tanner@socrates.cis.ohio-state.edu (Mike Tanner) (01/15/90)
Workshop on DEVICE UNDERSTANDING To be held at Ohio State University, March 2-3, 1990. The problem of representing how intelligent agents understand the way things work has long been recognized as an important problem in Artificial Intelligence. This necessarily includes representing the relationship between the structure, behavior, and function of devices and the ability to express the abstraction from states of components to states of the device in order to make inferences about the behavior of compound devices, make predictions, and diagnose failures. Work on qualitative physics, and related areas, has made a significant contribution to understanding how behavior can be derived from structural descriptions, and how structure and behavior are related. But there is the additional problem of how function comes from relating behavior to the goals or purposes of a device, i.e., the relationship between behavior and teleology. The fundamental questions for this problem are: (1) what is the relationship between function and behavior, (2) how do functions of devices arise from functions of components, (3) how are causal models of devices organized, (4) how can such causal models be used for simulation, diagnosis, design, etc. A considerable amount of work has been done at Ohio State on these issues in the domains of medicine and engineering. Consequently, we plan to hold an informal workshop and invite participation of those interested in the same issues. We will host the workshop at Ohio State University on March 2nd and 3rd, 1990. If you are interested in attending, please contact Mike Tanner or B. Chandrasekaran (addresses given below). Michael C. Tanner Department of Computer and Information Science Ohio State University 2036 Neil Avenue Mall Columbus, OH 43210-1277 Ph: (614) 292-1413 Email: tanner@cis.ohio-state.edu B. Chandrasekaran Professor Department of Computer and Information Science Ohio State University 2036 Neil Avenue Mall Columbus, OH 43210-1277 Ph: (614) 292-0923