FAWCETT@RED.RUTGERS.EDU.UUCP (03/02/87)
On Thursday, March 19th at 10:30 AM, Prof. Lindley Darden from the
University of Maryland will speak on her work on hypothesis formation. The
room will be announced shortly. An abstract and a summary of her interests
follow.
"Hypothesis Formation Using Part-Whole Interrelations"
Lindley Darden
This paper discusses an implementation, called SUTTON, of
strategies for rediscovering the chromosome theory of heredity.
Walter Sutton formulated the theory in the early 20th century, by
postulating interrelations between the fields of cytology and
genetics. Knowledge from these fields during that period is
represented in a frame-based system, and rules for using
knowledge from one field to guide hypothesis formation in
the other are implemented in LISP. In particular, the discovery
that the gene is part of the chromosome is simulated, and general
rules for part-whole reasoning are investigated, including rules
for inheritance and propagation of causal relations in part-whole
hierarchies.
Keywords: Hypothesis formation, scientific discovery, learning,
identity relation, part-whole relation, causality.
Lindley Darden is an Associate Professor in the Departments of
Philosophy and History and a member of the graduate faculty in
the Committee on the History and Philosophy of Science at the
University of Maryland, College Park. She is currently serving
in the second year of a half-time research appointment in the
University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies.
This work was done in collaboration with Roy Rada of the National
Library of Medicine. Her research interests include reasoning in
scientific discovery (including analogical reasoning and
formation of abstract theory types) and knowledge representation
techniques for biological knowledge. Her address is Department
of Philosophy, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland
20742 and darden@mimsy.umd.edu.
(In addition, Prof. Darden gave an invited talk at last summer's AAAI
entitled "Viewing History of Science as Compiled Hindsight".)