LAWS@SRI-AI.ARPA (12/19/84)
From: AIList Moderator Kenneth Laws <AIList-REQUEST@SRI-AI.ARPA> AIList Digest Wednesday, 19 Dec 1984 Volume 2 : Issue 179 Today's Topics: AI Tools - Micro-PROLOG & SmallTalk AI Systems, Applications - Expert Legal Systems & Intelligent Skimmer, Planning - Constraint Propagation and Design, Reports - SEAI Publications, Politics - Visitors from USSR, Lab Description - NRL, Workshop - Logic and Computer Science ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon, 17 Dec 1984 17:36 EST From: Chunka Mui <CHUNKA%MIT-OZ@MIT-MC.ARPA> Subject: micro-PROLOG info request We are looking for PROLOG packages which run on micros, especially the IBM PC. If you are familiar with any PROLOG interpreters for the PC, especially one with a tutorial package, I appreciate any information that you could give me. Thanks, Chunka Mui Chunka%mit-oz@mit-mc ------------------------------ Date: 17 Dec 84 12:21:53 EST From: Mike.Rychener@CMU-RI-ISL2 Subject: SmallTalk AI systems? [Forwarded from the CMU bboard by Laws@SRI-AI.] Does anyone know of any successful AI applications coded in SmallTalk? This was stimulated by the new Tektronix AI machine, whose blurb touts its SmallTalk as useful for developing expert systems. ------------------------------ Date: 17 Dec 1984 12:21-EST From: Alexander.Hauptmann@CMU-CS-G.ARPA Subject: expert legal systems? I am looking for references to publications about expert systems for legal reasoning. If you know of anybody who has done work in this area, please let me know (Alexander.Hauptmann@CMU-CS-G.ARPA). Among other things, I have heard that Roger Schank has done work in this area, but have been unable to find citations. Thanks. Alex. ------------------------------ Date: 17 Dec 84 06:44:45 EST From: Robert.Thibadeau@CMU-CS-H Subject: expert legal system [Forwarded from the CMU bboard by Laws@SRI-AI.] Extensive work in legal reasoning was done by Thorne McCarty. Thorne published in the Harvard Law Review back in 1977ish. His topic was legal reasoning in corporate tax law -- one of the areas where the Supreme Court effectively makes the law. Thorne, educated at Harvard in Law and Stanford in AI, and a tenured professor of Law at Rochester, evaluated Yale, way back, but decided to do his AI work at Rutgers. While I regard Roger Shank as absolutely excellent, I find it unfortunate that like natural language understanding systems vis a vis Yorick Wilks, belief systems vis a vis Chuck Schmidt and N. Sridharan, Memory vis a vis 100 years of thought in German and British psychology, we find now Roger implied at the leading edge in legal reasoning. Roger does good work, but he takes a long time to see the light and he tends to ignore his surround. I would hope the people on the frontiers not be forgotten this time around. ------------------------------ Date: 17 Dec 84 16:05:04 EST From: BIESEL@RUTGERS.ARPA Subject: Intelligent skimmer suggestion. As the volume of mail in this and other lists increases I find that I spend more and more time only skimming the text, searching for the message or two that is of interest to me. It occurs to me that an intelligent program for skimming text would be of some help in this. This program would scan a message, break up its sentences into grammatical tokens, and would first display only nouns and verbs - in their correct places on the screen. As the text scrolls upward adjectives, adverbs and pronouns appear, and by the time the text has traversed 2/3 of the screen, all words in each sentence are filled in. A smarter system would also keep track of the rate at which CTL-s/CTL-Q is sent, and adjust its transfer rate accordingly. A really smart program would keep track of keywords in those pieces of text which the user actually reads, determined by how often he slows down the skimming presentation, and would automatically present more fleshed out versions of messages which contained such keywords. There is no good reason why text has to be displayed in a letter- sequential form. We have a whole 2-D array to work with; let's try to use it to enhance rather than obfuscate communication. Biesel@rutgers ------------------------------ Date: Saturday, 15 December 1984 03:46:38 EST From: Duvvuru.Sriram@cmu-ri-cive.arpa Subject: Planning, Constraint Propagation and Design A part of the January 1983 SIGART newsletter was dedicated to Planning. A number of abstracts on (then) current research was compiled by Ann Robinson. I would like to add the following to Steinberg's equation about design: Heuristic Knowledge (HK) + Well-structured Programs (Algorithms) (WP) = Good Engineering Programs (GEP) If we add Causal knowledge (CK) to