The Seventh National Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Sponsored by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence
The Seventh National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-88) was held August 21–26, 1988, in Saint Paul, Minnesota.
Over the past few years, AAAI has experimented with separate conference sessions for science and engineering contributions, as a means of structuring presentations. Based on feedback from conference participants, we came to the conclusion that this distinction is just one of many possible dichotomies for characterizing work in our field. Therefore, this years conference is once again structured solely around the technical subareas (e.g., computer vision, knowledge representation) that constitute the primary distinctions among immediate goals of researchers and practitioners.
We are at an important point in the history of our discipline. Over the past few years we have witnessed a rapid expansion of commercial interest and application of techniques developed through the preceding decade of research. This commercial interest has significantly broadened our perspective and has deepened our understanding of methods that had previously been tested only in the laboratory. It has resulted in extensions to these techniques. It has also heightened awareness of the importance of the many basic research issues that have yet to be addressed. Whatever the cause, the field now seems to be embarked on a new examination of fundamental issues of intelligence research which will provide a needed balance to advances in the state of Al practice.
A further significant trend that we have seen is the appearance of many small, informal workshops in specialized areas of Al. This represents an extremely healthy response to the growing size and diversity of the field. Such workshops provide opportunities for highbandwidth, informal exchange of new ideas and conjectures in rapidly developing subareas. As such, they complement the presentation of more mature research results in the proceedings and conference sessions. We are pleased to see that the number of such workshops held in conjunction with the conference has grown from 7 in 1986 to 20 this year. We expect these workshops to add significantly to the spirit of technical exchange among all conference attendees.
Of the 850 submissions to the conference this year, we accepted 148. Each paper was reviewed by at least two members of the program committee. Our goal is to present the best: wellwritten papers that advance the state of the art, either theoretical or experimental.
Artificial Intelligence is a vital discipline, with new directions, results, ideas, and people. We believe this conference captures the energy and intellectual excitement of the individuals working in the field.
Reid G. Smith and Tom M. Mitchell
The 1988 Best Paper Awards
The AAAI Best Paper Awards, established in 1982, recognize papers that report important, substantial research in an exemplary manner. This year 148 papers were selected by the Program Committee during the normal conference review process. Of these papers, eleven were nominated for the 1988 Best Paper Award. Soon after the Program Committee Meeting, several members of the Committee were asked to read all of the nominated papers and to indicate which of the nominated papers they felt deserved the 1988 Best Paper Award. As a result, two clear winners were identified.
This year the Program Committee Is pleased to award the Best Paper Award to the following authors:
- Steven Minton, Carnegie Mellon University, for “Qualitative Results Concerning the Utility of Explanation-Based Learning”
- Brian C. Williams, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for “MINIMA: A Symbolic Approach to Qualitative Algebraic Reasoning”
The Best Paper Awards are sponsored by the editorial board of the journal Artificial Intelligence. In addition to providing a cash prize, Artificial Intelligence has offered each award winner the opportunity to publish a revised version of the paper in the journal. The Program Committee is also pleased to recognize the nine additional outstanding papers which were nominated for the 1988 Best Paper Award.
- Jonathan Amsterdam, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for “Some Philosophical Problems with Formal Learning Theory”
- Brian Falkenhainer and Kenneth D. Forbus, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, for “Setting up Large-Scale Qualitative Models”
- John J. Grefenstette, Naval Research Laboratory, for “Credit Assignment in Genetic Learning Systems”
- Leslie Pack Kaelbling, SRI International and Stanford University, for “Goals as Parallel Program Specifications”
- Benjamin J. Kulpers and Yung-Tal Byun, University of Texas at Austin, for “A Robust, Qualitative Method for Robot Spatial Learning”
- Mark F. Orelup, John R. Dixon and Paul R. Cohen, University of Massachusetts Amherst, and Melvin K. Simmons, General Electric Corporate Research and Development, for “Dominic II: Meta-Level Control in Iterative Redesign”
- David B. Searls, Unisys Paoli Research Center, for “Representing Genetic Information with Formal Grammars”
- Reid G. Simmons, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for “A Theory of Debugging Plans and Interpretations”
- L.G. Valiant, Harvard University, for “Functionality in Neural Nets”
AAAI-88 Organizers and Program Committee
Conference Chair
Howard Shrobe, Symbolics, Inc.
