mhi@edsews.eds.com (Mamdouh H. Ibrahim) (04/04/91)
CALL FOR PARTICIPATION
IJCAI-91 Workshop on
OBJECTS AND AI
Sunday, August 25, 1991
Sydney, Australia
Recently, object-oriented programming has gained tremendous
recognition as a powerful paradigm for structuring and programming
complex systems. At the same time, AI researchers are still striving
for new representational and software engineering advances for
developing complex AI applications. Cooperation between Objects and AI
can be an important step toward achieving advances in both fields.
This workshop will provide a forum for researchers in AI and OOP to
exchange ideas and discuss issues related to the two fields and the
potential cooperation between them. The focus of the presentations and
discussions will be on both the theoretical foundations and practical
applications and implementations of object-oriented programming in AI.
Tentatively, the workshop will be divided into four main sessions,
each moderated by one of the workshop organizers.
1) Objects and AI: Concepts and potential cooperation.
2) Object-oriented knowledge representations: Theory, formalisms and
practical issues.
3) Object-oriented environments and architectures for AI.
4) Object-oriented AI applications.
In the first session, participants will discuss how they view objects,
and identify their impact on AI. For example, objects may be viewed as
modules of knowledge or activities--agents. From this view, the
discussion should focus on identifying how these agents can contribute
to advances in AI research. From a different perspective, concepts and
methodologies of programming with objects that are applicable, and
could potentially contribute, to AI may be addressed and debated as
part of this session. This discussion should also identify those
concepts that are fundamentally different and may cause problems if
the two areas are combined. Examples for such discussion are objects
vs. frames, AI classification vs. class inheritance hierarchies, and
the suitability of object-oriented methodologies in dealing with ill-
defined domains.
The second session will focus on issues related to knowledge
representation using objects. Participants should discuss the
advantages and/or limitations of concepts such as encapsulation and
information hiding when applied to knowledge representation. Also,
objects have often been criticized for lacking formalisms and
semantics for object-oriented knowledge representation. The
discussions in this session should address these theoretical issues
and identify the potential problems associated with such lack of
formalisms.
The third session is intended to explore existing and future object-
oriented architectures as they may apply to the development of AI
tasks. The discussion should identify the advantages and disadvantages
of using class-based vs. delegation-based systems, concurrent and
distributed object-oriented architectures, communicating and
intelligent agents, reflective systems, and integrated programming
environments.
The last session will be devoted to presentations and discussions of
object-oriented AI applications. Discussions should focus on and
emphasize the aspects of OOP that contribute to the success of these
systems. Examples of such systems are object-oriented expert system
shells, natural language processing systems, learning systems,
simulation, scheduling and planning systems, and constraint
satisfaction systems.
Workshop attendance will be by invitation only and is limited to 30
participants. Invitations will be issued on the basis of extended
abstracts or position papers. Appropriate papers should not be less
than 3 single spaced pages and should state clearly their authors'
position and supporting arguments for issues relevant to the workshop
theme. Relevant topics include (but are not limited to):
o Formalisms and semantics for object-oriented knowledge
representations.
o Object-oriented methodologies for handling ill-defined domains.
o Object class hierarchies vs. AI classification hierarchies.
o Objects vs. frames: similarities and differences.
o Objects in distributed AI.
o Intelligent and communicating agents.
o Reflective object-oriented languages for AI development.
o Pattern matching with objects: problems and solutions
o object-oriented tools for designing and developing AI systems.
o Object-oriented protocols for AI tasks.
o Integration of object-oriented and AI programming paradigms.
The papers will be reviewed by members of the workshop committee and
acceptance will be based on both the relevance of the work to the
workshop theme and the quality and clarity of the papers. Accepted
papers will be distributed to the participants at the workshop, and
based on the workshop outcome, we may elect to generate some form of
formal publication that will include longer versions of the
accepted submissions.
IJCAI policy this year requires successful workshop applicants to
register for both the conference and the workshop. Workshop
registration fee is $US65.00.
Send five copies of extended abstract before April 30, 1991 to:
---------------------------------------------------------------
Mamdouh H. Ibrahim
EDS/Artificial Intelligence Services
5555 New King Street, 4th. Floor
Troy, MI 48057 USA
Phone: (313) 696-7129
e-mail: mhi@edsdrd.eds.com or mhi@ais.tsd.eds.com
Fax: (313) 696-2325
Important Dates:
----------------
April 30, 1991 Deadline for receiving extended abstracts.
June 1, 1991 Notification of invitation or rejection.
June 30, 1991 Deadline for receiving revised papers.
July 15, 1991 IJCAI to receive participants registration forms and fees.
For further information, contact any of the workshop organizers.
Workshop organizers:
--------------------
Daniel Bobrow
Systems Science Laboratory
Xerox PARC
3333 Coyote Hill Rd.,
Palo Alto, CA 94304
USA
bobrow@xerox.com
Jacques Ferber
LAFORIA - Universite Paris 6
T. 46, 4 place Jussieu
75252 Paris Cedex 05
France
ferber@laforia.ibp.fr
Mamdouh H. Ibrahim (Chair)
EDS/Artificial Intelligence Services
5555 New King Street, 4th. Floor
Troy, MI 48057 USA
Phone: (313) 696-7129
USA
mhi@edsdrd.eds.com or mhi@ais.tsd.eds.com
Mario Tokoro
Sony Computer Science Laboratory, Inc./Keio University
3-14-13, Higashigotanda
Shinagawa, Tokyo, 141
Japan
mario@csl.sony.co.jp