HDTenEightyP/NetNews huggingface dataset:
From: rapaport@acsu.buffalo.edu (William J. Rapaport)
Newsgroups: comp.ai,comp.ai.edu,sci.cognitive
Subject: Re: B.S. Degree
Date: 19 Nov 92 20:22:09 GMT
Organization: State University of New York at Buffalo/Comp Sci

In article <1992Nov18.033642.12612@galileo.cc.rochester.edu> wfsq_ltd@uhura.cc.rochester.edu (Billy the Kidd) writes:
>
>	I am currently in the process of pettitioning to get a B.S. degree in
>Cognitive Science, as it is currently only offered as a B.A..  Much of my
>curriculum consists of Computer Science, Elec. Engineering, and Math/Physics
>courses - and for this reason I am curious as to why it is labeled an arts
>degree, and not a science degree.  

At Buffalo, we are instituting a BA in cognitive science through our
"special majors" program.

But, in any case, why do you think it matters whether your degree says
"BS" or "BA"?  Do you think one is "better" than the other?  When I was
an undergrad at Rochester, many years ago, I got a BA in math; there
were no BSs in math.  We looked "down" (for no good reason) on the BS
degrees that the *engineers* got.  Here at Buffalo, the computer science
BS degree requires more math and CS than the BA computer science degree.
I urge most students to go for the BA, since it requires them to know
something besides CS and math.  At MIT, I'm told, English majors get a
BS in English, so I'm not sure that what the degree is called really
matters.
			William J. Rapaport
			Associate Professor of Computer Science
			and
			Center for Cognitive Science

Dept. of Computer Science||internet:  rapaport@cs.buffalo.edu
SUNY Buffalo		 ||bitnet:    rapaport@sunybcs.bitnet
Buffalo, NY 14260	 ||uucp: {rutgers,uunet}!cs.buffalo.edu!rapaport
(716) 645-3193, 3180     ||fax:  (716) 645-3464
From: srt@aero.org (Scott R. Turner)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: How to pick a grad school
Date: 16 Nov 92 17:28:32 GMT
Organization: The Aerospace Corporation, El Segundo, CA
NNTP-Posting-Host: sun-marino.aero.org

ginsberg@t.Stanford.EDU (Matthew L. Ginsberg) writes:
>What graduate school teaches you that you can't learn anywhere else
>is to be a scientist.  And the person you learn that from, more than
>anyone else, is your faculty advisor.
>
>Of course, this isn't to say that an advisor has no responsibilities
>in these other areas.  But if the single irreplaceable thing you will
>learn from your advisor is to be a scientist, you should -- probably --
>select him more on that basis than on others.

Right.  What I mean to say is that if your advisor can't teach, the
only way you can learn to be a scientist from him is by example.  And
that's not a good situation; there are many students who simply won't
be able to learn to be a good scientist by example.

I think that most students who fail to complete their Ph.D.s could
have done so under a different advisor/different circumstances.  I
think an important question to ask when selecting an advisor/school is
"Will I finish, and will I finish in a timely manner?"  Is it better
to drop out under a brilliant researcher who is a crummy teacher, or
to finish under a good researcher who is also a good teacher?

I also wanted to second Ehud's very good advice about examining your
reasons and goals for being in graduate school.  You should be in
graduate school for your own personal edification.  You're unlikely to
get anything more out of it.

						-- Scott T.
From: jacobsen@itexjct.jct.ac.il (Joel Jacobsen)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Alice in wonderland, written in an AI language?
Date: 15 Nov 92 17:14:08 GMT
Organization: ITEX, Jerusalem, Israel


 Some month ago, I've seen on the net the book 'Alice in wonderland' 
written completly in an AI programming language (lisp or prolog, I think..).

 I forgot where it is.

 Is someone know anything about it?

