Electronic Newsletter Actions and Change

Electronic Newsletter on
Reasoning about Actions and Change


Issue 97001 Editor: Erik Sandewall 21.9.1997

The ETAI is organized and published under the auspices of the
European Coordinating Committee for Artificial Intelligence (ECCAI).

New initiatives

ETAI Newsletter

Here is the first issue of the new started Newsletter. Details of the editing policy are at the end of this message.

Discussion with Wolfgang Bibel about his invited lecture

The recent IJCAI conference featured an invited talk by Wolfgang Bibel, titled "Let's plan it deductively!" The talked addressed issues within Reasoning about Actions and Change as well as within planning, and is of considerable relevance for our area. Since the format of a conference lecture with a large audience does not allow much discussion, we have invited Wolfgang to participate in an on-line discussion about his article in the present medium, and he has agreed heartily. Questions to Wolfgang can be sent to the Newsletter editor, and will be forwarded to him for answering. Questions and answers will be distributed through Newsletter issues, and will also be accumulated in discussion sessions in the Colloquium. It is intended that this discussion will have the flavor of a conference question period, so it is perfectly fine if the contributions develop into a broader discussion.

NRAC panel discussions continued

The NRAC workshop (Non-monotonic Reasoning, Actions and Change) at the recent IJCAI featured three panel discussions: on causality, methodology, and ontologies. (The methodology panel dealt with theory evaluation, or "what makes a theory good?"). We are presently trying to arrange for these panel discussions to continue on-line, just like the discussion with Wolfgang Bibel. More about this will appear in forthcoming Newsletter issues.


Recent developments

Computational complexity has not been much studied in the research on Reasoning about Actions and Change, although of course there has been considerable work on complexity in the neighboring topics of planning and in temporal reasoning (in the sense of only reasoning about points on the time line, but not allowing for change of state and the frame problem(s)). Recently, however, there have been two contributions on complexity in our field, namely:

The latter article has been received by the ETAI, and is presently in its discussion period.


Publications

Books

"Spatial and Temporal Reasoning" is a collection volume edited by Oliviero Stock which has just been published by Kluwer. The volume grew out of two Advanced Schools held in Bolzano, Italy, which were directed by Oliviero. The book contains contributions by the following authors: Laure Vieu, Alfonso Gerevini, Roberto Casati and Achille C. Varzi, Anthony G. Cohn et al., Andrew U. Frank, Annette Herskovits, James F. Allen and George Ferguson, Drew McDermott, Erik Sandewall, and Anthony Galton.


Calendar

Forthcoming conferences and workshops

Following the installation of new software and a database for conference announcements, the Colloquium for Actions and Change now has its own web page for forthcoming and recent conferences and workshops. (Previously, we only had a link to a similar page elsewhere. The new arrangements offers more complete coverage and better integration with our bibliography). The following are the present contents of our conference menue.

ECP-97: European Conference on Planning.

FCR-98: Formalization of Commonsense Reasoning.

TIME-98: International Workshop on Temporal Representation and Reasoning.

KR-98: International Conference on Knowledge Representation and Reasoning.

FOIS-98: Formal Ontology in Information Systems.

AIPS-98: Artificial Intelligence Planning Systems.

ECAI-98: European Conference on Artificial Intelligence.

Each link labelled "broadcast message" refers to a copy of a message that the conference organizers have sent out to the widest possible audience.


Newsletter policy

This is the first issue of the Newsletter for reasoning about actions and change, the direct-mail variant of the ETAI News Journal. It starts as an experiment because of numerous requests for a direct-mail service within ETAI. Many readers feel that it is easy to forget about places that are available for browsing, and that it is more convenient to receive news as E-mail messages and with as little delay as possible.

ETAI Newsletters will meet this demand in the following fashion. They are issued as often as news items come in, but not more frequently than once a day, and are distributed to subscribers by direct E-mail. At the same time, each Newsletter issue will be posted on a back issue page for newsletters. Therefore, the Newsletter mails are disposable: you can safely discard them after you have glanced through them, since if you need to look back at a particular issue, can retrieve them from the back issue page.

Contributions to the Newsletter are welcomed for all news of specific relevance to research on Reasoning about Actions and Change. The following are examples of relevant contributions:

A number of discussions are being organized within the area, and all messages within those discussions will be included in the Newsletter. In this way, the Newsletter also serves as a moderated newsgroup.

The Newsletters will offer a more rapid alternative to the News Journal, but for those subscribers who only want larger chunks of news in longer intervals, all news that appear in Newsletters will also be included in the next following issue of the News Journal. Similarly, those news that fit into existing categories of the Colloquium for Action and Change will be accumulated to there.

Initially, all current subscribers in the area will receive Newsletter mailings, as well as notification about new issues of the News Journal. If you wish to be removed from the Newsletter mailing list and only stay on the News Journal list, please send a note to the present editor.