Spencer.Star@B.GP.CS.CMU.EDU (11/10/87)
Something I was reading the other day may be of interest to those involved in this discussion of doing a Ph.D. thesis that follows closely someone else's work as opposed to striking off in some completely new direction. In Allen Newell's presidential address to AAAI in 1981, he comments on the SIGART "Special Issue of Knowledge Representation" in which Ron Brachman and Brian Smith present the answers to an elaborate questionnaire sent to members of the AI community to find out their views on knowledge representation. "The main result was overwhelming diversity--a veritable jungle of opinions. There is no consensus on any question of substance. ... Many (but of course not all?) respondents themselves felt the same way. As one said, 'Standard practice in the representation of knowledge is the scandal of AI.' "What is so overwhelming about the diversity is that it defies characterization. ... There is no tidy space of underlying issues in which respondents, hence the field, can be plotted to reveal a pattern of concerns or issues. Not that Brachman and SMith could see. Not that this reader could see." By encouraging students to do their research on a subject by taking a completely new approach, we are denying the value of previous work. Certainly there is room for some Ph.D. students to take this path. But a large part of what AI should be doing is building on the foundations laid by the previous generations of researchers. Spencer Star