the LHS of above equation then we have HK + WP + CK = EEP (Effecient Engineering Programs) Any comments? Has anyone tried the task suspension method instead of constraint propagation? Task suspension works in the following manner (there is more to it): IF a constraint in a certain part of the design cannot be satisfied THEN suspend that task and get the values needed to satisfy the constraint In other words if you are designing Module-1 and find that there is a constraint relating Module-1 to Module-2 then suspend the task of performing Module-1 and design that part of Module-2 which satisfies the constraint. I tried this in structural design [1] using a Hearsay-type approach. However, I ran into problems when a constraint involved interaction between 3 or more components. [1] ALL-RISE : A Case Study in Constraint-Directed Design, Working Paper, Department of Civil Engineering, C-MU, Pittsburgh, PA 15213 Sriram ------------------------------ Date: Tue 18 Dec 84 10:47:20-PST From: Ken Laws <Laws@SRI-AI.ARPA> Subject: SEAI Publications A brochure from the SEAI Institute has crossed my desk. They are offering a two-volume survey of commercial and near-commercial AI systems as of August 1984. The two 200-page surveys, AI Applications for Manufacturing and AI Applications for Business Management, include 136 products and in-house systems at over 100 corporations, including 28 expert-system toolkits and 10 natural-language systems. The reports are $110 each, or $200 together. SEAI also offers a three-volume set on Machine Vision for Robotics and Automated Inspection and several other reports on robots in industry, AI, expert systems, and automated guided vehicle systems. You can contact them at Box 590, Madison, GA 30650, (404) 342-9638. [Note: I have no connection with the company, and pass this along only in the hopes that it will be of use to the Arpanet or AI research communities. I obviously cannot report on every AI book offered by every publisher, but see no harm in forwarding book reviews or notices about obscure reports. Correspondence about this policy should be directed to AIList-Request@SRI-AI. -- KIL] ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 18 Dec 84 21:34:41 PST From: Judea Pearl <judea@UCLA-LOCUS.ARPA> Subject: Visitors from USSR I wish to share with the readers of the AI-Digest this letter, which I wrote to Professor Viktor V. Aleksandrov, Head, Leningraad Research Computer Center, who is currently visiting the U.S. and who is particularly interested in meeting AI researchers. Dear Professor Alexandrov, I would have liked very much to meet you during your current visit to UCLA, but the following circumstances will not allow me to do so in good faith: I have received from the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) a long list of Soviet computer scientists who, for the past several years, have been barred from scientific activity and have been denied permission to participate in scientific meetings, domestic as well as international. Some of these people would like to present papers at the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence which will take place at UCLA, August 1985, but will be prevented from leaving your country. I am particularly familiar with the stories of: Alexander Lerner, Moscow Isai Goldstein, Tbilisi Gregory Goldstein, Tbilisi whom I met at the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence - 1973, Tbilisi, Georgia, and with whom I tried to keep in touch. To my dismay, I find these three cited in the 1984 Report of the ACM Committee on Scientific Freedom and Human Rights as being harrassed and prevented from engaging in scientific activities. In 1973, I personally witnessed Isai Goldstein being barred from entering the lecture hall of the Tbilisi conference, so I feel obliged to express my concern that today, eleven years later, the method of professional deprivation is still practiced in your country. Although I would like to contribute to improved scientific cooperation between our two countries, my understanding has been that a prerequisite to true cooporation is the freedom for individuals to engage in scientific pursuits and to communicate their findings to other scientists. Your government apparently has a different perception of cooperation, and I will be happy to discuss with you these differences. However, because you are an official Soviet visitor, I cannot meet with you in good faith to engage in a purely professional discussion. To do so would be to betray Professor Lerner, who personally pleaded with me to refrain from participation in U.S.