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.