[ont.events] U of Toronto Comp. Sci. events for week of Sept. 9

clarke@utcsri.UUCP (Jim Clarke) (09/01/85)

(SF = Sandford Fleming Building, 10 King's College Road)
(GB  =  Galbraith Building, 35 St. George)

COLLOQUIUM, Tuesday, September 10, 11 am, SF1105

                           Dr. Sidney E. Harris
                       Decision Sciences Laboratory
                         Georgia State University

                 "Models of Unstructured Office Activity"

     Models of office  activities  have  been  primarily  oriented  towards
office  work  that  is  structured  and  organized.  However, the design of
office information systems to match human cognitive processes  is  becoming
increasingly  important  as  systems  become  more  sophisticated.  In this
presentation, some empirical results  and  models  of  unstructured  office
activity  will be reviewed.  Emphasis will be placed on problem-solving and
document preparation applications and the way in which models  can  facili-
tate needs assessment evaluation.


ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE SEMINAR, Tuesday, September 10, 3 pm, SF1105

                         Professor David Touretzky
                        Carnegie-Mellon University

                        "Symbols among the Neurons:
            Details of a Connectionist Inference Architecture"

     Pattern matching and variable binding are easily implemented  in  con-
ventional computer architectures, but not necessarily in all architectures.
In a distributed neural network architecture each symbol is represented  by
activity  in  many units and each unit contributes to the representation of
many  symbols.   Manipulating  symbols  using  this  type  of   distributed
representation  is  not  as  easy as with a local representation where each
unit denotes one  symbol,  but  there  is  evidence  that  the  distributed
approach is the one chosen by nature.  We describe a working implementation
of a production system interpreter in a neural  network  using  distributed
representations  for  both  symbols  and  rules.   The  research provides a
detailed account of two important symbolic  reasoning  operations,  pattern
matching  and  variable  binding,  as emergent properties of collections of
neuron-like elements.  The success of our production system  implementation
goes  some  way  towards  answering  a  common  criticism  of connectionist
theories: that they aren't powerful enough to do symbolic reasoning.



ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE SEMINAR, Thursday, September 12, 11 am., SF1105

                          Professor Veronica Dahl
                          Simon Fraser University

             "Gapping Grammars for Natural Language Analysis"



COMPUTER ALGEBRA SEMINAR, Thursday, September 12, 4 pm., GB414

                              Scott McCallum
                        DCS, University of Toronto

                       "Survey of Computer Algebra"
-- 
Jim Clarke -- Dept. of Computer Science, Univ. of Toronto, Canada M5S 1A4
              (416) 978-4058
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