Increasingly, the role of AI in business and scientific applications is that of one component in a complex system. Integrating AI with knowledge sources and databases, user interfaces, and existing software is an important aspect of advancing the application of AI to real world problems. This year's conference will emphasize both the development of enabling AI technology and the issues involved in the integration of this technology into products and processes. We are also seeking innovative ideas for new application areas and new research and technology transfer paradigms. Our goal is to increase interaction between different communities and to increase our understanding of how AI technology can be applied to real- world problems.
With these goals in mind, two general kinds of papers are appropriate. First are case studies of AI applications that address significant real- world problems. These papers must (1) justify the use of the AI technique, based on the problem and application requirements, (2) explain how the AI technology contributed to the solution and was integrated with other components, and (3) describe the status of the implementation.
Second are papers on novel AI techniques and principles that may enable more ambitious real-world applications. All the usual AI topics are appropriate. These papers must (1) describe the importance of the approach from an applications context, (2) describe the work in sufficient technical detail and clarity, (3) clearly and thoroughly differentiate the work from previous efforts.
While finished work is important, one major role for this conference is as a forum for exchanging ideas. For this reason, well-written reports on work-in-progress and descriptions of innovative partial implementations are encouraged. In fact, we hope to structure CAIA-94 in several ways to facilitate communication between researchers and practitioners. First, we will include invited speakers on various appropriate topics, of both technical and more general scope. Second, panel sessions are very important in an inter-disciplinary area and will be a key feature of CAIA-94. Third, CAIA will include a mix of introductory and advanced tutorials and a small workshop program oriented towards wide participation. Other, more novel forums such as evening discussion sessions may be tried.
Papers should be limited to 5000 words and papers significantly longer that this will not be reviewed. Accepted papers will be allotted seven pages in the conference proceedings, and the best papers will be considered for a special issue of IEEE Expert to appear late in 1994. Awards will be presented to the best paper and best student paper at the conference.
The first page of the paper must contain the following information (where applicable) in the order shown:
* Title. * Author's name and affiliation (specify student status). * Contact information (name, postal address, phone and email address). * Abstract: A 200 word abstract that includes a clear statement describing the paper's original contributions and what new lesson is imparted. * AI topic: One or more terms describing the relevant AI areas, e.g. knowledge acquisition, explanation, diagnosis, etc. * Domain area: One or more terms describing the problem domain area, e.g. mechanical design, factory scheduling, education, medicine, etc. * Language/Tool: Underlying programming languages, systems and tools used. * Status: Development and deployment status, as appropriate. * Effort: Person-years of effort put into developing the particular aspect of the project being described. * Impact: A 20 word description of estimated or measured (specify) benefit of the application developed.
In addition to papers, we will be accepting the following types of submissions:
* Proposals for Panel Discussions. Provide a brief description of the topic (1000 words or less). Indicate appropriateness for this conference, the membership of the panel and interest in organizing/moderating the discussion.
* Proposals for Tutorial Presentations. Proposals for three hour tutorials of both an introductory and advanced nature are requested. Tutorials which analyze classes of applications in depth or examine techniques appropriate for a particular class of applications are of particular interest. Include a detailed topic outline, a half-page synopsis of the focus, topics, a list of benefits to the audience, and a full professional vita.
* Proposals for Workshops. Proposals are sought for one day workshops to be held in conjunction with the conference. These workshops should avoid having too narrow a scope (such as "AI in Radiology"); rather, they should be designed to foster communication between both experts and interested newcomers about a broad application area (for example, "Applications of AI to Software") or address a concern that covers many applications (for example, "Issues in Technology Transfer"). Include a one-page description of the workshop and a small organizing committee.
Important Dates
* August 31, 1993: Four copies of papers, and three copies of all other proposals are due to the program chair at the address listed below (no electronic submissions).
* October 15, 1993: Author notifications mailed.
* December 14, 1993: Accepted papers and tutorial notes due to IEEE.
* March 1, 1994: Conference tutorial program and workshops.
* March 1-4, 1994: Conference technical program.
