From: geller@vienna.njit.edu (james geller)
Newsgroups: fj.mail-lists.parallel
Subject: CFP: Massive Parallelism in AI
Date: 11 Sep 92 12:19:05 GMT
Distribution: fj

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* Call for Papers: AAAI Spring Symposium on             *
* Innovative Applications of Massive Parallelism (in AI)*
* Stanford University,  March 23 - March 25, 1993.      *
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Description
-----------
Artificial Intelligence, in many respects, has not met the expectations of
the scientific, defense, and business communities.  Frustration with the
problems of the knowledge-based, symbolic approach that was firmly
established in the AI community in the 70's and early 80's has lead some
researchers to return to low-level connectionist and artificial neural
approaches.  It has become clear, though, that neither the symbolic nor the
sub-symbolic approach will offer, any time soon, a complete solution to the
problems of AI.

The eighties were also marked by the development of commercially viable 
new hardware designs that made use of massive parallelism.  Such machines 
are characterized as having processor resources that are relatively 
abundant compared to the size of the target problem. Typically, the 
processors in massively parallel machines number in the thousands.

So far, experiences in this area indicate that both symbolic and
connectionist approaches can benefit from massively parallel
implementation. Symbolically oriented massively parallel AI implementations 
combine the elegance of established formalisms of fields such as knowledge
representation and search with the brute force of the underlying hardware
and the comfort of a fully developed programming environment.  Neural network 
simulators can benefit from implementation on massively parallel hardware.

The purpose of this symposium is to bring together researchers in
different areas of Artificial Intelligence who are working in a
paradigm using massive parallelism.  We are especially interested in massively 
parallel search, knowledge representation, information retrieval, actor systems,
natural language processing, constraint satisfaction, genetic algorithms, 
expert systems, and neural network realizations.  However, the symposium 
is open to any innovative approach to using massive parallelism for AI systems.
The objective of the symposium is to exchange ideas and stimulate further 
research in how massively parallel computing can benefit AI.

Organizing Committee:
---------------------
Gul Agha (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
Matt Evett (University of Maryland)
James Geller (chair) (New Jersey Institute of Technology)
Hiroaki Kitano (CMU and NEC)
Curt Powley (UCLA)
Dave Waltz (Thinking Machines Corp. and Brandeis University)

Submission Information
-----------------------
To be considered for invitation to the symposium on
``Innovative Applications of Massive Parallelism,''
please submit either an extended abstract or a position statement 
on the subject of the symposium.  Submissions should be 10 pages or less 
(10pt, double-spaced).  THREE HARDCOPIES should be sent BY October 16, 1992 to:

James Geller 
New Jersey Institute of Technology 
CIS Department 
University Heights 
Newark, NJ 07102

A cover letter with author(s), title, affiliation(s), contact address, 
phone, and email address should be included.  Work in progress is acceptable.  
Abstracts of recently published papers or papers submitted concurrently to 
other conferences are acceptable but this fact should be mentioned in the 
cover letter.

All submissions will be reviewed by the program committee.
The usual academic review criteria will be applied, such as 
relevance to the topic, originality, correctness, readability,
and connectedness to the published literature.  
The authors of accepted submissions will be asked to supply us
with their manuscripts in an electronic format (preferably latex).

In accordance with the policies of the Spring Symposium series,
accepted submissions will be made available to participants as working notes.
No other publication is planned.  If we receive a sufficient number of 
previously unpublished submissions, authors of selected papers may be 
invited to submit extended versions of their manuscripts for later 
publication as a book.  
-- 
 James Geller / New Jersey Institute of Technology / CIS Department
 323 Dr. King Blvd. / Newark, NJ 07102
 email: geller@hertz.njit.edu / fax: (201) 596-5777  
 voice:  (201) 596-3383 / messages: (201) 596-3366