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News Journal on Reasoning about Actions and Change
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Vol. 1, Nr. 1
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Editor: Erik Sandewall
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July 31, 1997
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The ETAI is organized and published under the auspices of the
European Coordinating Committee for Artificial Intelligence
(ECCAI).
For a formatted paper version of this issue, combine
inner pages with a cover in
A4 paper size.
Contents of this issue
The main purpose of this News Journal is to serve as a vehicle for
review discussion about recently published articles in the area of
Reasoning about Actions and Change. The character of these
review discussions can now be demonstrated in concrete terms.
Earlier this month, our ETAI area received Paolo Liberatore's
article "The Complexity of the Language A", and the period of
questions, answers, and review discussion about this contribution has
already started. Please take a look, therefore, at the
discussion page
for that article. (If you are using HTML frames, you may prefer the
frame-oriented discussion page). You will notice how the
discussion page contains the same kinds of questions and answers
about the article as you would expect to hear at a conference.
Here, however, the ETAI discussions are accessible to the whole
community, and not only those who happen to attend the conference,
and they are retained for future reference. And, maybe the most
important of all, the written format provides time to think
before writing the questions and the answers.
I hope you will agree that this mode of scientific communication is
a significant step ahead from older systems - it's interactive,
unlike a conventional journal, it's preserved for future use,
unlike a discussion at a conference, and it's available to everyone,
unlike an exchange of E-mails.
The top news in the monthly issues of the present News Journal
will be a list of recently received articles, which allows you
to see what articles have appeared, and what is being said about
them. (The
list of received articles for our area will be updated
continuously, so please check it if you want these news more often
than once a month).
The main components of ETAI are now operational, in particular
for the present research area: the structure of WWW pages has
been set up, the News Journal has started to appear, and the
review discussion for the first contribution has started.
You are of course welcome to participate in this scheme yourself,
both by submitting questions or comments to current articles,
and by submitting your own articles. Each article discussion page
contains a handle for submitting questions/comments, and the main
ETAI structure contains instructions for authors. If you have
any questions, please send me a note.
Have you seen an article recently where you think a similar discussion
ought to be opened, for example, because you have a question to the
authors which you think may be of general interest?
No problems: send me a note with the reference to the
article and the first question, and I'll contact the author and
set up the discussion page.
Besides the discussion facility, ETAI also includes a formal review
facility leading to acceptance. The ETAI publication scheme
is different from the usual one, and works in two steps:
- First, an article is opened to discussion, as is now the case
for Liberatore's article.
- Then, after a discussion period of three months, and after the
author(s) have had a chance to revise it, the article is reviewed
for acceptance, using confidential peer review and journal
level criteria of quality.
We expect that the decision on acceptance can be done rapidly because
when the papers have arrived that far, it will already be quite clear
how it is received. However, notice that the author doesn't have to
wait for publication before the paper becomes visible: it "exists" all
the time through this discussion and review period.
The scope of ETAI is defined by the participating research areas
(see the ETAI home
page for a menue of the currently participating areas).
Review for acceptance is done, within each area, by an
editorial committee consisting of about ten leading researchers in
that particular area. See, for example, the
editorial
committee for actions and change. The combination of an open discussion
period and subsequent formal review by specialists in the area of the
contribution guarantee the best possible "quality control". In fact, we
foresee that the quality of articles accepted by ETAI will be
distinctly higher than for articles in any conventional journal.
So, if you have a research contribution on Reasoning about Actions and
Change which is ready for being submitted to a journal - consider the
advantages of submitting it to the ETAI!
In addition to advertising received articles, the News Journal will
contain calendarium information (forthcoming conferences, etc),
links to current research software,
discussion on general topics within our area, and
lists of articles in our area which appear in other journals and at
conferences. A
demonstration
issue of the News Journal was issued in May, and gives examples of
how these other kinds of news items will be presented.