Submit Papers and all Proposals to: Peter G. Selfridge AT&T Bell Laboratories Room 2B-425 600 Mountain Avenue Murray Hill, NJ 07974 Phone: 908-582-6801, fax -7550 Email: pgs@research.att.com
For registration and additional conference information, contact: CAIA-94 IEEE Computer Society 1730 Massachusetts Avenue, NW Washington, DC 20036-1903 Phone: 202-371-1013
General Chair: Dan O'Leary, University of Southern California
Program Chair: Peter G. Selfridge, AT&T Bell Laboratories
Publicity Chair: Marc Goodman, Cognitive Systems and Brandeis University
Local Arrangements Chair: Aaron Konstam, Trinity University
Program Committee Jan Aikins Trinzic Corporation Chid Apte IBM Larry Birnbaum Northwestern University Ron Brachman AT&T Mark Burstein BBN Dan Cooke U. Texas El Paso Vasant Dhar NYU Tim Finin U. Maryland Baltimore County Phil Hayes Carnegie Group Jim Hendler U. Maryland Haym Hirsh Rutgers Lou Hoebel Rome Laboratory, USAF Se June Hong IBM Lewis Johnson USC/ISI Bernadette Kowalski-Minton Academic Systems Corp. Larry Lefkowitz Bellcore Don McKay Paramax Robert Milne Intelligent Applications Ltd. Charles Petrie MCC David Redmiles UC Boulder Anil Rewari DEC Marcio Rillo University of San Paulo, Brazil Eric Schoen Schlumberger Evangelos Simoudis Lockheed Bob Simpson NCR Elliot Soloway U. Michigan Craig Stanfill Thinking Machines Loren Terveen AT&T Oliver Vadas Pulp and Paper Research Institute of Canada Wolfgang Wahlster DFKI David Waltz Thinking Machines and Brandeis U. John Yen Texas A&M University
General information on CAIA-94, including this Call for Papers, is available electronically. Send email to CAIA@CS.UMBC.EDU or try the Gopher server on GOPHER.CS.UMBC.EDU for a description of what is available and how to retrieve. For more information or clarification, contact the IEEE Computer Society or the Program Chair at the addresses above.
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Conference Report:
The Ninth Conference on Artificial Intelligence for Applications (CAIA '93) Orlando, Florida, 2/28-3/5, 1993
Peter G. Selfridge, AT&T Bell Laboratories
(Note: this report will appear in IEEE Expert Magazine, June, 1993. Currently, copyright for this report is held by AT&T Bell Laboratories.)
The Ninth Conference on Artificial Intelligence for Applications (CAIA '93) was held at The Disney Yacht Club Resort, Disney World, Orlando, Florida, February 28 through March 5, 1993. The setting was terrific: not only is the Yacht Club an excellent hotel and conference facility, but the weather cooperated and Disney World location gave attendees a plethora of activies after (and sometimes during!) the conference. This year's call-for-papers attracted 215 submission (a big jump over last year's 145), and 80 papers were accepted: 61 (or 28 percent of those submitted) as full papers and 19 (or 9 percent) as poster session papers. This year's conference had strong international representation. Accepted papers and posters come from 15 countries: nine from Canada, six from Germany, three from Japan (one coauthored with a US collaborator), three from France, two each from Scotland and Italy, and one each from England, India, Portugal, China, Australia, Austria, Singapore, and Mexico. The rest (47) came from the United States.
The conference started with two days of Tutorials and Workshops. There were eight tutorials, ranging in topic from AI and Business to Qualitative Reasoning to Intelligent User Interfaces. 102 people took these tutorials and they were well received. The Workshop on Validation and Verification of Intelligent Systems featured presentations by speakers including Robert Plant, Alun Preece and Daniel O'Leary. These presentations focused on specific issues in V&V, including life cycle impact on V&V, methodologies for system development including V&V, the use of metaknowledge in V&V, systematic determination of knowledge base anomolies and the statistical analysis of expert systems. A round table discussion of different applications followed the presentations. The V&V of a number of applications, including the "Pilot's Associate" and some of its derivatives, were discussed.
The second workshop was a meeting of the IEEE P1252 Standards Group, whose charter is to propose a Frame Based Knowledge Representation standard. Topics discussed included the semantics of various aspects of the proposed standard (such as system defined frames, slot attachment, and enumeration functions), validation of knowledge bases, detecting inheritance conflicts, and what aspects of a knowledge base are modifiable after the initial definition. This is an ongoing activity.
The technical program started with an invited plenary address by Wendy Lehnert of the Computer Science Department, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Mass. The title of the presentation was "Portability and Scalability for Information Extraction Systems." She described the evolution of Natural Language research from basic research and demonstration systems to problem-oriented research with an emphasis on evaluation and portability. This change in emphasis has been accomplished in part by priorities of funding agencies and the availability of common problem sets with agreed upon input and output. This allows different groups of researchers to work on the same problems and compare results. Dr. Lehnert concluded her talk by listing five new directions of natural language research: (1) applications must stimulate basic research, (2) domain portability through training, (3) automated knowledge acquisition, (4) put a human in the loop, and (5) hybrid systems. In response to a audience question, Dr. Lehnert described the "weakest link" in this kind of work as that of discourse analysis, or the analysis of multiple sentences.