            Joel
From: srt@aero.org (Scott R. Turner)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: How to pick a grad school
Date: 16 Nov 92 16:37:04 GMT
Organization: The Aerospace Corporation, El Segundo, CA
NNTP-Posting-Host: sun-marino.aero.org

I believe that the very best thing you can do to help select a
graduate school is to talk to the grad students at your prospective
choices.  Faculty, publications and so on are all good indicators of
the quality of work being done at a school, but that should not be
your only barometer of choice.

The graduate students - particularly ones who've been around 4-5 years
- will give you the straight scoop on what it's like to be a graduate
student in the department:  Is there support available?  Is there
office space available?  Machines?  Is there a sense of community?
Are the degree requirements difficult or onerous?  Is the staff hard
to work with?  Are the faculty accessible?  Do people graduate in a
timely manner?

You can't tell any of these things from the outside of a dept., or
from what the dept. will tell you.  You read in the literature that a
dept. has over a hundred workstations and assume that it will be easy
to get access to one - but you don't read that eighty of them are tied
up in faculty offices or dedicated laboratories, and the other twenty
are shared by 80% of the graduate students.  Or you see that there are
three great faculty members in the dept, but you don't know that two
of them have been on sabbatical 2 quarters out of 3 for the past three
years and that the other is no longer doing active research.  This is
the kind of information you can find out from the current grad
students. 

Two other notes to prospective graduate students:

	(1) Being a graduate student is not like being an
	    undergraduate.
	(2) Your advisor is the single biggest factor in your
	    career as a grad student.

The skills you learned as an undergraduate are largely useless as a
graduate student.  And unlike undergraduate education, there's no real
attempt to teach the skills you need as a graduate student --
research, paper writing, self-motivation, organizational skills, etc.
You're going to be much better off if you can find an advisor who will
help you learn the skills you need.  If it comes down to picking
between an advisor with a lesser reputation but better interpersonal
and teaching skills, or an advisor with a better reputation but poor
interactions with his graduate students, I advise choosing the former.
You can always put the latter on your committee and get whatever
inputs from him you need, but if you make him your advisor you may end
up suffering needlessly because of his poor teaching skills.

					-- Scott T.
Newsgroups: comp.ai
From: clin@eng.umd.edu (Charles Lin)
Subject: Re: How to pick a grad school
Date: Mon, 16 Nov 92 04:14:31 GMT
Organization: College of Engineering, Maryversity von Uniland, College Park
Originator: clin@capacitance.eng.umd.edu


In article <1992Nov15.233702.11813@CSD-NewsHost.Stanford.EDU>, ginsberg@t.Stanford.EDU (Matthew L. Ginsberg) writes:
>
[part of article deleted]
>
>The other thing you should do when selecting a school is to ask for
>specific information about the current status of their recent AI
>graduates.  I personally would discount any graduates who are employed
>at the school where they received their degree.

    Why is this?   I know it's fairly common for the faculty of
some school to get their Ph.D.'s at other schools.   The argument
I hear is that by keeping only keeping profs. at the school
they graduated from, there may be a stagnation of ideas.  However,
some of the more brand-name schools probably do this.  How many
of Stanford's faculty graduated from Stanford?

    Another question I have is how likely one can work with the
professor of one's choice.   When I was applying to graduate school
(in a different field -- elec. eng.), I looked for schools which
had a certain number of faculty in the area I thought I was interested
in.  I had talked to a prof. who had gotten accepted at Harvard, I believe,
but there was only one prof. in the area, and despite his reputation,
he couldn't get along with the prof., and with no one else to work
for, he returned back to the school that he received his bachelor's
degree.

    Faculty members seem to vary in what they want from their students.
Some insist on students with the highest grades, others don't care
as much.   I had someone tell me that often selecting an advisor
comes down to personality.  Can you work for this person, and they
get along with you?   Of course, from a job point of view, having
someone who is doing good work in the area you like, and who
you can get along with is usually the best situation, but it
doesn't always happen that way.  So, sometimes, I am a bit worried
about going to some school and expecting that I will get to work for
that person (although I almost did just that in the EE dept.).

