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AIList Digest Volume 8 Issue 069
AIList Digest Saturday, 27 Aug 1988 Volume 8 : Issue 69
Seminars:
Acquiring a Model of the User's Beliefs
Software Reusability: An Intelligent Approach
Localized Event-based Planning For Multiagent Domains - Amy Lansky
Describing Program Transformers with Higher-order Unification
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Date: Fri, 12 Aug 88 11:16:43 EDT
From: finin@PRC.Unisys.COM
Subject: Acquiring a Model of the User's Beliefs ...
Ph.D. Dissertation Defense
Acquiring a Model of the User's Beliefs from
a Cooperative Advisory Dialogue
Robert Kass
The ability of expert systems to explain their own reasoning is often
cited as their most important feature. Unfortunately, the quality of
these explanations is frequently poor. In this talk, I will argue
that for expert systems to produce good explanations, they must have
available a model of the user's beliefs about the system domain.
Obtaining such a model is not easy, however. Traditional approaches
have depended on the explicit hand-coding of a large number of
assumptions about the beliefs of anticipated system users -- a tedious
and error-prone process. In contrast, I will present an implicit
method for acquiring a user model, embodied in a set of implicit user
model acquisition rules. These rules, developed from the study of a
large number of transcripts of people seeking advice from a human
expert, represent likely inferences that can be made about a user's
beliefs -- based on the system-user dialogue and the dialogue
participants' previous beliefs. This implicit acquisition method is
capable of quickly building a substantial model of the user's beliefs;
a model sufficient to support the generation of expert system
explanations tailored to individual users. Furthermore, the
acquisition rules are domain independent, providing a foundation for a
general user modelling facility for a variety of interactive systems.
Committee: Tim Finin (Advisor)
Aravind Joshi (Chairman)
Elaine Rich (MCC)
Bonnie Webber
Date: Monday, August 15, 1988
Time: 3:00 - 5:00 p.m.
Location: 554 Moore, University of Pennsylvania
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Date: Mon, 15 Aug 88 10:59:12 EDT
From: finin@PRC.Unisys.COM
Subject: Software Reusability: An Intelligent Approach (UNISYS)
Software Reusability: An Intelligent Approach
Mark A. Simos and James Solderitsch
Software Technology Department
UNISYS Paoli Research Center
GVL-2 Auditorium
Unisys Great Valley Labs
12:00-1:00, 15 August 1988,
The topic of software reusability has been at the forefront of
software engineering research for quite some time, but as yet has
failed to live up to initial expectations. Part of the reason for
this failure was early and lingering confusion about the subjects of
software engineering and software reusablity, and the belief that the
proper software engineering methodology, and perhaps even the right
programming language, would naturally and effortlessly lead to the
creation of reusable software.
Recent research has begun to pinpoint the unique issues relating
explicitly to software reusability. This talk describes a practical
approach to software reuse based on the incremental development of
intelligent libraries of reusable components. Such libraries, or
repositories, are structured around explicit domain models which are
knowledgebased frameworks providing taxonomic representations of
specific application domains. These frameworks provide a uniform view
of both static software components and generative capabilities, and
contain tools to actively guide users in browsing among and selecting
existing components, or classifying and qualifying new candidate
components for the repository.
After an introduction to some of the essential issues of software
reusability, we present some background motivation for a
domain-specific focus to reusability. We next discuss the use of
program generation and knowledge-based techniques that support
domain-specificity and sketch the evolution of the development of a
reuse library based on these techniques. We close with a description
of our current project that is directed at developing the basic
Reusability Library Framework (RLF) technology necessary for the
development of such domainspecific libraries.
The RLF project is sponsored by the STARS Ada Foundations Technology
program (contract number N00014-88-C-2052). Specific objectives of
the RLF project include providing a set of knowledge-based components
in Ada that support the creation and maintenance of domain models, and
the development, using this platform, of general library tools for
component testing, qualification and retrieval.
