neuron-request@HPLMS2.HPL.HP.COM ("Neuron-Digest Moderator Peter Marvit") (02/03/91)
Neuron Digest Saturday, 2 Feb 1991 Volume 7 : Issue 6 Today's Topics: Workshop, "NNs for Stat. & Econ. Data" neural sessions /13th IMACS World Congress Neural Net Course and Conference CFP Constructive Induction Workshop, Due March 1st CALL FOR PAPERS: CONNECTIONIST MODELS IN BIOMEDICINE Call for Papers 7. OGAI Meeting AISB call for participation [[ Editor's Note: This issue has only "call for papers" and conference/ course announcements. -PM ]] Send submissions, questions, address maintenance and requests for old issues to "neuron-request@hplabs.hp.com" or "{any backbone,uunet}!hplabs!neuron-request" Use "ftp" to get old issues from hplpm.hpl.hp.com (15.255.176.205). ------------------------------------------------------------ Subject: Workshop, "NNs for Stat. & Econ. Data" From: MURTAGH@SCIVAX.STSCI.EDU Date: Wed, 09 Jan 91 13:34:54 -0500 Workshop on "Neural Networks for Statistical and Economic Data" This workshop, organized by Munotec Systems, and funded by the Statistical Office of the European Communities, Luxembourg, was held in Dublin, Ireland, on December 10-11, 1990. A proceedings, including abstracts and in many instances papers, will be reproduced and sent to all on the mailing list of the DOSES funding program in the near future. DOSES ("Design of Statistical Expert Systems") is one of the European Community funding programs, and is administered by the Statistical Office. Requests to be included on this mailing list should be addressed to: DOSES, Statistical Office of the European Communities, Batiment Jean Monnet, B.P. 1907, Plateau du Kirchberg, L-2920 Luxembourg. F. Murtagh (murtagh@scivax.stsci.edu, fionn@dgaeso51.bitnet) ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- The following were the talks given at the Dublin meeting: M. Perremans (Stat. Office of EC, Luxembourg) "The European Community statistical research programs." H.-G. Zimmermann (Siemens, Munich) "Neural network features in economics." J. Frain (Central Bank of Ireland, Dublin) "Complex questions in economics and economic statistics." M.B. Priestley (UMIST, Manchester) "Non-linear time series analysis: overview." R. Rohwer (CSTR, Edinburgh) "Neural networks for time-varying data." P. Ormerod and T. Walker (Henley Centre, London) "Neural networks and the monetary base in Switzerland." S. Openshaw and C. Wymer (Univ. of Newcastle upon Tyne) "A neural net classifier system for handling census data." F. Murtagh (Munotec, Dublin; ST-ECF, Munich) "A short survey of neural network approaches for forecasting." D. Wuertz and C. de Groot (ETH, Zrich) "Modeling and forecasting of univariate time series by parsimonious feedforward connectionist nets." J.-C. Fort (Univ. de Paris 1) "Kohonen algorithm and the traveling salesman problem." H.-G. Zimmermann (Siemens, Munich) "Completion of incomplete data." R. Hoptroff and M.J. Bramson (London) "Forecasting the economic cycle." A. Varfis and C. Versino (JRC, Ispra) "Neural networks for economic time series forecasting." D. Mitzman and R. Giovannini (Cerved SpA, Padua) "ActivityNets: A neural classifier of natural language descriptions of economic activities." (Also: demonstration on 386-PC.) C. Doherty (ERC, Dublin) "A comparison between the recurrent cascade-correlation architecture and the Box and Jenkins method on forecasting univariate time series." M. Eaton and B.J. Collins (Univ. of Limerick, Limerick) "Neural network front end to an expert system for decision taking in an uncertain environment." R.J. Henery (Univ. of Strathclyde, Glasgow) "StatLog: Comparative testing of statistical and logical learning algorithms." Ah Chung Tsoi (Univ. of Queensland) "FIR and IIR synapses, a neural network architecture for time series modelling." A. Singer (Thinking Machines, Munich) "Focusing on feature extraction in pattern recognition." R. Rohwer (CSTR, Univ. of Edinburgh) "The 'Moving Targets' algorithm for difficult temporal credit assignment problems." ------------------------------ Subject: neural sessions /13th IMACS World Congress From: Khalid Choukri <choukri@capsogeti.fr> Date: Wed, 16 Jan 91 14:26:23 +0000 [[ Editor's Note: Remember the 15 February deadline! -PM ]] 13th IMACS World Congress on Computation and Applied Mathematics July 22-26,1991, Trinity college, Dublin, Ireland Neural Computing sessions Preliminary announcement and call for papers ----------------------------------------------------- In the scope of the 13th IMACS World Congress on Computation and Applied Mathematics that will be held on July 22-26, 1991 at Trinity college, Dublin, Ireland, several sessions will be devoted to Neural computing and Applied Mathematics. A typical