    Actually, what usually happens when you can't work in the exact
area of preference, is that you modify what you want to do, and try
someone else.   I don't know how many people are dead-set on studying
one narrow area.   Most people seem to have a moderate amount of flexibility
in what they want to do, and sometimes would prefer their advisor select
the specific topic.

     I hope more articles like this continue.  Selecting a graduate
school is often made in the dark.  Most people have prejudices
about schools without ever visiting the school (a friend says MIT is the
place to go for EE, another says they don't want to go to California
because of the so-called California subculture, many are just
interested in going to top ten schools, which unfortunately is the
way to go, if you want a faculty position).   In the end, the decision
may not be perfect, but people seem to adapt to the school they select.

--
Charles Lin
clin@eng.umd.edu
From: lepape@ilog.fr (Claude Le Pape)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: efficient calculation of path distances in temporal databases.
Keywords: Temporal reasoning, path distance, backtracking
Date: 16 Nov 92 18:31:04 GMT
Reply-To: lepape@ilog.UUCP (Claude Le Pape)
Organization: ILOG SA, 2, Avenue Gallieni, BP 85, F-94253 Gentilly Cedex, FRANCE


In article <1992Nov10.144034.2380@fel.tno.nl>, huyh7@fel.tno.nl (Huy) writes:

> We are searching for an efficient path distance calculation algorithm,
> applicable to temporal databases. The temporal database is virtually a graph
> of timepoints connected by edges. The timepoints mark beginnings and endings
> of events. Each edge is labeled by a pair of integers defining respectively
> the minimum and maximum duration between the connected timepoints. For
> instance, if point A and point B are connected by an edge labeled with
> [3,6], the duration of the edge lies within 3 to 6 time units.

If your problem is merely to determine the longest path (sum) of minimum
durations (and/or the shortest path of maximum durations) between two 
points, the best buy is probably Ford's algorithm (1956). You shall find
a description of this algorithm in any standard Operations Research
book. My favorite:
	
	M. Gondran and M. Minoux
	Graphs and Algorithms
	John Wiley and Sons, 1984.	
	
The algorithm runs in O(n . e) where n is the number of nodes and e
the number of edges of the graph. Some other algorithms 
(e.g., matrix-based method implementing transitive closure) may
be worth (in terms of CPU time - not space) if you often modify the
graph and n is very very large (my experience in scheduling is that
even for a few hundreds of nodes, Ford's algorithm remains the most
efficient).

Note also that it may be worth representing a maximum duration d between
two events e1 and e2 as a minimum duration (- d) between e2 and e1.

Claude Le Pape


	
		-- 
  Claude LE PAPE		 net : lepape@ilog.fr
  ILOG S.A.
  2 Avenue Gallieni - BP 85	 tel : (33 1) 46 63 66 66
  94253 Gentilly Cedex FRANCE	 fax : (33 1) 46 63 15 82
From: mkant+@cs.cmu.edu (Mark Kantrowitz)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: Prolog compiler for PC
Date: 16 Nov 92 19:57:50 GMT
Article-I.D.: cs.BxtrGK.Fup.1
Organization: School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon


Prolog questions should probably be directed to comp.lang.prolog,
which has two FAQ postings, both of which answer your questions.

A copy of the current Prolog Resource Guide is available by anonymous
ftp from ftp.cs.cmu.edu:/afs/cs.cmu.edu/user/mkant/Public/AI/ as the
file prolog-resource-guide.txt.

--mark
Newsgroups: comp.ai,news.groups
From: joslyn@kong.gsfc.nasa.gov (Cliff Joslyn)
Subject: Re: RFD -- where to put "fuzzy"?
Organization: Goddard Space Flight Center
Date: Sat, 21 Nov 92 05:15:18 GMT


Putting "fuzzy" under comp.ai is like putting "differential equations"
under sci.engr.civil. 

