Report on the Second Workshop on Distributed AI

On June 24, 1981 twenty-five participants from organizations around the country gathered in MIT's Endicott House for the Second Annual Workshop on Distributed AI. The three-day workshop was designed as an informal meeting, centered mainly around brief research reports presented by each group, along with an invited talk. In keeping with the spirit of the meeting, this report was prepared as a distributed document, with each speaker contributing a summary of his remarks.MIT Artificial Intelligence Laborator

Power subsystem automation study

The purpose of the phase 2 of the power subsystem automation study was to demonstrate the feasibility of using computer software to manage an aspect of the electrical power subsystem on a space station. The state of the art in expert systems software was investigated in this study. This effort resulted in the demonstration of prototype expert system software for managing one aspect of a simulated space station power subsystem

Entity Relationship Approach to Knowledge Base Systems.

A unified framework for knowledge base systems is proposed based on Entity-Relationship (ER) approach. Following the analysis and the specification of the real-world using Entity-Relationship approach, the knowledge base is implemented as a first-order logic system, a production system, or a frame-based system by mapping the appropriate symbolic data structures. An approach for analyzing and specifying real-world perceptions must provide appropriate semantic primitives. Therefore, a justification is provided for the semantic primitives proposed in Entity-Relationship approach by considering the fundamental issues in perception. A notation that allows Entity-Relationship approach to be used as a holistic representation is presented. Translation rules are provided for the conversion of ER-diagrams into symbolic data structures of first-order logic systems, production systems, and frame-based systems. The feasibility of using Entity-Relationship approach to support a natural language front-end of a knowledge base system is examined by analyzing the representation of surface and deep structures of a sentence in Entity-Relationship approach

Making object-oriented databases more knowledgeable (From ADAM to ABEL)

Tesis leida en la Universidad de Aberdeen. 178 p.The salient points of this thesis are as follows: • Object-Oriented Databases can help in solving the impedance mismatch problem by introducing methods. However, methods have sometimes been overused in the sense th at the code encapsulated refers not only to how the operation is implemented but also to other kinds of knowledge that are implicit in the code. The disadvantages of this approach for modelling integrity constraints, user-defined relationships and active behaviour are pointed out. • The ADAM Object-Oriented Database has been extended to allow the designer to specify integrity constraints declaratively. A constraint equation approach is implemented th at supports the inheritance of constraints. • A need for semantic-rich user-defined relationships has been identified. In this thesis, relationships are represented as objects. An approach to enhance the semantics of relationships in both its structural and behavioural aspects is presented. The most novel idea of the approach presented is the support of the inferred properties and the operational semantics of relationships. • Active Databases have recently become an im portant area of research. This thesis shows how to extend an Object-Oriented Database with active capabilities. The principal contribution lies in representing as ‘first-class’ objects not only the active rules but also the rule manager itself. Hence, besides handling active rules as any other object in the system, future requirements can be supported just by specialising the current rule manager. • Active rules have been proposed for several purposes. Several examples, are given of the direct use of rules. However, higher level tools can be provided of which rule

Artificial Intelligence and Human Error Prevention: A Computer Aided Decision Making Approach: Technical Report No. 4: Survey and Analysis of Research on Learning Systems from Artificial Intelligence

Coordinated Science Laboratory was formerly known as Control Systems LaboratoryU.S. Department of Transportation / DOT FA79WA-4360 ABFederal Aviation Administratio

A hybrid approach to knowledge representation for knowledge-based systems.

by Shu-kin Kwan.Thesis (M.Ph.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1988.Bibliography: leaves 151-156

Electra : integrating constraints, condition-based dispatching, and features exclusion into the multiparadigm language Leda

Multiparadigm languages are languages that are designed to support more than one style of programming. Leda is a strongly-typed multiparadigm programming language that supports imperative, functional, object-oriented, and logic programming. The constraint programming paradigm is a declarative style of programming where the programmer is able to state relationships among some entities and expect the system to maintain the validity of these relationships throughout program execution. The system accomplishes this either by invoking user-defined fixes that impose rigid rules governing the evolution of the entities, or by finding suitable values to be assigned to the constrained entities without violating any active constraint. Constraints, due to their declarative semantics, are suitable for the direct mapping of the characteristics of a number of mechanisms including: consistency checks, constraint-directed search, and constraint-enforced reevaluation, among others. This makes constraint languages the most appropriate languages for the implementation of a large number of applications such as scheduling, planning, resource allocation, simulation, and graphical user interfaces. The semantics of constraints cannot be easily emulated by other constructs in the paradigms that are offered by the language Leda. However, the constraint paradigm does not provide any general control constructs. The lack of general control constructs impedes this paradigm's ability to naturally express a large number of problems. This dissertation presents the language Electra, which integrates the constraint paradigm into the language Leda by creating a unified construct that provides the ability to express the conventional semantics of constraints with some extensions. Due to the flexibility of this construct, the programmer is given the choice of either stating how a constraint is to be satisfied or delegating that task to the constraint-satisfier. The concept of providing the programmer with the ability to express system-maintained relations, which is the basic characteristic of constraints, provided a motivation for enhancing other paradigms with similar abilities. The functional paradigm is extended by adding to it the mechanism of condition-based dispatching which is similar to argument pattern-matching. The object-oriented paradigm is extended by allowing feature exclusion which is a form of inheritance exception. This dissertation claims that the integration provided by the language Electra will enable Leda programmers to reap the benefits of the paradigm of constraints while overcoming its limitations

Processes and Tools for Decision Support

The change in description of Decision Support Systems (DSS) from "concept" through "movement" to "bandwagon" clearly illustrates the growing interest in the managerial as well as in the research field for decision support systems in their different manifestations. One may expect that a conference on processes and tools for decision support brings together people from practice and research, whose experiences give insight in the direction the bandwagon is likely to go. This brings us to the question how expertise on processes and tools for decision support can be stored in such a way that one can get advice when developing future DSS. This asks for the definition and construction of a knowledge base, into which the expertise can be brought. In section 2 of this book, the authors address possible frameworks for such a knowledge base. In section 3 they place the papers presented into the chosen framework. Finally an attempt to make inferences from the contributed papers is made