The Fourth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Sponsored by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence
The Fourth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-84) was held August 6–10, 1984, at the University of Texas, Austin, Texas.
We have endeavored this year to produce an interesting and variegated conference of the absolute highest technical quality. AAAI has always prided itself on its careful reviewing process and its consistent high standards for acceptance of submitted papers. With the ever-growing number of forums for presentation of work in Al, AAAI has felt that it should provide at least one place where a conference participant can be assured of getting a concentrated dose of uniformly excellent work. This partially explains the perhaps surprisingly small number of papers accepted. But, further, the size of this conference is also a result of an experiment with the structure of the conference.
To capture some of the spirit of smaller, more special-purpose conferences and workshops, we have concentrated this year’s technical papers in the first two days of the conference. Thus, the half-day “mini-conferences” of the first two days serve our primary need-that of Al researchers wanting to confer with their colleagues over specialized current work. For those interested in Al from a less technical perspective, the second two days provide more general discussions and lectures on Al topics of current interest. These plenary sessions should also be of great value to researchers deeply involved with the technical sessions, since they allow us to become current in other areas of Al or simply provide a thought-provoking counterpoint to the technical paper sessions.
As mentioned, AAAI has maintained a high quality standard in this and its three previous conferences. The careful attention paid to each paper and the fairness to all authors are products of a unique reviewing process. Each paper submitted to the conference was read by at least two members of the Program Committee (or, in a few cases, an appropriate reviewer designated by a committee member), which is a sizable body of well-respected and technically expert researchers, each of whom was strongly committed to a serious and fair review process. The fact that all reviews were done by this small group of individuals explains the length of submissions (13 manuscript pages, approximately 4000 words) this was the only way to assure that all papers were treated equally and in sufficient depth. After all of the papers were read, the entire Program Committee met face to face, and each paper was discussed until a final decision was agreed upon (when extra opinions were necessary, they were obtained; by the way, the Program Chairman read no papers and was involved in none of the decisions). Members of the committee looked for substantive work, described clearly enough to convince the reader of its potential impact. The work must also have been previously unpublished and more than a minor incremental advance over that reported in last year’s paper. All in all, the Program Committee wanted quality and substance, in whatever form they could find it.
So, as a result, this conference consisted of the highest-quality short papers on the most important work in Al. The Program Committee members are to be congratulated and thanked for their substantial, dedicated, and tireless effort to make this a superb conference. We hope that you enjoy the fruits of our combined labor.
The 1984 Publisher’s Prize
The AAAI Publisher’s Prize, established in 1982, recognizes papers that, in addition to reporting important, substantial research, present the research in an exemplary way. This year, twelve papers on important work were selected by the Program Committee during the normal conference review process. Soon after the Program Committee meeting, each member of the committee, excluding the Chairman and the one committee member with a nominated paper, was asked to read the entire set of nominated papers. Each committee member selected the subset of papers that s/he felt to be written in an outstanding fashion (it was felt that, given the breadth of the field, choosing a single “best” paper would be impossible). The votes were tallied by several independent parties, and one group of four papers very clearly stood out from the rest.
This year, then, the Program Committee is pleased to award the Publisher’s Prize for outstanding papers jointly to the following authors:
- Ronald J. Brachman and Hector J. Levesque, both of the Fairchild Laboratory for Artificial Intelligence Research, Palo Alto, California, for “The Tractability of Subsumption in FrameBased Description Languages.” This paper was submitted under the topic of Knowledge Representation and appears on pages 34-37 of the AAAI-04 Proceedings.
- Johan de Kleer, of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, Palo Alto, California, for “Choices Without Backtracking.” This paper was submitted under Automated Reasoning (ProblemSolving) and appears on pages 79-85 of the AAAI-04 Proceedings.
- Hector J. Levesque, for “A Logic of Implicit and Explicit Belief.” This paper was submitted under Knowledge Representation and appears on pages 198-202 of the AAAI-04 Proceedings.
- Alex P Pentland, of SRI International, Menlo Park, California, for “Shading Into Texture.” This paper was submitted under Perception (Vision) and appears on pages 269-273 of the AAAI-04 Proceedings.
The cash portion of the Publisher’s Prize for 1984 was donated by The MIT Press.
We would also like to congratulate the authors of the other nominated papers for their excellent work:
- A. Blake, “Reconstructing a Visible Surface” (Perception), pages 23-26.