session consists of six 20-minutes papers. Invited papers (tutorials ~ 1-hour) are welcome. Contributions from all fields related to neuro-computing techniques are welcome. Including applications to pattern recognition and classification, optimization problems, etc. Information and a non-exclusive list of topics may be obtained from the session organizer or the Congress Secretariat. Proceedings will be available at the Congress. A more formal Transactions will be available at a later date. Submission procedure : - --------------------- Authors are solicited to submit proposals consisting of an abstract (one page, 500 words maximum) which must clearly state the purpose of the work, the specific original results obtained and their significance. The final paper length is two pages (IEEE two-column format). A first page of the proposal should contain the following information in the order shown: - Title. - Authors' names and affiliation. - Contact information (name, postal address, phone, fax and email address) - Domain area and key words: one or more terms describing the problem domain area. AUTHORS ARE ENCOURAGED to submit a preliminary version of the complete paper in addition to the abstract. Calendar: - -------- Deadline for submission : February, 15, 1990 Notification of acceptance : March , 15 , 1991 Camera ready paper : April, 5, 1991 Three copies should be sent directly to the technical chairman of these sessions at the following address: Dr. Khalid Choukri Cap GEMINI Innovation 118, Rue de Tocqueville 75017, Paris, France Phone: (+33-1) 40 54 66 28 Fax: (+33-1) 42 67 41 39 e-mail choukri@capsogeti.fr For further information about the IMACS Congress in general, contact Post: IMACS '91 Congress Secretariat 26 Temple Lane Dublin 2 IRELAND Fax: (+353-1) 451739 Phone: (+353-1) 452081 ------------------------------ Subject: Neural Net Course and Conference From: mike@park.bu.edu Date: Wed, 16 Jan 91 12:20:13 -0500 NEURAL NETWORKS COURSE AND CONFERENCE AT BOSTON UNIVERSITY NEURAL NETWORKS: FROM FOUNDATIONS TO APPLICATIONS May 5-10, 1991 This self-contained 5-day course is sponsored by the Boston University Wang Institute, Center for Adaptive Systems, and Graduate Program in Cognitive and Neural Systems. The course provides a systematic interdisciplinary introduction to the biology, computation, mathematics, and technology of neural networks. Boston University tutors are Stephen Grossberg, Gail Carpenter, Ennio Mingolla, Michael Cohen, Dan Bullock, and John Merrill. Guest tutors are Federico Faggin, Robert Hecht-Nielsen, Michael Jordan, Andy Barto, and Alex Waibel. Registration fee: $985 (professional) and $275 (student). Fee includes lectures, course notebooks, receptions, meals, coffee services, and evening discussion sessions. NEURAL NETWORKS FOR VISION AND IMAGE PROCESSING May 10-12, 1991 This research conference at the Wang Institute will present invited lectures and contributed posters, herewith solicited, ranging from visual neurobiology and psychophysics through computational modelling to technological applications. Invited speakers include: Stuart Anstis, Jacob Beck, Gail A. Carpenter, David Casasent, John Daugman, Robert Desimone, Stephen Grossberg, Robert Hecht-Nielsen, Ralph Linsker, Ennio Mingolla, Alex Pentland, V.S. Ramachandran, Eric Schwartz, George Sperling, James Todd, and Alex Waxman. A featured Poster Session will be held on May 11. To present a poster, submit 3 copies of an abstract (1 single-spaced page), postmarked by March 1, 1991, for refereeing. Include with the abstract the author's name, address, and telephone number. Mail to VIP Poster Session, Neural Networks Conference, Wang Institute of Boston University, 72 Tyng Road, Tyngsboro, MA 01879. Authors will be informed of abstract acceptance by March 31, 1991. Registration fee: $95 (professionals) and $75 (student). Fee includes lectures and poster session, abstract book, reception, meals, and coffee services. TO REGISTER: For one or both events by phone, call (508) 649-9731 with VISA or MasterCard between 9 a.m. - 5 p.m. (EST). For a meeting brochure, call as above or write: Neural Networks, Wang Institute of Boston University, 72 Tyng Road, Tyngsboro, MA 01879. ------------------------------ Subject: CFP Constructive Induction Workshop, Due March 1st From: charles anderson <andercha@grieg.CS.ColoState.EDU> Date: Mon, 28 Jan 91 15:06:28 -0700 CALL FOR PAPERS 1991 MACHINE LEARNING WORKSHOP Northwestern University June 27-29, 1991 CONSTRUCTIVE INDUCTION Selection of an appropriate representation is critical to the success of most learning systems. In difficult learning problems (e.g., protein folding, word pronunciation, relation learning), considerable human effort is often required