Sponsored by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence
The Sixth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-87) was held July 13–17, 1987, in Seattle, Washington.
AI contains both scientific and engineering components. Since the goal of the field is constructing and understanding intelligent artifacts, neither component can stand alone. Both aspects of AI were represented at the conference. The scientific papers stressed the computational principles underlying cognition and perception in man and machine. The engineering papers highlighted the pragmatic issues in building and applying AI systems, providing theoretical analyses and empirical demonstrations.
Last year the conference was split in two, organized by Science and Engineering. While people appreciated the chance to focus their time, many felt the temporal split between the programs to be arbitrary. This year we organized the sessions so that areas are, as much as possible, temporally concentrated on adjacent days. Those who wish mainly to attend sessions in a particular area can focus on just those days. Furthermore, we organized sessions to minimize conflicts with the annual meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, which overlaps on Thursday and Friday.
Paper sessions were scheduled for Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday. Tutorials were scheduled for Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday. Wednesday was a plenary session dedicated to matters of common interest. There will be a presidential address by Patrick Winston. The prizewinning papers, chosen to represent a broad variety of excellent AI work, were presented. In addition, we scheduled technical survey talks throughout the week to provide overviews of the state of the art in various of the subfields of AI. We intended these talks to be accessible to attendees who are not specialists in those subfields.
This year, 715 papers were submitted to the conference, and we accepted 149 of them. Each paper was reviewed by at least two members of the program committee. Our goal was to present only the best: well-written papers that advance the state of the art-either theoretical or applied. We explicitly rejected papers that were simply incremental advances, reimplementations of existing programs, or formalism without insights.
Kenneth Forbus and Howard Shrobe
The 1987 Best Paper Awards
The AAAI Best Paper Awards (formerly the Publishers’ Prize) were established in 1982 to recognize papers that report important, substantial research in an exemplary way. This year the Program Committee elected to select at most a single distinguished paper from each of the 16 topic areas. The intent was to provide wider exposure to outstanding work that spans the subareas of Artificial Intelligence rather than attempting to select only one or two papers.
Potential award-winning papers were nominated during the normal conference review process. Soon after the Program Committee meeting, several committee members, excluding those with nominated papers, were asked to read the entire set of nominated papers. Each of the prize committee members selected a subset of the nominated papers that he or she felt described especially important work and that were written in an outstanding fashion. The votes were tallied by several independent parties, and winners for each category clearly stood out among the rest. This year eight papers passed this rigorous additional review.
The Best Paper Awards are currently sponsored by the journal, Artificial Intelligence, published by Elsevier-North Holland. In addition to providing a cash prize, Artificial Intelligence has offered each award winner the opportunity to publish the paper in the journal without further peer review, thus assuring a speedy publication.
The Program Committee is pleased to present the 1987 AAAI Best Paper Awards for outstanding work to the following authors:
Automated Reasoning-Planning
- “Incremental Causal Reasoning”
Thomas Dean and Mark Boddy, Brown University
Commonsense Reasoning
- “An Approach to Default Reasoning Based on a First-Order Conditional Logic”
James P. Delgrande, Simon Fraser University
Engineering Problem-Solving
- “PROMPT: An Innovative Design Tool”
Seshashayee Murthy and Sanjaya Addanki, IBM T. J. Watson Research Center
Knowledge Representation
- “Curing Anomalous Extensions”
Paul Morris, IntelliCorp
Machine Architectures and Computer Languages
- “Non-Deterministic Lisp with Dependency-directed Backtracking”
Ramin Zabih, Stanford University, and David McAllester and David Chapman, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Machine Learning
- “Defining Operationality for Explanation-based Learning”
Richard Keller, Rutgers University