PEOPLE: fuzzy theory is ONE part of the modern GENERAL, MATHEMATICAL
theory of INFORMATION (other parts are evidence theory, possibility
theory, etc.). The idea that fuzzy theory has anything to do with
human thinking is rarely even well articulated, let alone justified.
It's use in knowledge-based control engineering probably barely
qualifies it as a valid AI technique.

To be technically accurate, it should be sci.math.information.fuzzy,
which is cumbersome, and requires the creation of sci.math.information
(for the MOST general case). sci.math.fuzzy is acceptible, so is
sci.fuzzy.

Neither comp.fuzzy nor sci.engr.fuzzy are an especially good idea (who
would put CLASSICAL information theory under comp or engr?), but I
guess I could live with them. But comp.ai.fuzzy is just silly.

O----------------------------------------------------------------------------->
| Cliff Joslyn, Cybernetician at Large, 327 Spring St #2 Portland ME 04102 USA
| Systems Science, SUNY Binghamton      NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
| cjoslyn@bingsuns.cc.binghamton.edu    joslyn@kong.gsfc.nasa.gov
V All the world is biscuit shaped. . .
Newsgroups: comp.ai,aus.ai,sci.math,sci.math.stat,aus.stats.s,alt.info-theory,comp.ai.philosophy,sci.philosophy.language,sci.philosophy.tech,melb.seminars,monash.seminars
From: tolman%asylum.cs.utah.edu@cs.utah.edu (Kenneth Tolman)
Subject: Mechanization of creativity
Date: 23 Nov 92 14:33:50 MST
Organization: University of Utah, CompSci Dept


  I am looking for references on papers specifically on mechanized 
creativity.  Where might I find such?  The only thing I have on this
at the moment are:

S. Amarel, "On the mechanization of the Creative Process", IEEE Spectrum,
April 1966, pp. 112-114. 

along with popular books... but I am looking for published papers in
journals.

Thank you
From: krovetz@sydney.cs.umass.edu (Bob Krovetz)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Top schools in AI
Date: 15 Nov 92 18:31:22 GMT
Reply-To: krovetz@cs.umass.edu (Bob Krovetz)
Followup-To: comp.ai
Organization: University of Massachusetts, Amherst

A recent posting asked about top schools in AI.  I would rate UMass
as one of the best;  We have faculty in the following areas:

Edwina Rissland - AI and Law, Case-Based Reasoning
Bev Woolf       - AI and Education
Paul Cohen      - Planning, Expert Systems, AI Methodology
Paul Utgoff     - Machine Learning
Ed Riseman      - Computer Vision
Al Hanson       - Computer Vision
Wendy Lehnert   - Natural Language Processing, Case-Based Reasoning
Victor Lesser   - Distributed AI, Planning
Andrew Barto    - Connectionism
Bruce Croft     - Intelligent Information Retrieval
Robin Popplestone - Robotics
Rod Grupen      - Robotics

We also have several AI post-docs, and about 80 students working on
their Ph.D's in AI (out of 160 Ph.D. students in all).  In addition,
we have the largest number of grants of any public university (I believe
we are close to the top among private universities as well).  All 
incoming students are guaranteed an assistantship [I'm not sure if
this is still official policy, but I don't know of any cases in which
it is false].  The university also has one of the best linguistics
departments in the country, and a good program in psychology and
philosophy.  Finally, this area is a beautiful place to live.