to identify the basic terms of the representation language. Constructive induction offers a partial solution to this problem by automatically introducing new terms into the representation as needed. Automatically constructing new terms is difficult because the environment or teacher usually provides only indirect feedback, thus raising the issue of credit assignment. However, as learning systems face tasks of greater autonomy and complexity, effective methods for constructive induction are becoming increasingly important. The objective of this workshop is to provide a forum for the interchange of ideas among researchers actively working on constructive induction issues. It is intended to identify commonalities and differences among various existing and emerging approaches such as knowledge-based term construction, relation learning, theory revision in analytic systems, learning of hidden-units in multi-layer neural networks, rule-creation in classifier systems, inverse resolution, and qualitative-law discovery. Submissions are encouraged in the following topic areas: o Empirical approaches and the use of inductive biases o Use of domain knowledge in the construction and evaluation of new terms o Construction of or from relational predicates o Theory revision in analytic-learning systems o Unsupervised learning and credit assignment in constructive induction o Interpreting hidden units as constructed features o Constructive induction in human learning o Techniques for handling noise and uncertainty o Experimental studies of constructive induction systems o Theoretical proofs, frameworks, and comparative analyses o Comparison of techniques from empirical learning, analytical learning, classifier systems, and neural networks Send six copies of paper submissions (4000 word maximum) to Christopher Matheus, GTE Laboratories, 40 Sylvan Road, MS-45, Waltham MA 02254 (matheus@gte.com). Submissions must be received by March 1, 1991. Include a cover page with authors' names, addresses, phone numbers, electronic mail addresses, paper title, and a 300 (maximum) word abstract. Do not indicate or allude to authorship anywhere within the paper. Acceptance notification will be mailed by April 30, 1991. Accepted papers will be allotted four two-column pages for publication in the Proceedings of the 1991 Machine Learning Workshop. Organizing Committee: Program Committee: Christopher Matheus, GTE Laboratories Chuck Anderson, Colorado State George Drastal, Siemens Corp. Research Gunar Liepins, Oak Ridge National Lab. Larry Rendell, University of Illinois Douglas Medin, University of Michigan Paul Utgoff, University of Massachusetts ------------------------------ Subject: CALL FOR PAPERS: CONNECTIONIST MODELS IN BIOMEDICINE From: reggia@cs.UMD.EDU (James A. Reggia) Date: Thu, 31 Jan 91 10:56:57 -0500 CALL FOR PAPERS: The 15th Symposium on Computer Applications in Medical Care will include a Program Area Track on Connectionism, Simulation and Modeling. Submission of papers is welcomed. Papers are solicited which report on original research, system development or survey the state of the art in an aspect of this wide- ranging field. Papers in previous years have addressed such topics as modelling invertebrate nervous systems, modelling disorders of higher cortical functions, development of high-level languages for building connectionist models, and systems for medical diagnosis, among other topics. Deadline for receipt of manuscripts is April 1, 1991. The conference will be held November 17-20, 1991 in Washington, DC. For submittal forms please write: Paul D. Clayton, PhD SCAMC Program Chair, 1991 AMIA 11140 Rockville Pike Box 324 Rockville, MD 20852 or contact Gail Mutnik at mutnik@lhc.nlm.nih.gov by email. If you have questions about whether your paper would be appropriate for this conference please contact me at: Stan Tuhrim SSTMS@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU ------------------------------ Subject: Call for Papers 7. OGAI Meeting From: Holger G Ziegeler <hgz@siegud.siemens.co.at> Date: Fri, 01 Feb 91 09:53:42 +0100 7. OESTERREICHISCHE ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE TAGUNG 1991 24.