The Sixth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence
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 the construction and understanding of intelligent artifacts, neither component can stand alone. Both aspects of AI are represented in this conference. The scientific papers stress the computational principles underlying cognition and perception in man and machine. The engineering papers highlight the pragmatic issues that arise in building and applying AI systems, providing both 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 have organized the sessions so that areas are, as much as possible, temporally concentrated in 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 are scheduled for Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday. Tutorials are scheduled for Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday. Wednesday is 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, will be presented. In addition, we have scheduled technical survey talks throughout the week, to provide overviews of the state of the art in various of the subfields of AI. We intend 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 is 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 members of the committee, 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 to describe especially important work and that are 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 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, Massachussetts 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
For more information about AAAI–87, please consult the following:
- Conference proceedings.
- List of papers (with links to abstracts) presented at the conference.