symposium announcement

[Michael Jordan]

	Control of the Physical World by Intelligent Agents
		     AAAI 1994 Fall Symposium

                        November 4-6, 1994
            The Monteleone Hotel, New Orleans, Louisiana

                      Call for Participation

The Problem

An intelligent agent, interacting with the physical world, must cope
with a wide range of demands.  Different scientific and engineering
disciplines, with different abstractions of the world, have found
different "pieces of the puzzle" for the problem of how the agent can
successfully control its world.  These disciplines include:

  - AI
     = qualitative reasoning
     = planning
     = machine learning
     = intelligently guided numerical simulation
  - control theory 
  - dynamical systems
  - fault diagnosis
  - fuzzy logic and systems
  - neural nets
  - computer vision
  - robotics

The goal of this symposium is to attempt to understand the puzzle as a
whole, by bringing together researchers with experience assembling two
or more pieces.  The emphasis will be on learning from successful
projects in this area that exploit results or methods from several
disciplines.


Communication

Abstractly, the important questions will be:
 - What are the strengths and weaknesses of each piece of the puzzle?
 - How do we put together two pieces to exploit their strengths and
   avoid their weaknesses?
 - How do we reconcile the different conceptual frameworks to make
   different approaches mutually comprehensible?

In order to make our discussions mutually comprehensible, participants
should relate their work to one of a small number of everyday tasks:
 - vacuuming the floors in an ordinary house, coping with furniture, pets,
   trash, etc.
 - controlling a process such as a pressure-cooker, including set-up,
   start-up, normal operation, anticipating and handling emergencies,
   shut-down, and clean-up.
 - automated driving of a car through city and/or highway traffic,
   including learning spatial structure and using maps.
 - learning to understand and control one's own sensory-motor system,
   including seeing, grabbing, walking, running, bicycling, juggling, etc.


Format: The symposium will be organized around a few presentations and
lots of discussion.  In some sessions, a successful project will be
presented and critiqued.  In others, a problem will be posed, and
relevant contributions collected and evaluated.

The working papers will be distributed (we hope) in advance, so
participants can familiarize themselves with each others' positions
before the symposium.  We expect conversations of the form:
 - "What problem are you working on?"
 - "Why is that important?"
 - "How can I help you?"
 - "How can you help me?"

Attendance: Attendance at the workshop will be limited.  Some
attention will be given to balance among areas, but the primary
criteria will be successful synthesis of multiple approaches to
intelligent agenthood, and ability of the participant to communicate
across discipline boundaries.

In addition to invited participants, a limited number of other
interested parties will be able to register in each symposium on a
first-come, first-served basis.  Registration will be available by
mid-July 1994.  To obtain registration information write to the AAAI
at 445 Burgess Drive, Menlo Park, CA 94025 (fss at aaai.org).

Submission requirements: Papers should focus on one of the above
everyday tasks (or a task of similar familiarity and concreteness).
It would be helpful to include a glossary of key concepts to help
bring the reader into your conceptual framework.  Five copies of either
full papers (twenty pages max) or short position papers (five pages
max) should be sent to:

	Benjamin Kuipers
	Co-chair, AAAI Intelligent Agent Workshop 
	Computer Sciences Department
	University of Texas at Austin
	Austin, Texas 78712 USA

Dates:
 -  Submissions due:     April 15, 1994.
 -  Notification by:     May 17, 1994.
 -  Final versions due:  August 19, 1994. 


Workshop committee:
	Benjamin Kuipers, University of Texas, co-chair;
	Lyle Ungar, University of Pennsylvania, co-chair;
	Piero Bonnisone, General Electric;
	Jim Hendler, University of Maryland;
	Michael Jordan, MIT.


Sponsored by the
	American Association for Artificial Intelligence
	     445 Burgess Drive, Menlo Park, CA 94025
	     (415) 328-3123		fss at aaai.org