-27. Sept. 1991 Technische Universitaet Wien Call for Papers AUSTRIAN MEETING ON ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE September 24-27, 1991 Technische Universitaet Wien Given the success of the previous meetings held annually since 1985, the Austrian Society for Artificial Intelligence (OGAI) will organize its seventh meeting in 1991. The scientific program will present research in all aspects of AI, including, but not limited to: AI Hypertext AI Tools AI Project Management Automated Reasoning Cognitive Modeling Connectionism Education using AI Impacts of AI Knowledge Representation Knowledge-Based Systems Machine Learning Natural Language Philosophical Foundations Planning and Search Qualitative Reasoning Robotics and Control Vision Invited papers will be presented by Georg Gottlob (Vienna) and Wolfgang Wahlster (Saarbruecken). Authors should submit long papers (max. 10 pages) on completed research, or short papers (max. 4 pages) on work in progress, 4 copies each. The accepted papers will be published in conference proceedings, which will be available for every participant (included in the conference fee). The conference languages are English and German. In addition to the scientific program, tutorials on specific AI-related topics of interest will be held at the beginning of the meeting (Coordination: W. Horn, Vienna). During the whole meeting, there will be the possibility for exhibitions. Those interested are expected to contact J. Retti (Vienna) as soon as possible. Chairman: Hermann Kaindl Vienna Program Committee: W. Bibel Darmstadt J. Diederich St. Augustin / Davis G. Goerz Hamburg J. Hertzberg St. Augustin H. Horacek Bielefeld W. Horn Vienna A. Leitsch Vienna W. Nejdl Vienna B. Neumann Hamburg J. Retti Vienna G. Strube Bochum R. Trappl Vienna St. Wrobel St. Augustin H. Ziegeler Vienna Workshops: (Coordination: E. Buchberger, Vienna) To support discussions on specific topics also workshops will be held. Proposals should be discussed with E. Buchberger. Publication of separate proceedings is a possibility. Excellent contributions presented at workshops may also be included in the proceedings of the main conference. Important Dates: - Submission deadline for complete papers (4 copies) March 15, 1991 - Notification of acceptance or rejection May 1, 1991 - Camera-ready copies of accepted papers July 1, 1991 Conference Fees: by July 15, 1991 AS 1,500.- (AS 750.- for students under 26) after July 15, 1991 AS 1,900.- (AS 950.- for students under 26) OGAI members may subtract AS 100.-. On-site registration for students will not be possible. Bank account number: Die Erste oesterreichische Spar-Casse-Bank Wien Konto-Nr. 004-71186, BLZ 20111 Submitted papers as well as inquiries should be sent to the following address: Dr. Hermann Kaindl Siemens AG Oesterreich, PSE 13 Gudrunstrasse 11, A-1100 Vienna, Austria, Europe Fax: + 43-1-60171-6112 or -5913 (not for submission of papers) Tx: + 47-61-32233615 siegud a Ttx: +232-32233615 siegud a Mr. E. Buchberger, Dr. W. Horn, and Dr. J. Retti can be contacted at Oesterreichische Gesellschaft fuer Artificial Intelligence, "OGAI-Tagung 1991" Postfach 177, A-1014 Vienna, Austria, Europe ------------------------------ Subject: AISB call for participation From: B M Smith <bms@dcs.leeds.ac.uk> Date: Fri, 18 Jan 91 14:36:57 +0000 PRELIMINARY CALL FOR PARTICIPATION ================================== AISB91 University of Leeds 16-19 April 1991 Interested to know what is happening at the forefront of current AI research? Tired of going to AI conferences where you hear nothing but talk about applications? Bored at big AI conferences where there are so many parallel sessions that you don't know where to go? Saturated with small workshops that focus only on one narrow topic in AI? ==> the 1991 AISB conference may be just the thing for you ! AISB91 is organized by the Society for the Study of Artificial Intelligence and Simulation of Behaviour. It is not only the oldest regular conference in Europe on AI - which spawned the ECAI conferences in 1982 - but it is also the conference that has a tradition of focusing on research as opposed to applications. The 1991 edition of the conference is no different in this respect. The conference has a single session and covers the full spectrum of AI work, from robotics to knowledge systems. It is designed for researchers active in AI who want to follow the complete field. Papers were selected that are representative for ongoing research, particularly for research topics that promise new exciting avenues into a deeper understanding of intelligence. There will be a tutorial programme on Tuesday 16 April, followed by the technical programme from Wednesday 17 to Friday 19 April. The conference will be held at Bodington Hall, University of Leeds, a large student residence and conference centre. Bodington Hall is 4 miles from the centre of Leeds and set in 14 acres of private grounds. Leeds/Bradford airport is 6 miles away, with frequent flights from London Heathrow, Amsterdam and Paris. Leeds itself is easily accessible by rail (2 and a half hours from London) and the motorway network. The Yorkshire Dales National Park is close by, and the historic city of York is only 30 minutes away by rail. TECHNICAL PROGRAMME Wednesday 