Expert systems and developing expertise: Implications of Artificial Intelligence for Education

This paper discusses a few issues in AI research with the aim of understanding whether the concepts or the tools of AI can be of use in education (see also Green, 1984). Most of the discussion focuses on natural language understanding, one aspect of the highly diverse field of AI.published or submitted for publicationis peer reviewe

Slisp: A Flexible Software Toolkit for Hybrid, Embedded and Distributed Applications

We describe Slisp (pronounced ‘Ess-Lisp’), a hybrid Lisp–C programming toolkit for the development of scriptable and distributed applications. Computationally expensive operations implemented as separate C-coded modules are selectively compiled into a small Xlisp interpreter, then called as Lisp functions in a Lisp-coded program. The resulting hybrid program may run in several modes: as a stand-alone executable, embedded in a different C program, as a networked server accessed from another Slisp client, or as a networked server accessed from a C-coded client. Five years of experience with Slisp, as well experience with other scripting languages such as Tcl and Perl, are summarized. These experiences suggest that Slisp will be most useful for mid-sized applications in which the kinds of scripting and embeddability features provided by Tcl and Perl can be extended in an efficient manner to larger applications, while maintaining a well-defined standard (Common Lisp) for these extensions. In addition, the generality of Lisp makes Lisp a good candidate for an application-level communication language in distributed environments

Ada as an implementation language for knowledge based systems

Debates about the selection of programming languages often produce cultural collisions that are not easily resolved. This is especially true in the case of Ada and knowledge based programming. The construction of programming tools provides a desirable alternative for resolving the conflict

Timed Soft Concurrent Constraint Programs: An Interleaved and a Parallel Approach

We propose a timed and soft extension of Concurrent Constraint Programming. The time extension is based on the hypothesis of bounded asynchrony: the computation takes a bounded period of time and is measured by a discrete global clock. Action prefixing is then considered as the syntactic marker which distinguishes a time instant from the next one. Supported by soft constraints instead of crisp ones, tell and ask agents are now equipped with a preference (or consistency) threshold which is used to determine their success or suspension. In the paper we provide a language to describe the agents behavior, together with its operational and denotational semantics, for which we also prove the compositionality and correctness properties. After presenting a semantics using maximal parallelism of actions, we also describe a version for their interleaving on a single processor (with maximal parallelism for time elapsing). Coordinating agents that need to take decisions both on preference values and time events may benefit from this language. To appear in Theory and Practice of Logic Programming (TPLP)

An analysis of the application of AI to the development of intelligent aids for flight crew tasks

This report presents the results of a study aimed at developing a basis for applying artificial intelligence to the flight deck environment of commercial transport aircraft. In particular, the study was comprised of four tasks: (1) analysis of flight crew tasks, (2) survey of the state-of-the-art of relevant artificial intelligence areas, (3) identification of human factors issues relevant to intelligent cockpit aids, and (4) identification of artificial intelligence areas requiring further research

A study of the very high order natural user language (with AI capabilities) for the NASA space station common module

The requirements are identified for a very high order natural language to be used by crew members on board the Space Station. The hardware facilities, databases, realtime processes, and software support are discussed. The operations and capabilities that will be required in both normal (routine) and abnormal (nonroutine) situations are evaluated. A structure and syntax for an interface (front-end) language to satisfy the above requirements are recommended