[mod.ai] Conference - Workshop on Blackboard Systems

juggy@BOEING.COM (Vasudevan Jagannathan) (01/07/87)

                   Call for Participation


   Workshop on Blackboard Systems: Implementation Issues

     In the past couple of years a wide  variety  of  black-
board  systems  have been built to address a wide variety of
problems.  The goal of this workshop is to study the  design
and  implementation  issues  in  blackboard  systems  and to
understand the  diversity  which  exists  in  such  systems.
Specific issues that will be focused on are:

1.  Control Issues:  What is the approach taken  to  control
the problem solving and rationale for choice?

2.  Organization Issues:  What are the mechanisms  available
for  organizing knowledge in such systems?  If the system is
distributed what are the communication issues  that  play  a
critical role in the development of the system.

3.  Parallelism  and  Concurrency  Issues:   What  scope  is
present in the system to exploit parallelism at the applica-
tion level, at the system level?

4.  Performance issues:  What benchmarks are  available  for
evaluating  the  performance,  and  what are the bottlenecks
affecting performance?

5.  Development Environment:  Does the  system  provide  any
help in developing the actual application?

     To encourage vigorous interaction and exchange of ideas
between  those  attending,  the  workshop will be limited to
approximately 30 participants. The workshop is scheduled  on
July  13th, 1987, Monday, as a parallel activity during AAAI
1987, and will last for a day.

     All submitted papers will be refereed with  respect  to
how well they identify and discuss the factors affecting the
design and implementation of blackboard  systems.    Authors
should  discuss  their  design  decisions  (why a particular
approach was selected); what worked, what did not  and  why;
the  advantages,  disadvantages  and  limitations  of  their
approach; and what they would recommend to others developing
such systems.  Preference will be given to those papers that
discuss approaches  that  have  been  demonstrated  in  real
applications.

Submission Details:  Five copies of  an  extended  abstract,
double spaced draft up to 4000 words, should be submitted to
the workshop chairman before  April  1,  1987.   Acceptances
will  be mailed by May 1, 1987. Final copies of the extended
abstract will be required by June 1, 1987 so that  they  may
be  informally  bound  together  for distribution before the
workshop.

Workshop Chairman: V. Jagannathan,  M/S  7L-64,  The  Boeing
Advanced  Technology  Center, Boeing Computer Services, P.O.
Box 24346, Seattle, WA 98124-0346. Telephone: (206)865-3240.
E-mail:juggy@boeing.com.