17 - Friday 19 April 1991 ======================================================== The technical programme sessions are organized around problem areas, not around approaches. This means sessions show how different schools of AI - knowledge-based approaches, logic based approaches, and neural networks - address the fundamental problems of AI. The technical programme lasts 2 and a half days. Each day has a morning session focusing on a particular area of AI. The first day this area is distributed AI, the second day new modes of reasoning, and the third day theorem proving and machine learning. The afternoon is devoted to research topics which are at the forefront of current research. On the first afternoon this topic is emergent functionality and autonomous agents. It presents the new stream of ideas for building autonomous agents featuring concepts like situatedness, physical symbol grounding, reactive systems, and emergence. On the second day the topic is knowledge level expert systems research. It reflects the paradigm shift currently experienced in knowledge based systems away from the symbol level and towards the knowledge level, both for design and knowledge acquisition. Each session has first a series of accepted papers, then two papers which treat the main theme from a principled point of view, and finally a panel. In addition the conference features three exciting invited speakers: Andy Clark who talks about the philosophical foundations of AI, Rolf Pfeifer who reflects on AI and emotion, and Tony Cohn who looks at the formal modeling of common sense. The conference is closed by the Programme Chairman, Luc Steels, who speculates on the role of consciousness in Artificial Intelligence. Here is a more detailed description of the various sessions and the papers contained in them: Distributed Intelligent Agents ============================== Research in distributed AI is concerned with the problem of how multiple agents and societies of agents can be organized to co-operate and collectively solve a problem. The first paper by Chakravarty (MIT) focuses on the problem of evolving agents in the context of Minsky's society of mind theory. It addresses the question how new agents can be formed by transforming existing ones and illustrates the theory with an example from game playing. Smieja (GMD, Germany) focuses on the problem of organizing networks of agents which consist internally of neural networks. Smieja builds upon the seminal work of Selfridge in the late fifties on the Pandemonium system. Bond (University of California) addresses the problem of regulating co-operation between agents. He seeks inspiration in sociological theory and proposes a framework based on negotiation. Finally Mamede and Martins (Technical University of Lisbon) address the problem of resource-bounded reasoning within the context of logical inference. Situatedness and emergence in autonomous agents =============================================== Research on robots and autonomous agents used to be focused strongly on low level mechanisms. As such there were few connections with the core problems of AI. Recently, there has been a shift of emphasis towards the construction of complete agents. This has lead to a review of some traditional concepts, such as the hierarchical decomposition of an agent into a perception module, a decision module and an action module and it has returned robotics research to the front of the AI stage. This session testifies to the renewed interest in the area. It starts with a paper by Bersini (Free University of Brussels) which is strongly within the new perspective of emphasizing situatedness and non-symbolic relations between perception and action. It discusses the trade-offs between reactive systems and goal-oriented systems. Seel (STC Technology, Harlow, UK) provides some of the formal foundations for understanding and building reactive systems. Jackson and Sharkey (University of Exeter) address the problem of symbol grounding: how signals can be related to concepts. They use a connectionist mechanism to relate spatial descriptions with results from perception. Cliff (University of Sussex) discusses an experiment in computational neuroethology. The next paper is from the Edinburgh Really Useful Robot project which has built up a strong tradition in building autonomous mobile robots. The paper will be given by Hallam (University of Edinburgh) and discusses an experiment in real-time control using toy cars. The final paper is by Kaelbling (Teleos Research, Palo Alto, California) who elaborates her proposals for principled programming of autonomous agents based on logical specifications. The panel which ends the session tries to put the current work