Bob

krovetz@cs.umass.edu

Newsgroups: comp.ai,comp.ai.edu,sci.cognitive
From: shanks@saifr00.cfsat.honeywell.com (Mark Shanks)
Subject: Re: B.S. Degree
Organization: Honeywell Air Transport Systems Division
Date: Mon, 23 Nov 92 14:17:30 GMT

In article <By0tBI.Lvt@acsu.buffalo.edu> rapaport@acsu.buffalo.edu (William J. Rapaport) writes:

>This is an interesting inconsistency between your first comment and your
>second:  companies want BS degrees, but they also want the "liberal
>education" that tends more to come with the BA degree; do I understand
>you correctly?
>
No. Corporations demand the applicant have a BSEE, regardless of 
(in)ability to read or write a coherent paragraph. I would very
much like to see less emphasis on the BS as a sine qua non of
employment. The only inconsistency would be if it was I who set
corporate hiring policy. I got my BS at a school that DEMANDED
a more rounded education, and I think that's the better way to
fufill the corporate needs. (IMHO :>!!). 

Mark Shanks
shanks@saifr00.cfsat.honeywell.com
Newsgroups: comp.ai
From: gerald@atlastele.com (Gerald Aden)
Subject: clips
Summary: clips available from an ftp site?
Keywords: clips
Organization: Atlas Telecom Inc.
Date: Mon, 23 Nov 1992 17:11:24 GMT

Is clips available from an ftp site somewhere?

Thanks in advance,
Gerald Aden
-- 
Gerald Aden                         EMAIL: gerald@atlastele.com
Atlas Telecom                       VOICE: [USA] 1+503.228.1400 x659
4640 SW Macadam Ave.                FAX1:  [USA] 1+503.225.5518
Portland, OR 97201                  FAX2:  [USA] 1+503.228.0368
From: lpb@cs.bham.ac.uk (Luc Beaudoin)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: UNCERTAINTY IN Exp. Sys
Date: 21 Nov 92 22:39:44 GMT
Organization: School of Computer Science, University of Birmingham, UK

EASWAR@PURCCVM.BITNET writes:


> Hi!
> I am taking a course in Decision Sciences and chose initially to review
> the role of expert systems as a tool for modelling decision making under
> uncertainty. However, as I went on with the review, I realised that
> Probability Theories based on an amazing variety of aximatic foundations
> are being used to capture uncertainty.

For an AI treatment of uncertainty, you might want to look at
Cohen's book. It may add to the variety of the approaches about
which you have read, since it deals with the problems of
representing uncertainty qualitatively.

AUTHOR:    Cohen, Paul R.
TITLE:     Heuristic reasoning about uncertainty, an artificial
intelligence
           approach, Paul R. Cohen
PUBLISHED: London, Pitman, 1985
SERIES:    Research notes in artificial intelligence, 2
ISBN:      0273086677
-- 
-------------------------------------- -----------------------------------
Luc Beaudoin                          |  School of Computer Science
E-mail: lpb@cs.bham.ac.uk             |  University of Birmingham
voice:  +44 (21) 414-4766 or 3743     |  Birmingham B15 2TT, UK
Newsgroups: comp.compression
From: drkhoe@nmt.edu (ONID)
Subject: Survey - Research
Organization: New Mexico Tech
Date: Thu, 19 Nov 1992 03:02:15 GMT

                              QUESTIONNAIRE
                         TO EXAMINE CAFFEINE USE
                        AMONG COMPUTER SCIENTISTS
                         AND ELECTRICAL ENGINEERS
                                     
Most of us enjoy consuming caffeine in one form or another. The purpose of
this questionnaire is to examine how much caffeine is being consumed, what
form the caffeine is being consumed in, and who is consuming it.

Please answer these questions with email to: bob@jupiter.nmt.edu
with the subject 'survey'.

**Please do not post your answers, that will waste bandwidth**

You don't have to quote the whole article, just use 6 lines or so:
EXAMPLE
	1 CS
	2 85 cans
	3 Jolt
	4 5 pots
	5 none (gives me a headache)
	6 45 Vivarin/hr.

Thank you!