The members of the subscriber list for the present News Journal
will receive a reminder by E-mail each time a new issue is out.
In order to subscribe or unsubscribe, please
send me a note.
The ETAI is a "federation" of research areas, each with its own
area editor, news journal, and reviewing mechanism, just like ours.
The area of
Planning
and Scheduling (area editor: Susanne Biundo)
will see the issue of its first News Journal within shortly,
and the area of
Intelligent
User Interfaces (area editor: Elisabeth André) is also close
to starting. Additional areas are starting up or being considered.
In a broader perspective, electronic publishing is now developing rapidly.
A committee within the ACM, chaired by Joe Halpern is presently working
on a new ACM strategy for electronic publishing. Things go at very
different speed in different disciplines, but it has reportedly
reached far e.g. in astronomy. The ETAI initiative has been reported
at several conferences on scientific publication, and has been
received with a lot of interest.
Therefore, submitting your article
to ETAI achieves two important purposes: obtaining qualified feedback,
and giving it the highest possible visibility both now and in the
future.
The following article has been received by the present
News Journal. Clicking the title of the
article leads to a page containing the on-going question-answer
debate about the article, with options for submitting a question
or comment, and of course for seeing the full text of the article.
- f-cis.linep.se-97-006
- Paolo Liberatore:
The Complexity of the Language A.
Please click for
a list
of all received articles in a plain web page, or
for a
page using frames. (On the date of issue of this first issue
of the News Journal, the list only contains Liberatore's article.
Additional contributions will be added to the list successively).
This heading will be used in future issues of the present
News Journal for reporting on articles which have been accepted by
the ETAI after confidential review, thereby achieving proof of
high journal quality. At the present time, of course, no article has
reached to that point.
This News Journal invites announcements of research software
systems pertaining to the area of actions and change.
We believe that the development and diffusion of software systems
representing the state of the art in research is now very important
in this research area. Also,
the electronic communication medium is particularly appropriate for
this purpose.
The demo issue contained
announcements of two software systems
for actions and change: the VITAL system and the DLS algorithm.
The demo issue also contained the
beginning of a debate
on general approaches to reasoning about
actions and change. Additional contributions to that debate
are invited, and will be organized in a fashion similar to the
discussions about received articles.
FCR-98: Formalization of Commonsense Reasoning.
The organizers of this conference have set up a
Common
Sense Problem Page, containing (quote) a collection of problems or
descriptions of domains which individual
contributors have found of interest from the point of view of logical
formalizations of common sense reasoning. Additions to this collection
are welcome... (end quote).
TIME-98: International Workshop on Temporal Representation and Reasoning.
KR-98: International Conference on Knowledge Representation and Reasoning.
None at this point.
The present heading will list journal articles on Reasoning about
Actions and Change, with special priority on articles in high quality
journals containing only a small proportion of AI and KR contributions -
articles which may otherwise easily be overlooked by researchers in our
field.
We begin with the following articles. We are happy to receive suggestions
for what journals and what articles ought to be covered.
jr-fi-30-109 Yan Zhang and Norman Y. Foo:
Deriving Invariants and Constraints from Action Theories.
jr-aij-92-91 B. Shults and B.J. Kuipers:
Proving properties of continuous systems: qualitative simulation and temporal logic.
jr-aij-92-131 Fangzhen Lin and Ray Reiter:
How to progress a database.
jr-aij-92-301 A.D. Kshemkalyani:
Reasoning about causality between distributed nonatomic events.
The News Journal will regularly list references to articles on
reasoning about Actions and Change which appear in other journals or
conferences.
Lists of articles on Reasoning about Actions and Change at
AAAI-97, NRAC-97, and IJCAI-97 can be found in the
corresponding section
of the previous (demo) issue of this News Journal.
Similar lists of relevant articles at some other recent conferences
will follow.
Edited by
Erik
Sandewall,
Linköping University, Sweden.
E-mail ejs@ida.liu.se.