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Date: Tue, 23 Aug 88 09:33:11 PDT
From: CHIN%PLU@ames-io.ARPA
Subject: Localized Event-based Planning For Multiagent Domains - Amy
Lansky
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National Aeronautics and Space Administration
Ames Research Center
SEMINAR ANNOUNCEMENT
SPEAKER: Amy L. Lansky
SRI International
TOPIC: LOCALIZED EVENT-BASED PLANNING FOR MULTIAGENT DOMAINS
ABSTRACT:
This talk will present the GEM concurrency model and GEMPLAN, a multiagent
planner based on this model. Unlike standard state-based AI representations,
GEM is unique in its explicit emphasis on events and domain structure --
world activitiy is modeled in terms of events occurring within a set of regions.
Event-based temporal logic constraints are then associated with each region
to delimit legal domain behavior. GEM's emphasis on constraints is directly
reflected in the architecture of the GEMPLAN planner -- it can be viewed
as a general purposed constraint satisfaction facility. Its task is to
construct a network of interrelated events that satisfies all applicable
regional constraints and also achieves some stated goal.
A key focus of our work has been on the use of --localized--techniques for
domain representation and reasoning. Such techniques partition domain
descriptions and reasoning tasks according to the regions of activity within
a domain. For example, GEM localizes the applicability of domin constraints
and also imposes additional "locality constraints" based on domain structure.
This use of locality helps alleviate several aspects of the frame problem
for multiagent domains. The GEMPLAN planner also reflects the use of locality;
its constraint satisfaction search space is subdivided into regional planning
search spaces. GEMPLAN can pinpoint and rectify interactions among these
regional search spaces, thereby reducing the burden of "interaction analysis"
ubiquitous to most planning systems.
DATE: Wednesday TIME: 2:00 pm - 3:30 pm BLDG. 244 Room 103
August 31, 1988 --------------
POINT OF CONTACT: Marlene Chin PHONE NUMBER: (415) 694-6527
NET ADDRESS: chin@pluto.arc.nasa.gov
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VISITORS ARE WELCOME: Register and obtain vehicle pass at Ames Visitor
Reception Building (N-253) or the Security Station near Gate 18. Do not
use the Navy Main Gate.
Non-citizens (except Permanent Residents) must have prior approval from the
Director's Office one week in advance. Submit requests to the point of
contact indicated above. Non-citizens must register at the Visitor
Reception Building. Permanent Residents are required to show Alien
Registration Card at the time of registration.
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Date: Fri, 26 Aug 88 09:47:31 EDT
From: finin@PRC.Unisys.COM
Subject: Describing Program Transformers with Higher-order Unification
AI SEMINAR
UNISYS PAOLI RESEARCH CENTER
Describing Program Transformers with Higher-order Unification
John J. Hannan
Computer and Information Science
University of Pennsylvania
Source-to-source program transformers belong to the class of
meta-programs that manipulate programs as objects. It has previously
been argued that a higher-order extension of Prolog, such as
Lambda-Prolog, makes a suitable implementation language for such
meta-programs. In this paper, we consider this claim in more detail.
In Lambda-Prolog, object-level programs and program schemata can be
represented using simply typed lambda-terms and higher-order
(functional) variables. Unification of these lambda-terms, called
higher-order unification, can elegantly describe several important
meta-level operations on programs. We detail some properties of
higher-order unification that make it suitable for analyzing program
structures. We then present (in Lambda-Prolog) the specification of
several simple program transformers and demonstrate how these can be
combined to yield more general transformers. With the depth-first
control strategy of Lambda-Prolog for both clause selection and
unifier selection all the above mentioned specifications can be and
have been executed and tested.
2:00 pm Wednesday, August 3
Unisys Paloi Research Center
BIC Conference Room
Route 252 and Central Ave.
Paoli PA 19311
-- non-Unisys visitors who are interested in attending should --
-- send email to finin@prc.unisys.com or call 215-648-7446 --
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End of AIList Digest
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