on autonomous agents into the broader perspective of AI. The panel includes Smithers (University of Edinburgh), Kaelbling, Connah (Philips Research, UK), and Agre (University of Sussex). Following this session, on Wednesday evening, the conference dinner will be held at the National Museum of Photography, film and Television at Bradford. The evening will include a special showing in the IMAX auditorium, which has the largest cinema screen in Britain. New modes of reasoning ====================== Reasoning remains one of the core topics of AI. This session explores some of the current work to find new forms of reasoning. The first paper by Hendler and Dickens (University of Maryland) looks at the integration of neural networks and symbolic AI in the context of a concrete example involving an underwater robot. Euzenat and Maesano (CEDIAG/Bull, Louveciennes, France) address the problem of forgetting. Pfahringer (University of Vienna) builds further on research in constraint propagation in qualitative modelling. He proposes a mechanism to improve efficiency through domain variables. Ghassem-Sani and Steel (University of Essex) extend the arsenal of methods for non-recursive planning by introducing a method derived from mathematical induction. The knowledge level perspective =============================== Knowledge systems (also known as expert systems or knowledge-based systems) continue to be the most successful area of AI application. The conference does not focus on applications but on foundational principles for building knowledge systems. Recently there has been an important shift of emphasis from symbol level considerations (which focus on the formalism in which a system is implemented) to knowledge level considerations. The session highlights this shift in emphasis. The first paper by Pierret-Golbreich and Delouis (Universite Paris Sud) is related to work on the generic task architectures. It proposes a framework including support tools for performing analysis of the task structure of the knowledge system. Reichgelt and Shadbolt (University of Nottingham) apply the knowledge level perspective to the problem of knowledge acquisition. Wetter and Schmidt (IBM Germany) focus on the formalization of the KADS interpretation models which is one of the major frameworks for doing knowledge level design. Finally Lackinger and Haselbock (University of Vienna) focus on domain models in knowledge systems, particularly qualitative models for simulation and control of dynamic systems. Then there are two papers which directly address foundational issues. The first one by Van de Velde (VUB AI Lab, Brussels) clarifies the (difficult) concepts involved in knowledge level discussions of expert systems, particularly the principle of rationality. Schreiber, Akkermans and Wielinga (University of Amsterdam) critically examine the suitability of the knowledge level for expert system design. The panel involves Leitch (Heriot Watt University, Edinburgh), Wielinga, Van de Velde, Sticklen (Michigan State University), and Pfeifer (University of Zurich). Theorem proving and Machine learning =============== ================ The final set of papers focuses on recent work in theorem proving and in machine learning. The first paper by Giunchiglia (IRST Trento, Italy) and Walsh (University of Edinburgh) discusses how abstraction can be used in theorem proving and presents solid evidence to show that it is useful. Steel (University of Essex) proposes a new inference scheme for modal logic. Then there are two papers which represent current work on machine learning. The first one by Churchill and Young (University of Cambridge) reports on an experiment using SOAR concerned with modelling representations of device knowledge. The second paper by Elliott and Scott (University of Essex) compares instance-based and generalization-based learning procedures. TUTORIAL PROGRAMME - Tuesday 16 April 1991 ========================================== Six full-day tutorials will be offered on 16 April (subject to sufficient registrations for each.) Tutorial 1 Knowledge Base Coherence Checking - ---------- Professor Jean-Pierre LAURENT University of Savoie FRANCE Like conventional software, AI Systems also need validation tools. Some of these tools must be specific, especially for validating Knowledge-Based Systems, and in particular for checking the coherence of a Knowledge Base (KB). In the introduction to this tutorial we will clarify the distinctions to be made between Validation, Verification, Static Analysis and Testing. We will present methods which try to check exhaustively for the coherence of a knowledge Base. Then we will present a pragmatic approach in which, instead of trying to assert the