One reason why Distributed AI (DAI) technology has been deployed in relatively few real-size applications is that it lacks a clear and implementable model of cooperative problem solving which specifies how agents should operate and interact in complex, dynamic and unpredictable environments. As a consequence of the experience gained whilst building a number of DAI systems for industrial applications, a new principled model of cooperation has been developed. This model, called Joint Responsibility, has the notion of joint intentions at its core. It specifies pre-conditions which must be attained before collaboration can commence and prescribes how individuals should behave both when joint activity is progressing satisfactorily and also when it runs into difficulty. The theoretical model has been used to guide the implementation of a general-purpose cooperation framework and the qualitative and quantitative benefits of this implementation have been assessed through a series of comparativ...

Our goal is to understand and build comprehensive agents that function effectively in challenging niches. In particular, we identify a class of niches to be occupied by "adaptive intelligent systems (AISs)." In contrast with niches occupied by typical AI agents, AIS niches present situations that vary dynamically along several key dimensions: different combinations of required tasks, different configurations of available resources, contextual conditions ranging from benign to stressful, and different performance criteria. We present a small class hierarchy of AIS niches that exhibit these dimensions of variability and describe a particular AIS niche, ICU (intensive care unit) patient monitoring, which we use for illustration throughout the paper. To function effectively throughout the range of situations presented by an AIS niche, an agent must be highly adaptive. In contrast with the rather stereotypic behavior of typical AI agents, an AIS must adapt several key aspects of its behavio...

interpreter for logic programs (Sterling & Shapiro, 1986)...................138 1 1. INTRODUCTION The most important outcome of AI research during the 70s was the general acceptance of the major role of knowledge in intelligent systems (Buchanan & Feigenbaum, 1982). Lenat and Feigenbaum (1989) call this belief the knowledge as power hypothesis and assert it as: "The knowledge principle (KP) A system exhibits intelligent understanding and action at a high level of competence primarily because of the specific knowledge that it can bring to bear: the concepts, facts, representations, methods, models, metaphors, and heuristics about its domain of endeavor." Or as Buchanan and Feigenbaum (Buchanan & Feigenbaum, 1982) put it, "the power of an intelligent program to perform its task well depends primarily on the quantity and quality of knowledge it has about that task." Thus, it is not surprising that the general attitude toward knowledge was a greedy one - grab as much knowledge as you ca...

Narrative structure models are useful tools for understand-ing how and why narratives of any medium affect an audi-ence’s level of participation in their role of story reconstruc-tion and understanding. [14] With the advent of the com-puter comes the potential to negotiate through many such models and variables within models as a means of generat-ing multiple narratives quickly and semi-autonomously. The computational narrative model presented in this paper offers one approach to narrative generation, that of splitting narrative structure; 2) defining a collection and organization of story pieces with some representation of their meaning; and 3) a navigational strategy or reasoning through that col-lection of story pieces. Agent Stories is a story design and presentation environment for non-linear, multiple-point-of-view cinematic stories. It is designed to be placed in the hands of the non-linear story writer to use as a tool to pro-mote structuring and re-writing of non-linear narratives be-fore and as they are realized in audio and video.

In recent years two main technologies for knowledge sharing and reuse have emerged: ontologies and problem solving methods (PSMs). Ontologies specify reusable conceptualizations which can be shared by multiple reasoning components communicating during a problem solving process. PSMs describe in a domain-independent way the generic reasoning steps and knowledge types needed to perform a task. Typically PSMs are specified in a task-specific fashion, using modelling frameworks which describe their control and inference structures as well as their knowledge requirements and competence. In this paper we discuss a novel approach to PSM specification, which is based on the use of formal ontologies. In particular our specifications abstract from control, data flow and other dynamic aspects of PSMs to focus on the logical theory associated with a PSM (method ontology). This approach concentrates on the competence and knowledge requirements of a PSM, rather than internal control de...

According to an "external grounding" theory of meaning, a concept's meaning depends on its connection to the external world. By a "conceptual web" account, a concept's meaning depends on its relations to other concepts within the same system. We explore one aspect of meaning, the identification of matching concepts across systems (e.g. people, theories, or cultures). We present a computational algorithm called ABSURDIST (Aligning Between Systems Using Relations Derived Inside Systems for Translation) that uses only within-system similarity relations to find between-system translations. While illustrating the sufficiency of a conceptual web account for translating between systems, simulations of ABSURDIST also indicate powerful synergistic interactions between intrinsic, within-system information and extrinsic information. q 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.

. This paper suggests that a distinction between knowledge acquisition methods should be made. On the one hand there are methods which aim to help the expert and knowledge engineer analyse what knowledge is involved in solving a particular type of problem and how this problem solving is carried out. These methods are concerned with classifying the different types of problem solving and providing tools and methods to help the knowledge engineer identify the appropriate approach and ensure nothing is omitted.. A different approach to knowledge acquisition focuses on ensuring incremental addition of validated knowledge as mistakes are discovered (validated knowledge here means only that the earlier performance of the system is not degraded by the addition of new knowledge). The organisation of this knowledge is managed by the system rather than the expert and knowledge engineer. This would seem to correspond to human incremental development of expertise. From this perspective...

Causal reconstruction is the task of reading a written causal description of a physical behavior, forming an internal model of the described activity, and demonstrating comprehension through question answering. This task is difficult because written descriptions often do not specify exactly how referenced events fit together. This article (1) characterizes the causal reconstruction problem, (2) presents a representation called transition space, which portrays events in terms of "transitions," or collections of changes expressible in everydaylanguage, and (3) describes a program called PATHFINDER, which uses the transition space representation to perform causal reconstruction on simplified English descriptions of physical activity.PATHFINDER works byidentifying partial matches between the representations of events and using these matches to form causal chains, fill causal gaps, and merge overlapping accounts of activity. By applying transformations to events prior to matching, PATHFINDER is also able to handle a range of discontinuities arising from a writer's use of analogy or abstraction.

This paper is about the philosophical and methodological foundation of artificial intelligence (AI). After discussing what is a good "working definition", "intelligence" is defined as "the ability for an information processing system to adapt to its environment with insufficient knowledge and resources". Applying the definition to a reasoning system, we get the major components of Non-Axiomatic Reasoning System (NARS), which isasymbolic logic implemented in a computer system, and has many interesting properties that are closely related to intelligence. The definition also clari es the difference and relationship between AI and other disciplines, such as computer science. Finally, the definition is compared with other popular definitions of intelligence, and its advantages are argued.

This thesis is concerned with the development of an under-lying model of memory to support selective case retrieval for case-based reasoning. The major requirements are that retrieval should be highly flexible yet efficient. The traditional approach of "indexing" is rejected as being too restrictive while more flexible approaches in analogical reasoning are generally too computationally expensive. Several important organisational principles are developed in the memory model. A network representation is advocated with a number of required extensions; such as multi-granular representation, context-based segregation and a statistically-based grading of paths. The organisation of memory offers the potential for the serial performance of a number of retrieval tasks that have previously only been addressed by assuming a massively parallel implementation. The retrieval mechanism developed is a novel activation passing technique that creates a gradation of stored cases during retrieval. Empiri...