Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!mnetor!seismo!gatech!akgua!lcuxlm!whuxl!houxm!hounx!kort From: kort@hounx.UUCP (B.KORT) Newsgroups: net.ai Subject: Notes on AAAI '86 Message-ID: <959@hounx.UUCP> Date: Thu, 21-Aug-86 07:28:53 EDT Article-I.D.: hounx.959 Posted: Thu Aug 21 07:28:53 1986 Date-Received: Fri, 22-Aug-86 06:56:17 EDT Organization: AT&T Bell Labs, Holmdel NJ Lines: 137 Notes on AAAI Barry Kort Abstract The Fifth Annual AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence was held August 11-15 at the Philadelphia Civic Center. These notes record the author's personal impressions of the state of AI, and the business prospects for AI technology. The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the perspective or intentions of other individuals or organizations. * * * The American Association for Artificial Intelligence held its Fifth Annual Conference during the week of August 11, 1986, at the Philadelphia Civic Center. Approximately 5000 attendees were treated to the latest results of this fast growing field. An extensive program of tutorials enabled the naive beginner and technical- professional alike to rise to a common baseline of understanding. Research and Science Sessions concentrated on the theoretical underpinnings, while the complementary Engineering Sessions focused on reduction of theory to practice. Dr. Herbert Schorr of IBM delivered the Keynote Address. His message was simple and straightforward: AI is here today, it's real, and it works. The exhibit floor was a sea of high-end workstations, running flashy applications ranging from CAT scan imagery to automated fault diagnosis, to automated reasoning, to 3-D scene animation, to iconographic model-based reasoning. Symbolics, TI, Xerox, Digital, HP, Sun, and other vendors exhibited state of the art hardware, while Intellicorp, Teknowledge, Inference, Carnegie-Mellon Group, and other software houses offered knowledge engineering power tools that make short work of automated reasoning. Knowledge representation schema include the ubiquitous tree, as well as animated iconographic models of dynamic systems. Inductive and deductive reasoning and goal-directed logic appear in the guise of forward and backward chaining algorithms which seek the desired chain of nodes linking premiss to predicted conclusion or hypothesis to observed symptoms. Such schema are especially well adapted to diagnosis of ills, be it human ailment or machine malfunction. Natural Language understanding remains a hard problem, due to the inscrutable ambiguity of most human-generated utterances. Nevertheless, silicon can diagram sentences as well as a precocious fifth grader. In limited domain vocabularies, the semantic content of such diagrammatic representations can be reliably extracted. Robotics and vision remain challenging fields, but advances in parallel architectures may clear the way for notable progress in scene recognition. Qualitative reasoning, model-based reasoning, and reasoning by analogy still require substantial human guidance, perhaps because of the difficulty of implementing the interdomain pattern recognition which humans know as analogy, metaphor, and parable. Interesting philosophical questions abound when AI moves into the fields of automated advisors and agents. Such systems require the introduction of Value Systems, which may or may not conflict with individual preferences for benevolent ethics or hard-nosed business pragmatics. One speaker chose the provocative title, "Can Machines Be Intelligent If They Don't Give a Damn?" We may be on the threshold of Artificial Intelligence, but we have a long way to go before we arrive at Artificial Wisdom. Nevertheless, some progress is being made in reducing to practice such esoteric concepts as Theories of Equity and Justice, leading to the possibility of unbiased Jurisprudence. AI goes hand in hand with Theories of Learning and Instruction, and the field appears to be paying dividends in the art and practice of knowledge exchange, following the strategy first suggested by Socrates some 2500 years ago. The dialogue format abounds, and mixed initiative dialogues seem to capture the essence of mutual teaching and mirroring. Perhaps sanity can be turned into an art form and a science. Belief Revision and Truth Maintenance enable systems to unravel confusion caused by the injection of mutually inconsistent inputs. Nobody's fool, these systems let the user know that there's a fib in there somewhere. Psychology of computers becomes an issue, and the Silicon Syndrome of Neuroses can be detected whenever the machines are not taught how to think straight. Machines are already sapient. Soon they will acquire sentience, and maybe even free will (nothing more than a random number generator coupled with a value system). Perhaps by the end of the Millenium (just 14 years away), the planet will see its first Artificial Sentient Being. Perhaps Von Neumann knew what he was talking about when he wrote his cryptic volume entitled, On the Theory of Self-Reproducing Automata. There were no Cybernauts in Philadelphia this year, but many of the piece parts were in evidence. Perhaps it is just a matter of time until the Golem takes its first step. In the mean time, we have entered the era of the Competent System, somewhat short on world-class expertise, but able to hold it's own in today's corporate culture. It learns about as fast as its human counterpart, and is infinitely clonable. Once upon a time it was felt that machines should work and people should think. Now that machines can think, perhaps people can take more time to enjoy the state of being called Life. * * * Lincroft, NJ August 17, 1986