LAWS@SRI-AI.ARPA (11/19/84)
From: AIList Moderator Kenneth Laws <AIList-REQUEST@SRI-AI> AIList Digest Sunday, 18 Nov 1984 Volume 2 : Issue 157 Today's Topics: Conference - Expert Systems Symposium, Expert Systems - Skinner, Algorithms - Scheduling Algorithm Question & Malgorithm, Logic Programming - Compiling Logic to Functions, Linguistics - In Praise of Natural Languages, Seminars - Conceptual Change in Childhood & Relational Interface, Process Representation & Partial Winter Schedule at NCARAI, Course & Conference - Logic, Language, and Computation Meeting ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: 26 Oct 1984 9:37:06 EDT (Friday) From: Marshall Abrams <abrams@mitre> Subject: Expert Systems Symposium I am helping to organize a Symposium on Expert Systems in the Federal Government. In addition to papers, I am looking for people to serve on the program committee and the conference committee, and to serve as reviewers and session chairmen. The openings on the conference committee include local arrangements, publicity, and tutorials. Please contact me or the program chairman (karma @ mitre) with questions and suggestions. The call for papers is available on request. Marshall Abrams ------------------------------ Date: Friday, 16 Nov 84 11:34:27 EST From: shrager (jeff shrager) @ cmu-psy-a Subject: Quote for our times... "If Skinner were born in our time, he'd have been an expert systems researcher." -- Peter Pirolli 11/16/84 in the heat of an argument. (Quoted with permission) ------------------------------ Date: 15 Nov 84 11:38:40 EST From: DIETZ@RUTGERS.ARPA Subject: Scheduling algorithm questions [Forwarded from the SRI bboard by Laws@SRI-AI.] I want an online algorithm for preemptive scheduling on a single processor with release times and deadlines (no precedence relations). This problem is trivial offline, but I want to be able to add new jobs (or determine they cannot be added) in polylog time. Has anyone looked at this problem? Paul Dietz (dietz@rutgers) ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 16 Nov 84 15:30 CST From: Boebert@HI-MULTICS.ARPA Subject: Old high-level malgorithm A (very) early IBM FORTRAN compiler contained the following jewel of an error message: "COLUMN cc OF CARD nnnn CONTAINS A 12-4 PUNCH MINUS SIGN INSTEAD OF AN 11 PUNCH MINUS SIGN. CORRECT AND RESUBMIT." This was a fatal error. (For the youngsters, "12-4 punch" and "11 punch" refer to the patterns of holes in a card column; I believe the 12-4 was officially a "dash". Also, FORTRAN only spoke capital letters; this was an Eisenhower-era compiler, and shouted at you in proper authoritarian style.) [Speaking of user-interface styles: Commodore Grace Hopper tells of the time a Navy (or perhaps just Pentagon) programming team realized that a computer could "speak German" if you just replaced JUMP with SPRUNGE, etc. (Even JUMP was a novelty at this time: it may have been the earliest COBOL compiler prototype.) They set up a demo and passed around a memo saying "Come see our computer compile this German program." The brass were not amused at the idea of an American military computer being trained to speak German, and the team had to distribute another memo saying that the first was just a bad joke -- no computer could possibly understand German! -- KIL] ------------------------------ Date: Thu 15 Nov 84 19:31:17-MST From: Uday Reddy <U-REDDY@UTAH-20.ARPA> Subject: Compiling logic to functions To add to my previous message on the topic, the fact that the effect of logical variables cannot be achieved in functional languages is not a linguistic limitation but an operational one. Specifically, all logic predicates are boolean-valued functions. So, all Horn clauses can be directly translated into function equations. A :- B1, ..., Bn. => A = and(B1,...,Bn) A. => A = true However, in traditional functional languages the translated logic programs can only be used for rewriting. They cannot be used to solve goals with variables in them. If "narrowing" rather than "rewriting" is used as the operational semantics of functional programs, they too can be used to solve goals and the effect of logical variables is achieved. For more details, see Hullot, Canonical forms and unification, Conf. Automated Deduction, 1980. Lindstrom, Functional programming and the logical variable, to appear, POPL 85. Reddy, On the relationship between logic and functional languages, to appear in, Degroot, Lindstrom, Functional and Logic programming, Prentice-Hall, 85. Uday Reddy ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 15 Nov 84 11:01:51 PST From: April Gillam <gillam@AERO2> Subject: In Praise of Natural Languages Rick Briggs raises some very interesting questions about what is a natural language, so I thought I'd air my views. Natural language, in its broadest sense, should include any communication between man and/or animal for which there is an underlying common belief system. I'd even go so far as to include non-verbal communications. I'm not a linguist, so this is just how I view the term. When dealing with machine translation, a working definition restricting it to verbal or written communications of course makes more sense. It would be interesting if at some time we could interpret body language well enough to have a computer analyze what a person says