At the Wednesday banquet (surprisingly good food and very well attended) there were two special events. The first was the acceptance of the Emanual R. Piore Award, an IEEE award for long-standing applications-oriented research, to Dr. Makoto Nagao, Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan. This award comes with a handsome plaque and a generous honorarium, and Dr. Nagao chose the Conference on AI for Applications as the IEEE conference for accepting this award. Dr. Nagao discussed his research into global approaches to Natural Language and Image analysis on Thursday. Second, Oliver Selfridge, of GTE Research Laboratories, Waltham, Massachusetts, gave the banquet speech entitled "AI and the Future of Software". His controversial message is that computer science and artificial intelligence should take a new approach to software. Instead of trying to do everything at the level of specifications, and then transform these specifications into code, the community ought to acknowledge that specifications will always be ambiguous, incomplete, and, most important, will change. This implies that software should be written with change in mind, and that the types of change software undergoes should be extensively and empirically studied. If we do that, Dr. Selfridge argued, we can begin to design software to change and can begin to build evaluation into the programs themselves. Then we can begin to understand and build truly adaptive, intelligent software systems.
Two other invited talks were part of CAIA '93. Patrick Winston, of the MIT AI Laboratory, gave a talk on his experiences in business. One message of his talk was that in a commercial product, the amount of actual AI technology tends to shrink far beyond expectations, and in some cases, vanishes. This mirrors other people's experiences in the amount of work necessary to turn a demonstration system into something closer to a product - that amount of work is much more than it took to build the prototype! Dr. Frank Mayadas, of the Alfred T. Sloan Foundation, gave an assessment of computer technology. In his view, the extraordinary pace of improvements in processing power, memory capacity, and the like, are beginning to slow. The biggest challenge by far, he claimed, is now to explore and develop new application areas for our technology. This, of course, was an appropriate message for the Conference on AI for Applications!
The bulk of the conference was, of course, paper sessions and panels. The papers covered a large number of topic areas, from parallel processing to case-based reasoning, constraint satisfaction, and genetic algorithms. Two papers received Best Paper awards: Amir Hekmatpour, of IBM and also a student at UCSD, and Charles Elkan, a professor at UCSD, for their paper "Categorization-Based Diagnostic Problem Solving in the VLSI Design Domain", and Leonard A. Hermens, a student at Washington State University, and Jeffrey C. Schlimmer, a professor at WSU, for their paper "A Machine-Learning Apprentice for the Completion of Repetitive Forms". Panel presentations were very popular, and included a panel on statistical approaches to natural language, evaluation AI applications, AI on Wall Street, AI for Manufacturing, Organizational Memory, Applications of Case-Based Reasoning, and Massifely Parallel AI.
The success of CAIA-93 was the result of many people's efforts. Jan Aikins, of Trinzic Corporation, provided terrific leadership and planning for the conference. Dave Waltz, as Program Chair, did a great job, especially during the final program committee meeting. His colleauge at Thinking Machines, Craig Stanfill, did a fantastic job standing in for Dave during an illness. Peter Selfridge, AT&T Bell Laboratories and Don McKay, of Paramax, worked hard to put together a successful tutorial and workshop program. Curt Hall of Intelligent Software Strategies and Doug Dankel of the University of Florida did excellent jobs at Publicity and Local Arrangements, respectively. People at the IEEE office, especially Nancy Wise, Janet Harward, Phyllis Walker, and John Mee, worked hard at many logistic details crucial to the success of CAIA-93. Dari Whitehouse of Thinking Machines also handled many administrative details. The program committee members reviewed all the papers and made many difficult decisions. Finally, the success of a conference like this ultimately rests on those people submitting papers and agreeing to be outside reviewers, invited speakers, and panel members. Thank you all!
This brings us to next year's conference, which will be held at the Marriot Riverwalk in San Antonio, Texas. Dan O'Leary, of the Business School at the University of Southern California will be the Conference Chair, and Peter Selfridge of AT&T Bell Laboratories, will be the Program Chair. Dan and I are contemplating a number of changes in the Conference on AI for Applications. We want to ensure that this Conference remains attractive to a wide and diverse audience, from government to acedemia to industry. To do this, we are formulating an integrative theme for the conference that will emphasize that while AI is but one component of a complete application, it can be the most important technical component and the true "market differentiator". We hope the theme will both widen the scope of the conference and help us in the AI and applications community sharpen our focus on the exact role of AI in applications, and the role of AI research in applications endeavors.
Dan and I are also committed to a number of structural changes in the conference to make it more efficient. While these changes are still being decided, it is probable that the conference will be shortened from 5 days to 4, and we are exploring various options including integrating tutorials into the technical program, having evening sessions, including demonstration tracks, and trying to facilitate more direct and active participation among the audience and speakers. Of course, a successful conference of this kind must also include outstanding plenary addresses and panels and, last but not least, attractive social events. If you have any ideas or suggestions for events, panels, workshops, tutorials, or are interested in submitting a paper, the due date is August 31, 1993. For more information, contact CAIA '94, IEEE Computer Society, 1730 Massachusetts Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20036, or call 202-371-1013. Alternatively, feel free to contact me, Peter Selfridge, at AT&T Bell Laboratories, Room 2B- 425, 600 Mountain Avenue, Murray Hill, NJ, 07974, phone 908-582-6801, email pgs@research.att.com.