global coherence of a KB, it is proposed to check heuristically whether it contains incoherences. This approach is illustrated by the SACCO System, dealing with KBs which contain classes and objects, and furthermore rules with variables. Tutorial 2 Advanced Constraint Techniques - ---------- Dr. Hans Werner Guesgen and Dr. Joachim Hertzberg German National Centre for Computer Science (GMD) Sankt Augustin, GERMANY This tutorial will present a coherent overview of the more recent concepts and approaches to constraint reasoning. It presents the concept of dynamic constraints as a formalism subsuming classical constraint satisfaction, constraint manipulation and relaxation, bearing a relationship to reflective systems; moreover, the tutorial presents approaches to parallel implementations of constraint satisfaction in general and dynamic constraints in particular. Tutorial 3 Functional Representation and Modeling - ---------- Prof. Jon Sticklen and Dr. Dean Allemang* Michigan State University USA * Universitaet Zurich, SWITZERLAND A growing body of AI research centres on using the known functions of a device as indices to causal understanding of how the device "works". The results of functional representation and modeling have typically used this organization of causal understanding to produce tractable solutions to inherently complex modelling problems. In this tutorial, the fundamentals of functional representation and reasoning will be explained. Liberal use of examples throughout will illustrate the representational concepts underlying the functional approach. Contacts with other model based reasoning (MBR) techniques will be made whenever appropriate. Sufficient background will be covered to make this suitable for both those unacquainted with the MBR field, and for more experienced individuals who may be working now in MBR research. A general familiarity with AI is assumed. Participants should send in with their registration materials a one page description of a modeling problem which they face in their domain. Tutorial 4 Intelligent Pattern Recognition and Applications - ---------- Prof. Patrick Wang M.I.T. Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and Northeastern University, Boston USA The core of pattern recognition, including "learning techniques" and "inference" plays an important and central role in AI. On the other hand, the methods in AI such as knowledge representation, semantic networks, and heuristic searching algorithms can also be applied to improve the pattern representation and matching techniques in many pattern recognition problems - leading to "smart" pattern recognition. Moreover, the recognition and understanding of sensory data like speech or images, which are major concerns in pattern recognition, have always been considered as important subfields of AI. This tutorial includes overviews of pattern recognition and articifical intelligence; including recent developments at MIT. The focus of the tutorial will be on the overlap and interplay between these fields. Tutorial 5 SILICON SOULS - Philosophical foundations of computing and AI - ---------- Prof. Aaron Sloman University of Birmingham This will not be a technical tutorial. Rather the tutor will introduce a collection of philosophical questions about the nature of computation, the aims of AI, connectionist and non-connectionist approaches to AI, the relevance of computation to the study of mind, varieties of mechanism, consciousness, and the nature of emotions and other affective states. Considerable time will be provided for discussion by participants. Prof. Sloman has provided a list of pertinent questions, these will be sent to participants upon registration. Tutorial 6 Knowledge Acquisition - -------- Dr. Nigel Shadbolt Nottingham University Practical methods for acquiring knowledge from experts. The methods described have been shown to be effective through the pioneering research at Nottingham which compared common and less common methods for eliciting knowledge from experts. This tutorial is an updated version of the knowledge acquisition tutorial given at AISB'89 which was well-attended and enthusiastically received. ======================================================================== For further information on the tutorials, mail tutorials@hplb.hpl.hp.com or tutorials@hplb.lb.hp.co.uk or tutorials%hplb.uucp@ukc.ac.uk For a conference programme and registration form, or general information about the conference, mail aisb91@ai.leeds.ac.uk or write to: Barbara Smith AISB91 Local Organizer School of Computer Studies University of Leeds Leeds LS2 9JT U.K. ------------------------------ End of Neuron Digest [Volume 7 Issue 6] ***************************************