-USSR cooperative programs until minimum standards of scientific freedom are agreed upon. I hope you understand my position and will convey my regrets to your colleagues at the Leningrad Computer Research Center. Yours Sincerely, Judea Pearl Professor, Computer Science Dpt. University of California Los Angeles A note to the reader: The 1984 report of the ACM Committee on Scientific Freedom and Human Rights is available from my office. It is scheduled for publication in the January-85 issue of the Communications of the ACM. If you meet with Professor Alexandrov, or other Soviet visitors, you may find it appropriate to express your sensitivity to two allegations made in the ACM report: 1. That Soviet scientists are dismissed from their jobs (or demoted) once they apply for exit visas. 2. That these scientists are prevented from attending professional meetings (even in the privacy of their homes) or from submitting papers to international meetings, e.g., IJCAI-83. If you kindly send me a summary of Professor Alexandrov's replies, especially regarding the practices at his own Institute, I will be glad to bring them to the attention of the ACM Committee. J.Pearl <judea@ucla-locus.arpa> ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 13 Dec 84 16:30:45 est From: Rod Johnson <johnson@nrl-css> Subject: Lab Description - NRL (Computer Science & Systems Branch) [Edited by Laws@SRI-AI.] NAVAL RESEARCH LABORATORY Computer Science and Systems Branch The Computer Science and Systems Branch of NRL is active in: >> software engineering >> computer security >> information theory >> search theory >> expert systems >> message processing >> software measurement >> speech and signal processing >> formal software specifications. Our interests also include performance modeling and evaluation, human- computer interfaces, and program specification and verification tools. OUR GROUP is small, close-knit, and informal, with a research staff of 22 members; 9 hold PhDs. Attendance at conferences and publication in the open literature are encouraged. There are ample opportunities for educational support toward graduate degrees. Several branch members also teach at local universities. COMPUTING RESOURCES at NRL are being expanded to include a Cray X-MP/12 system. This unique system will include a front end consisting of a cluster of VAX 11/785s with connections to the ARPANET and to a broadband network linking other NRL computers. The Branch maintains VAX 11/780, Sun, and VAX 11/750 machines running UNIX and VMS, and a Symbolics Lisp Computer. Each office includes a terminal with a high-speed link to these systems, which are also linked to the ARPANET. THE NAVAL RESEARCH LABORATORY is a government laboratory located on a 129-acre campus on the banks of the Potomac River in Washington, D.C. It was founded at the suggestion of Thomas Edison more than 60 years ago and carries out a wide variety of basic and applied research. The Washington area offers a temperate climate and an outstanding cultural environment, including the museums of the Smithsonian Institution, the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, and several excellent professional and collegiate theatre groups. For more information, contact: Mr. S. H. Wilson Head, Computer Science and Systems Branch Code 7590 Phone: (202) 767-2518 Naval Research Laboratory Arpanet: Wilson@NRL-CSS Washington, D.C. 20375 uucp: ...!decvax!nrl-css!wilson ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 10 Dec 84 16:07:59 est From: ukma!marek@ANL-MCS.ARPA (Wiktor Marek) Subject: Workshop - Logic and Computer Science FIRST COMMUNICATION Workshop on LOGIC AND COMPUTER SCIENCE Lexington,KY, June 9-14 1984. In the first half of June 1985 a workshop on Logic and Computer Science will take place in Lexington, Kentucky. The workshop will take 4 and 1/2 working days. The workshop will cover those parts of Computer Science where an active part is played by logic-inclined research- ers, in particular: Theory of Computation Theory of Databases Artificial Intelligence Theory of Operating Systems (Temporal Logic) Program Verification Logic Programming All the inqueries should be sent to: Logic and Computer Science Department of Computer Science University of Kentucky Lexington, KY, 40506-0027 (606) 257-3961 or: Logic and Computer Science ARPA: "ukma!logic-and-cs"@ANL-MCS (Note the quote marks.) UUCP-> unmvax -----------\ UUCP-> research ----------\____ !anlams --\ UUCP-> boulder -----------/ >-!ukma!logic-and-cs UUCP-> decvax!ucbvax ----/ / cbosgd!hasmed!qusavx --/ Organizational Committee: Forbes Lewis Wiktor Marek Anil Nerode Lexington, December 1984 ------------------------------ End of AIList Digest ********************