Fourth Conference on Artificial Intelligence for Space Applications

Proceedings of a conference held in Huntsville, Alabama, on November 15-16, 1988. The Fourth Conference on Artificial Intelligence for Space Applications brings together diverse technical and scientific work in order to help those who employ AI methods in space applications to identify common goals and to address issues of general interest in the AI community. Topics include the following: space applications of expert systems in fault diagnostics, in telemetry monitoring and data collection, in design and systems integration; and in planning and scheduling; knowledge representation, capture, verification, and management; robotics and vision; adaptive learning; and automatic programming

Recommendations for NASA research and development in artificial intelligence

Basic artificial intelligence (AI) research, AI applications, engineering, institutional management, and previously impractical missions enabled by AI are discussed

Debunking Creedal Beliefs

Following Anthony Downs’s classic economic analysis of democracy, it has been widely noted that most voters lack the incentive to be well-informed. Recent empirical work, however, suggests further that political partisans can display selectively lazy or biased reasoning. Unfortunately, political knowledge seems to exacerbate, rather than mitigate, these tendencies. In this paper, I build on these observations to construct a more general skeptical challenge which affects what I call creedal beliefs. Such beliefs share three features: i) the costs to the individual of being wrong are negligible, ii) the beliefs are subject to social scrutiny, and iii) the evidential landscape relevant to the beliefs is sufficiently complex so as to make easy verification difficult. Some philosophers and social scientists have recently argued that under such conditions, beliefs are likely to play a signaling, as opposed to a navigational role, and that our ability to hold beliefs in this way is adaptive. However, if this is right, I argue there is at least a partial debunker for such beliefs. Moreover, this offers, I suggest, one way to develop the skeptical challenge based on etiological explanation that John Stuart Mill presents in On Liberty when he claims that the same causes which lead someone to be a devout Christian in London would have made them a Confucian in Peking. Finally, I contend that this skeptical challenge is appropriately circumscribed so that it does not over-extend in an implausible way

The evolution of the public sphere

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to rethink the issue of publicity from a cross-cultural and evolutionary perspective. Design/methodology/approach: Assuming that there is a dominant paradigm in the studies of the public sphere centered on Habermas’ ideas, media theory (and especially Luhmann who is considered as a media theorist) is selected as a new context that provides different concepts, ideas, language games and metaphors that allow the re-foundation of the study of publicity. Findings: Publicity as a social structure emerges – and acquires different forms during history – out of the complex dynamics resulting from the interaction between success media, such as power, and different kinds of dissemination media. Originality/value: A research into the forms of publicity not only promotes awareness of the ubiquity of the phenomenon across cultural evolution, but also offers tools to make new discoveries and systematize what is already known about the subject and its ramifications.Fil: Blanco Rivero, José Javier. Universidad Nacional de Quilmes. Departamento de Ciencias Sociales. Centro de Historia Intelectual; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; Argentin