clarke@utcsri.UUCP (Jim Clarke) (09/13/85)
(SF = Sandford Fleming Building, 10 King's College Road)
(GB = Galbraith Building, 35 St. George Street)
COLLOQUIUM, Tuesday, September 24, 11 am, SF 1105
Hector Levesque
University of Toronto
"Making Believers out of Computers"
What with the overwhelming dominance of Expert Systems in Artificial
Intelligence, one might get the impression that there was no more to our
field than building software tools and recommending programming methodolo-
gies. It is now possible, we are told, to construct sophisticated computer
systems that are knowledge-based, that is, that derive much of their abil-
ity by reasoning over an explicitly represented base of knowledge about
some application domain. What we are not told, however, is the scientific
principles that must underlie this development. Why should it be at all
possible to construct systems that reason effectively about a domain? If
'knowledge is power' as claimed in the ads, how is this power harnessed and
controlled, and why exactly have Expert Systems not been blown away by com-
binatorial explosions? This talk will sketch how a theory of knowledge
representation and reasoning based on logic and computability might shed
some light on these and other questions and provide a foundation for under-
standing the nature and limits of knowledge-based systems.
COMPUTER ALGEBRA SEMINAR
Thursday, September 26, 4 pm, GB414
Paul Beame
University of Toronto
"Parallel Algorithms for Sturm's Theorem
and some of its Generalizations"
--
Jim Clarke -- Dept. of Computer Science, Univ. of Toronto, Canada M5S 1A4
(416) 978-4058
{allegra,cornell,decvax,ihnp4,linus,utzoo}!utcsri!clarke