Natural Language Processing
- “Word-Order Variation in Natural Language Generation”
Aravind Joshi, University of Pennsylvania
Perception-Vision
- “Energy Constraints on Deformable Models: Recovering Shape and Non-Rigid Motion”
Demetri Terzopoulos, Andrew Witkin and Michael Kass, Schiumberger Palo Alto Research
AAAI-87 Organizers and Program Committee
Conference Chair
Jay M. Tenenbaum, Fairchild Camera and Instrument Corporation
Program Cochair
Kenneth Forbus (Science), University of Illinois-Urbana
Program Cochair
Howard Shrobe (Engineering), Symbolics
Associate Program Cochairs
Robert Cassels, Symbolics
Brian Faikenhainer, University of Illinois-Urbana
Steven Rowley, Symbolics
Tutorial Chair
William J. Clancey, Stanford University
Workshop Chair
Joseph Katz, The MITRE Corporation
Volunteer Coordinator
Richard Feifer, University of California, Los Angeles
Program Committee Members
James Allen, University of Rochester
Narinda Ahuju, University of Illinois-Urbana
Douglas Appelt, SRI International
David Barstow, Schlumberger Doll Research Center
Ken Bowen, Syracuse University
Rod Brooks, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Bruce Brunstein, Bolt Bernack & Newman
David Chapman, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Greg Clemenson, IntelliCorp
Paul Cohen, University of Massachusetts
Al Davis, Schlumberger Palo Alto Research
Randall Davis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Johan de Kleer, Xerox Palo Alto Research Center
Tom Dean, Brown University
Jerry DeJong, University of Illinois-Urbana
Thomas Dietterich, Oregon State University
Andy Disessa, University of California, Berkeley
Robert Filman, IntelliCorp
Joe Goguen, SRI International
Eric Grimson, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Mehdi Harandi, University of Illinois-Urbana
Peter Hart, Syntelligence
Patrick Hayes, Schlumberger Palo Alto Research
James Hollan, MCC
David Israel, SRI International
Elaine Kant, Schlumberger Doll Research Center
Joseph Katz, The Mitre Corporation
Kurt Konolige, SRI International
Richard Korf, University of California, Los Angeles
Ted Kowalski, AT&T Bell Laboratories
Ben Kuipers, University of Texas at Austin
Vipin Kumar, University of Texas at Austin
John Laird, University of Michigan
Patrick Langley, University of California, Irvine
Wendy Lehnert, University of Massachusetts
Mitch Marcus, AT&T Bell Laboratories
Tom Mitchell, Carnegie Mellon University
John Mohammed, Schlumberger Palo Alto Research
Peter Patel-Schneider, Schlumberger Palo Alto Research
Judea Pearl, University of California, Los Angeles
Sandy Pentland, SRI International
Larry Rendell, University of Illinois-Urbana
Bruce Roberts, Bolt, Bernack & Newman
Paul Rosenbloom, Stanford University
Jeffrey Schrager, Xerox Palo Alto Research Center
Len Schubert, University of Alberta
Reid Smith, Schlumberger Palo Alto Research
Guy Steele, Thinking Machines Corporation
Mark Stickel, SRI International
William Swartout, USC-Information Sciences Institute
Peter Szolovits, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
J. Martin Tenenbaum, Schlumberger Palo Alto Research
Demetri Terzopoulos, Schlumberger Palo Alto Research
David Touretzky, Carnegie Mellon University
Marc Vilain, Bolt, Bernack & Newman
Bonnie Webber, University of Pennsylvania
Robert Wilensky, University of California, Berkeley
David Wilkins, SRI International
Yorick Wilks, New Mexico State University
Brian Williams, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Chuck Williams, Inference Corporation
Robert Woodham, University of British Columbia
William Woods, Applied Expert Systems
Beverly Woolf, University of Massachusetts
Auxiliary Reviewers
Richard M. Adler
Ed Altman
Harlyn Baker
Jane E. Barnett
Scott Bennett
Dorethea Blostein
Steve Blostein
Melissa P. Chase
Steve Chien
William Clancey
Mike Coombs
Murray Daniels
Chris Debrunner
Sylvia Candelaria de Ram
Elizabeth M. Cholawsky
Eric Dietrich
Thomas A. Doehne
Adam Farquhar
David Farwell
Dan Fass
Stuart Goldkind
Andrew Haas
Barbara Hayes-Roth
Daniel Hodnett
John Hotchkiss
Daniel Huttenlocher
Vincent Hwang
Yong Hwang
W. Lewis Johnson
Lester J. Holtzblatt
Candace Kalish
Michael Kass
David Krieger
Rense Lang
Yvan A. Leclerc
Y. Lin
Steven Litvintchouk
Judith Marcet
Richard Marcotte
Chris Matheus
Paul McKevitt
Bartlett Mel
Thomas C. Mitchell
Ray Mooney
Dana Nau
H. Keith Nishihara
Louis Odette
Derek Partridge
Richard Piazza
Jordon Pollack
Bruce Porter
Curt Powley
Myra Jean Prelle
Krish Purswani
Shankar Rajamoney
Elisha Sacks
Steven Salzberg
James Schmolze
Glen Shafer
Jude Shavlik
A. Shenoy
Reid Simmons
Brian Slator
Steve Smoliar
James Stansfield
Martha Steenstrup
Baoz Super
David Voth
Dan Weld
Michael Weliman
Juyang Weng
Carl Werowinski
Andrew Witkin
Thomas Wu
Dorothy H. Yu
Monte Zweben