[comp.ai.digest] Seminar - BB* Layered Environment for AI Systems

Ted.Kamins@STRIPE.SRI.COM.UUCP (05/08/87)

                     HEWLETT-PACKARD LABORATORIES
                         COMPUTER COLLOQUIUM


Speaker: Barbara Hayes-Roth
         Senior Research Associate
         Stanford Knowledge Systems Lab

Subject: BB*: A modular and layered environment for AI systems

Time:    Thursday, May 14, 1987, 4 pm

Place:   Hewlett-Packard
         5M Auditorium
         1501 Page Mill Road
         Palo Alto

Non-HP Employees:  Welcome!  Please come to the lobby shortly before 4 pm
         so that you can be escorted to the auditorium.

Refreshments will be served following the talk.

Host:    Barry Bronson (857-3033)
Stanford contact:  Ted Kamins (kamins@sierra)

Abstract:  

         An intelligent system reasons about--controls, explains,
learns about--its actions, thereby improving its efforts to achieve
goals and function in its environment.  In order to perform
effectively, a system must have knowledge of the actions it can
perform, the events and states that can occur, and the relationships
among instances of those actions, events, and states.  The BB*
environment represents this knowledge in an abstraction hierarchy and
defines uniform standards of knowledge content and representation for
modules within each of three hierarchical levels: architecture,
framework, and application.

The speaker will illustrate BB* with some of its current modules: (a)
the BB1 blackboard control architecture; (b) the ACCORD framework for
arrangement-assembly tasks; and (c) several domain-specific
applications of BB1-ACCORD.  BB* advantages for system representation
and performance, system design and implementation, reusable knowledge
modules, and open systems integration will be discussed. 

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