clout which will become an essential element in future integrated software from Lotus. (3) A pencil and paper is fine, but I much prefer a Model 100 as a portable device for recording and shaping notes and ideas. A Model 100 with significantly greater memory, built-in idea processing software, and a connecter to an optical disk storage device would, I suspect, wean many people away from paper and pencils for good. (4) Building a powerful idea processor is very much a function of available memory. Framework, for instance, would be a much more effective product if the quality of its word processor and database management system could be raised to the level of ZyWrite II Plus and MDBS III. To acquire that kind of power would require an extra megabyte or two of memory. (5) The privacy issue in regard to optical disks is a red herring. The federal government already has easy access to much of the sensitive information which would be stored on a personal disk. A biodisk might give individuals an opportunity to know as much about themselves as the government does. -- Wayne McGuire <wayne%mit-oz@mit-mc> ------------------------------ Date: 24 Dec 1984 00:07-EST From: Todd.Kueny@CMU-CS-G.ARPA Subject: Very Inexpensive LISP Machine I have recently been toying with the idea of very inexpensive lisp machines (VILM). The ideal VILM would support a hi-res display, a keyboard, mouse, RS-232/422 interface, floppies (5 1/4 or 3 1/2 inch), support interpreter, compiler, plus other handy functions (fasl, debugger, trace, maybe an object language), provide a window package (mulitple fonts, editor, etc.), be portable (so I can drag it back and forth to work easily), and be able to support as some sort of options: virtual memory with a hard disk (10M, 20M, or whatever is cheap), ethernet, and different size physical memory (512K, 1M, 2M). As I see it, the technology exists right now to build such a beast (by "right now" I mean "order it from BYTE magazine"). The hi-res display, keyboard, mouse, r2-232/422 and floppies are supplied by an Apple MacIntosh (approximately $1700-2800). The remaining non-optional stuff would be supplied (initially) by a box similar in size to the Mac containing an 8 slot Multi-Bus card rack, power supply, fan, M68010 processor card, ROM card (interpreter, compiler, other handy stuff), RAM card or cards (512K or more), interface logic to talk to the Mac (total < $5,000). The LISP would be Portable Standard Lisp (PSL) which is cheap, avaiable, and could be loaded into ROMS. The Mac would handle the display and filing functions. It would be portable since the Mac will zip into a bag and so could the additional box. Total cost would be around $8,500 to build from scratch (the Imagine IMPRINT laser printers use this concept, so I know it's workable). Some tense hacking plus a disk controller card and 10-30M Winchester could make a single process, virtual memory system possible for an additional $5,000 (total price ~ $13,500). Enhancements could include a bit-slice processor board with a real instruction set, tape cartridge backup, more disk, and a real operating system with files, multple processes, and ether/arc/apple net. My goal is a VILM which is affordable, flexible, and able to support truly tense lisp hacking in a useful way. Is there any such thing out there? I would like to correspond with anyone having interest in VILMs (ideas, designs, hardware and software implementations). -Todd K. ------------------------------ Date: Fri 14 Dec 84 23:29:42-PST From: Derek Sleeman <SLEEMAN@SUMEX-AIM.ARPA> Subject: Intelligent Tutoring Systems course - Winter Quarter [Forwarded from the Stanford bboard by Laws@SRI-AI.] This course was given for the first time last session; this year the course will have more of a workshop flavour. Topic: Some issues in Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITSs) CS 324X & Ed. 495X Instructor: D Sleeman Time/Location: Winter Quarter: Wednesday, 4-6 p.m., Room 334 Cubberley Audience: Graduate Students in Computer Science, Education & Psychology. Prerequisites: Consent of Instructor required Number of units: 2-3 The seminar will highlight research problems which are encountered in implementing automated teaching systems from principally, an AI perspective, and secondly from Cognitive Science and instructional perspectives. In particular we will review the "traditional" CAI systems and the more recent activities in ITSs within these frameworks and point out the current perceived shortcomings which include: - inappropriate feedback due to inadequate students models - inadequate conceptualization of the domain - unprincipled tutoring strategies - user interaction with the system is too restricted The systems which have concentrated on the issue of inferring a student model, namely BUGGY and PIXIE (formerly LMS), will be studied in some depth. Inferring a model of a student's problem solving, even in a restricted domain, is very complex as given N rules, there are potentially N! models to be considered. We shall discuss how these modelling systems have addressed and "solved" the combinatorial explosion problem. We will then consider how some of these techniques could be applied to the more general problem of modelling a user of computer system/package. The class will have access to several mini-versions of ITSs which have very recently been transferred to the IBM PC -- these include a version of BUGGY, PROUST and the instructor's PIXIE system. Indeed the principal task for the class will be to implement a data-base for the PIXIE system. The course will conclude with a discussion of open research issues in the area. Literature: Principal source will be Intelligent Tutoring Systems, Academic Press l982, (eds. Sleeman and Brown). Additional BUGGY and LMS papers and selected papers from Mental Models Erlbaum, l983, (eds. Gentner & Stevens). Queries may be addressed to SLEEMAN@SUMEX, or 497-3257. D. Sleeman, 10 December l984 ------------------------------ Date: 18 Dec 84 1105 PST From: Terry Winograd <TW@SU-AI.ARPA> Subject: Course on Computational Semantics - Ling/CS 276 [Forwarded from the Stanford bboard by Laws@SRI-AI.] Computer Science 276 / Linguistics 276 Computational Models for the Semantics of Natural Language Winter 1985 Terry Winograd MWF 10-11, Terman 156 (televized) In this course we will develop the theoretical basis for the implementation of computer systems dealing with the meaning of natural language. We will cover a variety of semantic and pragmatic areas, developing three aspects of each: 1) The formal theories relevant to the area, drawn from work in linguistics and the philosophy of language 2) Computational issues that arise, and the computational mechanisms that have been developed to augment or supplant the standard formal framework 3) Limitations of the formalization and problems in extending it to cover the full range of related phenomena. Areas covered will include lexical meaning, compositionality, quantification and reference, temporality, speech acts, and schematic structures. I will describe a number of existing AI systems in light of these theoretical foundations, but will not attempt to provide a comprehensive coverage of the currently available systems or to deal in depth with details of implementation. The course is intended to serve as a basis for understanding what is being done and what can be done, not as a practical "how-to-do-it" course. There will be three lectures a week, and some homework assignments. There will be a mid-term and a final exam. No computer programming exercises or project will be required. There is no regular textbook. Course notes will be duplicated and made available, based partly on a textbook I am writing. The course will assume a background (either prior, or through additional study during the course) in two areas: formal logic and basic techniques of artificial intelligence. Two books are recommended: Logic in Linguistics, by Allwood, Andersson and Dahl,is recommended to anyone not already well versed in the logical formalisms used in semantics, including basic set theory, propositional and predicate logic, deduction rules, and rudiments of modal and intensional logic. Principles of Artificial Intelligence, by Nils Nillson, is recommended as an introduction to basic AI techniques for planning, deduction, and representation. We will not cover most of this material in class, but will provide tutorial opportunities for those students who need to fill in the background as we go. There are no other prerequisities in either computation or linguistics, except for a general familiarity with concepts of programming (as gained from any programming course or experience). ------------------------------ End of AIList Digest ********************