Program Cochairs
Tom Mitchell, Carnegie Mellon University
Reid Smith, Schlumberger Palo Alto Research
Program Associate Cochairs
Peter Patel-Schneider, Schlumberger Palo Alto Research
Jeffrey Schllmmer, Carnegie Mellon University
Tutorial Chair
Mark Fox, Carnegie Mellon University
Workshop Chair
Joseph Katz, MITRE Corporation
Local Arrangements Cochairs
Gary Stroick, Knowledge Designs, Inc. and Karen Ryan, Honeywell
Volunteer Coordinator
Richard Feifer, University of California, Los Angeles
Program Committee Members
Jan Aikins, AION Corporation ◊
Steven Barnard, SRI International ◊
Harry Barrow, Schlumberger Palo Alto Research ◊
Madeleine Bates, BBN Laboratories ◊
James Bennett, Coherent Thought ◊
Bruce Buchanan, University of Pittsburgh ◊
John Canny, University of California, Berkeley ◊
Robert Cassels, Symbolics, Inc. ◊
Eugene Charniak, Brown University ◊
William Clancey, Xerox Palo Alto Research Center ◊
Greg Clemenson, IntelliCorp ◊
Paul Cohen, University of Massachusetts ◊
Phil Cohen, SRI International ◊
Greg Cooper, Stanford University ◊
Tom Dean, Brown University ◊
Gerald Dejong, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign ◊
Johan de Kleer, Xerox Palo Alto Research Center ◊
Tom Dietterich, Oregon State University ◊
Jon Doyle, Carnegie Mellon University ◊
David Etherington, AT&T Bell Laboratories ◊
Brian Falkenhainer, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign ◊
Steve Fickas, University of Oregon ◊
Richard Fikes, Price-Waterhouse ◊
Gerhard Fischer, University of Colorado ◊
Ken Forbus, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign ◊
Peter Friedland, NASA Ames Research Center ◊
Eric Grimsori, Massachusetts Institute of Technology ◊
Anoop Gupta, Stanford University ◊
Peter Hart, Syntelligence ◊
David Haussler, University of California, Santa Cruz ◊
Patrick Hayes, Xerox Palo Alto Research Center ◊
Barbara Hayes-Roth, Stanford University ◊
David Israel, SRI International ◊
Lewis Johnson, USC-Information Sciences Institute ◊
Gary Kahn, Carnegie Group, Inc. ◊
Takeo Kanade, Carnegie Mellon University ◊
Henry Kautz, AT&T Bell Laboratories ◊
Richard Keller, Stanford University ◊
Tom Knight, Massachusetts Institute of Technology ◊
Janet Kolodner, Georgia Institute of Technology ◊
Kurt Konolige, SRI International ◊
Benjamin Kuipers, University of Texas at Austin ◊
Vipin Kumar, University of Texas at Austin ◊
Peter Ladkin, Kestrel Institute ◊
John Laird, University of Michigan ◊
Pat Langley, University of California, Irvine ◊
Amy Lansky, SRI International ◊
Victor Lesser, University of Massachusetts ◊
Hector Levesque, University of Toronto ◊
Vladimir Lifschitz, Stanford University ◊
Ron Loui, University of Rochester ◊
Mitch Marcus, University of Pennsylvania ◊
William Mark, Lockheed AI Laboratory ◊
John McDermott, Digital Equipment Corp. ◊
Jack Mostow, Rutgers University ◊
Ramesh Patil, Massachusetts Institute of Technology ◊
Ira PohI, University of California, Santa Cruz ◊
Bruce Porter, University of Texas at Austin ◊
Brian Reiser, Princeton University ◊
Chris Riesbeck, Yale University ◊
Paul Rosenbloom, University of Southern California ◊
Stuart Russell, University of California, ◊
Berkeley Terrance Sejnowski, Johns Hopkins University ◊
Glen Shafer, University of Kansas ◊
Jeff Shrager, Xerox Palo Alto Research Center ◊
Yoav Shoham, Stanford University ◊
Howard Shrobe, Symbolics, Inc. ◊
Candy Sidner, BBN Laboratories ◊
Robert Stepp, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign ◊
Mark Stickel, SRI International ◊
William Swartout, USC-Information Sciences Institute ◊
David Touretzky, Carnegie Mellon University ◊
Paul Utgoff, University of Massachusetts ◊
Mike Wellman, Massachusetts Institute of Technology ◊
Andy Witkin, Schlumberger Palo Alto Research Center
Local Arrangements Committee
Leone Barnett, Brad Beneke, Bonnie Bennett, Dave Berquist, Elisa Collin, Jodi Dahien, John Dolejsi, Glenn Galen, Sharon Garber, Maria Gin, George Hadden, Alicia Hedren, Ron Joy, Kit Ketchum, Gary Kinser, Paul Krueger, Raymond Larson, Stephen Mundy, Becky Root, Tariq Samad, Jerene Schmidt, Jim Slagle, Dave Weldon
For more information about AAAI–88, please consult the following:
- Conference proceedings.
- List of papers (with links to abstracts) presented at the conference.
- 1988 program (PDF).