1. What is your field of work/study?
    EE       CS        BothNeither

2. How much soda do you consume per day (average)?
    ________

3. What kind of soda do you drink?
    ________

4. How much coffee do you consume per day (average)?
    ________

5. How much tea?
    ________

6. Do you take any caffeinated pills? If so, how many?
    Vivarin  NoDoze    Maximum Strength Excedrin
    ______   ______    ______

bob@jupiter.nmt.edu
Bob "Chunkstyle" Broilo
-- 
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Amiga to the Bone | SF2 Fanatics: Can you hang with the Guile combo's?
Moshing - the number one dance in America.  Kill the preacher hang the pope.
-------------------------------drkhoe@nmt.edu-------------------------------
Newsgroups: comp.compression
From: roe2@ellis.uchicago.edu (Cave Newt)
Subject: Re: Is my PKZIP 2.01 a fake?
Reply-To: roe2@midway.uchicago.edu
Organization: University of Chicago
Date: Sat, 21 Nov 1992 19:40:31 GMT

morley@camins.camosun.bc.ca writes:

>I've heard that there was (is?) some sort of trojan warning concerning
>PKZIP 2.x  However, this version I received works fine (or so it appears).
>It also has many more options than version 1.93 has.  It comes complete
>with docs that detail the changes since 1.93, etc.

I've lost track of all the hacks, but I believe this one was our
(Info-ZIP's) 1.6 or 1.7 beta with the Info-ZIP copyright removed
and a few other small, cosmetic changes.  Don't use it in any case.
Zip 1.9p1 has been out for months and is less buggy, and this one
could easily have a time-bomb or other nastiness in it.

>It seems like an
>awful lot of work just to make some sort of trojan.  Am I missing
>something here?

It was, and you are... :-)

Greg Roelofs
Newsgroups: comp.compression
From: rogerj@aix.rpi.edu (Diversion (Jeff Rogers))
Subject: ZIPfix
Date: Sat, 21 Nov 1992 07:07:01 GMT

Is there an Info-ZIP version of zipfix? Or any other type of zipfix (besides
pkzipfix)? Something that will take a corrupted zipfile (or truncated
zipfile) and extract the 'good' information from it? 

Diversion

-- 
"I can see 'em                          | "Want me to create a diversion?"
    I can see 'em                       | Diversion
        Someone wake me when it's over" | rogerj@rpi.edu
From: rohit@sloth.eng.uci.edu (Rohit Agarwal)
Subject: ( Shimmering ) artifacts in wavelet based video compression ?
Newsgroups: comp.compression
Organization: University of California, Irvine
Keywords: Video, Wavelet Transform, MPEG
Date: 17 Nov 92 08:46:33 GMT

        I have been doing some work with the compression of video by taking
a wavelet transform, scalar quantization and entropy coding. I have implemented
a video compression scheme that uses purely spatial techniques. No motion info
is used. I applied my technique to the compression of several of the CCIR601
MPEG test sequences and observed the following:

        In some of the sequences, particularly Tennis and Flower Garden, there
was a noticable shimmering in the background. Viewed individually, each of the
frames looked very good. For Tennis and Flower Garden, PSNR was about 35 dB on
the average. However viewed as video, ther was a noticable shimmering artifact.
Its as if the errors in each frame are highly uncorrelated with errors in other
frames or maybe it has something to do with interlacing. It might also have 
been due to not using temporal information. I have seen some of the MPEG 2
results from Kurihama and I noticed that there were a few techniques based on
wavelets which did not seem to have these artifacts particularly Aware1 and
 Aware2.
Can anyone give me some pointers as to the possible sources of this artifact.
Interestingly enough, my technique did much better on Mobile and Calendar --
individual frames had a lower PSNR than the other test sequences (about 30 dB),
and there were noticable artifacts in the individual images viewed still (the
white background of the calendar looked dirty gray) but viewed as a sequence
it looked "pretty good" even at 1H.

Also, the compression ratio was only 20:1 translating to a bitstream of about
8Mbps. 

rohit agarwal