- William J. Clancey, Classification Problem Solving (Expert Systems), pages 49-55.
- Garrison W. Cottrell, A Model of Lexical Access of Ambiguous Words (Cognitive Modeling), pages 61-67.
- Graeme Hirst, A Semantic Process for Syntactic Disambiguation (Natural Language), pages 148-152.
- John E. Laird, Paul S. Rosenbloom, and Allen Newell, Towards Chunking as a General Learning Mechanism (Learning), pages 188-192.
- Pat Langley and Stellan Ohlsson, Automated Cognitive Modeling (Cognitive Modeling), pages 193-197.
- Jock Mackinlay and Michael R. Genesereth, Expressiveness of Languages (Knowledge Representation), pages 226-232.
- Stephen J. Westfold, Very-High-Level Programming of Knowledge Representation Schemes (Knowledge Representation), pages 344-349.
AAAI-84 Organizers and Program Committee
Conference Chair
Jay M. Tenenbaum, Fairchild Camera and Instrument Corporation
Program Chair
Ronald J. Brachman, Fairchild Camera and Instrument Corporation
Tutorial Chair
Douglas Lenat, Stanford University
Local Arrangements
Elaine Rich
Volunteer Coordinator
David Touretzky
Program Committee Members
Ronald J. Brachman (Chairman), Fairchild Camera and Instrument Corporation ◊
Kenneth Bowen, Syracuse University ◊
Rodney Brooks, Stanford University ◊
Jaime G. Carbonell, Carnegie-Mellon University ◊
Richard Fikes, Intellicorp, Inc. ◊
Michael Genesereth, Stanford University ◊
Barbara J. Grosz, SRI International ◊
Benjamin Kuipers, Tufts University ◊
Wendy Lehnert, University of Massachusetts ◊
Douglas Lenat, Stanford University ◊
John D. Lowrance, SRI International ◊
Drew McDermott, Yale University ◊
John McDermott, Carnegie-Mellon University ◊
Tom Mitchell, Rutgers University ◊
John Mylopoulos, University of Toronto ◊
Judea Pearl, University of California At Los Angeles ◊
Stan Rosenschein, SRI International ◊
Lenhart K. Schubert, University of Alberta ◊
Howard Shrobe, Symbolics, Inc. ◊
Mark Stefik, Xerox Palo Alto Research Center ◊
Albert Stevens, BBN Laboratories ◊
William R. Swartout, USC Information Sciences Institute ◊
Peter Szolovits, Massachusetts Institute of Technology ◊
John K. Tsotsos, University of Toronto ◊
Kurt Van Lehn, erox Palo Alto Research Center ◊
Bonnie Lynn Webber, University of Pennsylvania ◊
Andy Witkin, Fairchild Camera and Instrument Corporation
Additional Reviewers
Doug Appelt ◊ Klaus Berkling ◊ P. Bruce Berra ◊ Robert Bolles ◊ Lee Brownston ◊ Nick J. Cercone ◊ Norman Dalkey ◊ Al Davis ◊ Rina Dechter ◊ Michael Deering ◊ Bruce Delagi ◊ Larry Eshelman ◊ Scott E. Fahlman ◊ David Fleet ◊ Randy Goebel ◊ Neil Goldman ◊ Kevin J. Greene ◊ Peter E. Hart ◊ Paul Horstmann ◊ Allan Jepson ◊ Gary Kahn ◊ Jin Kim ◊ Gary E. Kopec ◊ Hector J. Levesque ◊ Richard F. Lyon ◊ William Mann ◊ Mitchell P Marcus ◊ Sandra Marcus ◊ Gordon McCalla ◊ David McKeown ◊ Gerard Michon ◊ John L. Mohammed ◊ Robert C. Moore ◊ F. Lockwood Morris ◊ Jack Mostow ◊ Nils Nilsson ◊ Ramesh S. Patil ◊ Alex Pentland ◊ Fernando Pereira ◊ David Poole ◊ Lynn Quam ◊ Edwina Rissland ◊ Ronald L. Rivest ◊ Igor Roizen ◊ Chuck Seitz ◊ Stuart C. Shapiro ◊ Dick Sites ◊ Mark Stickel ◊ Hans Uszkoreit ◊ Richard Waldinger ◊ David H. D. Warren ◊ David Wile ◊ George Wood
For more information about AAAI–84, please consult the following:
- Conference proceedings.
- List of papers (with links to abstracts) presented at the conference.