AI Journal

[Phil Agre]

Stan Rosenschein and I are editing a special issue of the AI Journal on
"Computational Theories of Interaction and Agency".  We started from the
observation that a wide variety of people in AI and cognitive science are
using principled characterizations of interactions between agents and their
environments to guide their theorizing and designing and modeling.  Some
connectionist projects I've heard about fit this description as well, and
people engaged in such projects would be most welcome to contribute articles
to our special issue.  I've enclosed the call for papers.  Please feel free 
to pass it along to anyone who might be interested.  And I can send further
details to anyone who's curious.

Thanks very much.

Phil Agre, UCSD




Artificial Intelligence: An International Journal

Special Issue on Computational Theories of Interaction and Agency

Edited by Philip E. Agre (UC San Diego) and 
          Stanley J. Rosenschein (Teleos Research)

Call for Papers


Recent computational research has greatly deepened our understanding of
agents' interactions with their environments.  The first round of research 
in this area developed `situated' and `reactive' architectures that interact
with their environments in a flexible way.  These `environments', however,
were characterized in very general terms, and often purely negatively, as
`uncertain', `unpredictable', and the like.  In the newer round of research,
psychologists and engineers are using sophisticated characterizations of
agent-environment interactions to motivate explanatory theories and design
rationales.  This research opens up a wide variety of new issues for
computational research.  But more fundamentally, it also suggests a revised
conception of computation itself as something that happens in an agent's
involvements in its world, and not just in the abstractions of its thought.

The purpose of this special issue of Artificial Intelligence is to draw
together the remarkable variety of computational research that has recently
been developing along these lines.  These include:

 * Task-level robot sensing and action strategies, as well as projects
   that integrate classical robot dynamics with symbolic reasoning.

 * Automata-theoretic formalizations of agent-environment interactions.

 * Studies of "active vision" and related projects that approach perception
   within the broader context of situated activity.

 * Theories of the social conventions and dynamics that support activity.

 * Foundational analyses of situated computation.

 * Models of learning that detect regularities in the interactions between 
   an agent and its environment. 

This list is only representative and could easily be extended to include
further topics in robotics, agent architectures, artificial life, reactive
planning, distributed AI, human-computer interaction, cognitive science, and
other areas.  What unifies these seemingly disparate research projects is
their emerging awareness that the explanation and design of agents depends 
on principled characterizations of the interactions between those agents and
their environments.  We hope that this special issue of the AI Journal will
clarify trends in this new research and take a first step towards a synthesis.
The articles in the special issue will probably also be reprinted in a book to
be published by MIT Press.

The deadline for submitted articles is 1 September 1992.  Send articles to:

  Philip E. Agre
  Department of Communication D-003
  University of California, San Diego
  La Jolla, California  92093-0503

Queries about the special issue may be sent to the above address or to
pagre at weber.ucsd.edu.  Prospective contributors are encouraged to contact
the editors well before the deadline.