verbally and bodily. (When pattern recognition has matured!) There are certainly some people who have the sensitivity and receptiveness to do the interpretation. Reading of some of Dr. Kubler-Ross's work, it is an amazing learning experience to see the level of interpretation which she does with dying patients, many of whom cannot express directly their knowledge of their imminent death, however they still have a strong desire to communicate this to someone, using an analogy or some indirect manner. She writes of a terminally ill man who could not get out of bed without the use of his cane, who one day said to take the cane away, Shortly after which he died. This man was letting her know that the time had come. But few, if any of us pick up on the cues. Do we really expect a computer to do this? It also points up how vital context is to understanding. It doesn't seem plausible to me that any language can express ALL "aspects of the natural world"? In Indian (from India) languages there are words for levels of consciousness (eg. samadhi), for energy centers of the body (eg. chakras), etc. In English we have sophisticated words pertaining to weaponry, to real estate, etc. Do you think an aborigine would have a word or concept for garbage recycling? (Or coke bottle?) What I'm trying to say is, language is cultural (as my friend Ellen, an anthropolgist, succinctly put it). I find it hard to believe that Sastric Sanskrit, or any other language, can contain the concepts of all of humanity's experiences. Have we ourselves experienced enough of our reality to be able to express it, and does the person we talk to have a common enough set of experiences to interpret what we say? There are enough misunderstandings when we both speak the same language, that I doubt another language will render a semantically exact translation. How can the color scheme be described to the land of the blind? There is also a flavor to words. For eg., cabron in Spanish, or the phrase "curses, foiled again" to those of us who've seen the Perils of Pauline or comic strips. I don't see it as a virtue, to be able to express oneself unambiguously. Part of the power and beauty of language is the ability to make multi-leveled statements, double entendres, analogies, etc. It's interesting what Bill Frawley says about a change which complicates a language being compensated by by a simplification elsewhere. On some level that is aesthetically pleasing, but I have no feel for whether that would be the case. In the proceedings of this year's AAAI conf. there was an interesting paper in which a micro-environment (a context) of words, likely references and multiple meanings for a particular topic was set up. If the topic was Italian food, there'd be some notions of restaurants and pizza and such. Then if the statement "Hold the anchovies" was encountered, it would be known that it means "Do not put anchovies on the pizza", as opposed to "Grasp the anchovies in your hand." I don't have the reference handy, but it looked like a good idea, as well as a lot of work. - April Gillam ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 13 Nov 84 14:40:54 pst From: chertok%ucbcogsci@Berkeley (Paula Chertok) Subject: Seminar - Conceptual Change in Childhood BERKELEY COGNITIVE SCIENCE PROGRAM Fall 1984 Cognitive Science Seminar -- IDS 237A TIME: Tuesday, November 20, 11 - 12:30 PLACE: 240 Bechtel Engineering Center DISCUSSION: 12:30 - 2 in 200 Building T-4 SPEAKER: Susan Carey; MIT Psychology Department; Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences TITLE: ``Conceptual Change in Childhood'' ABSTRACT: In the tradition of recent Cognitive Studies tutorials, this paper is a tutorial on the proper description of cognitive development. At issue is the status of the claim that young children think differently from older children and adults. This claim is often contrasted with the claim that children differ from adults merely in knowing less. I review the kinds of phenomena that parti- cipants in the debate take as relevant to deciding the issue. Finally, I argue that a third position, in which the phenomenon of conceptual change is taken seriously, avoids the pitfalls of the original Piagetian posi- tion while allowing for its successes. I exemplify the third position by sketching a recently completed case study of the emer- gence of biology as an independent domain of intuitive theorizing in the first decade of life. I will conclude by raising the ques- tion of the relation between conceptual change in childhood and conceptual change in the history of science. ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 15 Nov 84 18:41:04 cst From: briggs@ut-sally.ARPA (Ted Briggs) Subject: Seminar - Relational Interface, Process Representation [Forwarded from the UTexas-20 bboard by Laws@SRI-AI.] ROSI: A UNIX Interface for the Discriminating User by Mark Roth Srinivasan Sundararajan noon Friday Nov. 16 PAI 3.38 ROSI ( Relational Operating System Interface ) strives to provide the UNIX user an environment based on the relational data model. Usually, relational database theory deals only with relations in 1NF. In this talk, this assumption is relaxed by allowing sets-of-values to exist anywhere an atomic value could before. These relations will be unnormalized or in non-first-normal-form (non-1NF). The need for non-1NF relations, a relational calculus and algebra dealing with non-1NF relations, and some extended algebra operators will be discussed. The approach used in the design of ROSI was to model elements of the operating system environment as relations and to model system commands as statements in a relational language. In adapting the relational data model to an operating system environment, we have extended the model and tried to improve existing relational languages. The extensions to the relational model are designed to allow a more natural representation of elements of the en- vironment. The language extensions exploit the universal relation model and utilize the graphical capabilities of modern worksta- tions. The goal of the project is to produce a user and programmer in- terface to the operating system that : * is easier to use * is easier to learn * allows greater portability as compared with existing operating system interfaces. ------------------------------ Date: 13 Nov 84 08:37:21 EST From: Dennis Perzanowski <dennisp@NRL-AIC.ARPA> Subject: Seminars - Partial Winter Schedule at NCARAI U.S. Navy Center for Applied Research in Artificial Intelligence Naval Research Laboratory - Code 7510 Washington, DC 20375-5000 WINTER SEMINAR SERIES Monday, 10:00 a.m. 3 December 1984 Dr. Poohsan Tamura Westinghouse Research & Development Center Pittsburgh, PA "Optical High Speed 3-D Digital Data Acquisition" Monday, 10:00 a.m. 17 December 1984 Dr. Terrence Sejnowski Department of Biophysics Johns Hopkins University Baltimore, MD "The BOLTZMANN Multiprocessor" Monday, 10:00 a.m. 14 January 1985 Dr. Lance Miller IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center Yorktown Heights, NY "Bringing Intelligence into Word Processing: The IBM EPISTLE System" Monday, 10:00 a.m. 28 January 1985 Dr. Larry Reeker Visiting Scientist at NCARAI from Tulane University, New Orleans, LA "Programming for Artificial Intelligence: LISP, Ada, PROLOG, ... or Something Else?" Meetings are held at 10:00 a.m. in the Conference Room of the Navy Center for Applied Research in Artificial Intelligence (Bldg. 256) located on Bolling Air Force Base, off I-295, in the South East quadrant of Washington, DC. A map can be mailed for your convenience. Coffee will be available starting at 9:45 a.m. for a nominal fee. Please do not arrive before this time. IF YOU ARE INTERESTED IN ATTENDING A SEMINAR, PLEASE CONTACT US BEFORE NOON ON THE FRIDAY PRIOR TO THE SEMINAR SO THAT A VISITOR'S PASS WILL BE AVAILABLE FOR YOU ON THE DAY OF THE SEMINAR. NON-U.S. CITIZENS MUST CONTACT US AT LEAST TWO WEEKS PRIOR TO A SCHEDULED SEMINAR. If you would like to speak, be added to our mailing list, or would like more information, contact Dennis Perzanowski. ARPANET: DENNISP@NRL-AIC or (202) 767-2686. ------------------------------ Date: Fri 9 Nov 84 17:21:21-PST From: Jon Barwise <BARWISE@SU-CSLI.ARPA> Subject: Course & Conference - Logic, language and computation meeting [Forwarded from the MIT bboard by SASW@MIT-MC.] LOGIC, LANGUAGE AND COMPUTATION MEETINGS The Association for Symbolic Logic (ASL) and the Center for the Study of Language and Information (CSLI) are planning a summer school and a meeting from July 8-20, 1985, at Stanford University. The first week (July 8-13) will consist of the CSLI Summer School, during which courses on the following topics will be offered: Situation Semantics Prof. Jon Barwise PROLOG Prof. Maarten van Emden Denotational Semantics Prof. Gordon Plotkin Types and ML Dr. David MacQueen Complexity Theory Prof. Wolfgang Maass Abstract Data Types Dr. Jose Meseguer The Theory of Algorithms Prof. Yiannis Moschovakis Generalized Quantifiers Dr. Lawrence Moss LISP Dr. Brian Smith Foundations of Intensional Logic Prof. Richmond Thomason (Enrollment in some courses using computers is limited.) The second week (July 15-20) will consist of an ASL Meeting with invited addresses, symposia, and sessions for contributed papers. Of the invited speakers, the following have already accepted: Prof. Peter Azcel Prof. David Kaplan Prof. Robert Constable Prof. Kenneth Kunen Prof. Maarten van Emden Prof. Per Martin-Lof Prof. Yuri Gurevich Prof. John Reynolds (tentative) Prof. Anil Gupta (tentative) Dr. Larry Wos Prof. Hans Kamp Symposia: Types in the Study of Computer and Natural Languages: Prof. R. Chierchia Dr. David MacQueen Prof. Solomon Feferman Prof. Barbara Partee The Role of Logic in AI: Dr. David Israel Dr. Stanley Rosenschein Prof. John McCarthy Possible Worlds: Prof. John Perry Prof. Robert Stalnaker For further information or registration forms, write to Ingrid Deiwiks, CSLI, Ventura Hall, Stanford, CA 94305, or call (415) 497-3084. Room and board in a residence hall on campus are available, and those interested should indicate their preference for single or shared room, as well as the dates of their stay. Since space is limited, arrangements should be made early. Some Graduate Student Fellowships to cover cost of accomodation in the residence hall are available. Abstracts of contributed papers should be no longer than 300 words and submitted no later than April 1, 1985. The program committee consists of Jon Barwise, Solomon Feferman, David Israel and William Marsh. ------------------------------ End of AIList Digest ********************