Murray Shanahan's Publications

All of these files are Postscript, and have been compressed using the Unix "compress" command.

Reasoning about Action and Change

Further work on abductive event calculus appears under the Planning heading. Much of this work finds application in papers under the Robotics heading.
  • M.P.Shanahan, Prediction Is Deduction but Explanation Is Abduction, Proceedings IJCAI 89, pages 1055-1060. Abstract
  • M.P.Shanahan, Representing Continuous Change in the Event Calculus, Proceedings ECAI 90, pages 598-603. Abstract
  • M.P.Shanahan, Explanation in the Situation Calculus, Proceedings IJCAI 93, pages 160-165. Abstract
  • R.S.Miller and M.P.Shanahan, Narratives in the Situation Calculus, The Journal of Logic and Computation, vol 4, no 5, (1994), pages 513-530.
  • M.P.Shanahan, A Circumscriptive Calculus of Events, Artificial Intelligence, vol 77 (1995), pages 249-284. Abstract
  • R.S.Miller and M.P.Shanahan, Reasoning about Discontinuities in the Event Calculus, Proceedings 1996 Knowledge Representation Conference, pages 63-74. Abstract
  • M.P.Shanahan, Solving the Frame Problem, MIT Press, 1997. Contents

  • Reasoning about Space and Shape

    There's more on this topic in my papers under the Robotics heading.
  • M.P.Shanahan, Default Reasoning about Spatial Occupancy, Artificial Intelligence, vol 74, no 1 (1995), pages 147-163. Abstract

  • Robotics

    The five papers below concern the assimilation of sensor data via abduction. The ECAI paper presents the basic ideas, and the AAAI 96 paper extends them to deal with motor noise. The long paper (second in the list) combines the material of the ECAI and AAAI 96 papers, and includes some discussion of computational issues. The Common Sense 96 paper is an early presentation of the work. The AAAI 97 paper is a cleaner presentation of the earlier work, and deals with both motor and sensor noise.
  • M.P.Shanahan, Robotics and the Common Sense Informatic Situation, Working Notes of Common Sense 96, The Third Symposium on Logical Formalizations of Commonsense, pages 186-198.
  • M.P.Shanahan, A Logical Account of the Common Sense Informatic Situation for a Mobile Robot. Abstract
  • M.P.Shanahan, Robotics and the Common Sense Informatic Situation, Proceedings ECAI 96, pages 684-688. Abstract
  • M.P.Shanahan, Noise and the Common Sense Informatic Situation for a Mobile Robot, Proceedings AAAI 96, pages 1098-1103. Abstract
  • M.P.Shanahan, Noise, Non-Determinism and Spatial Uncertainty, Proceedings AAAI 97, pages 153-158. Abstract

  • Planning

  • M.P.Shanahan, Event Calculus Planning Revisited, Proceedings 1997 European Conference on Plannning (ECP 97) , Springer-Verlag Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence no. 1348, pages 390-402. An early draft of this paper appears in the Working Notes of the AAAI 97 Workshop on Robots, Softbots, Immobots: Theories of Action, Planning and Control. Abstract

  • Artificial Life

    I'm no longer active in this area of research.
  • M.P.Shanahan, Evolutionary Automata, Proceedings A-Life IV, pages 388-393.
  • M.P.Shanahan, Applying Artificial Life Techniques to a Symbolic Learning Task.
  • You can also browse my Internet publication: BioDigital Substrate: An Experiment in Artificial Life.

    Philosophy of AI

    The first of these papers was actually written in 1987. It was presented at the Turing 1990 conference, and wasn't published in the associated Oxford University Press volume until late 1996.
  • M.P.Shanahan, Folk Psychology and Naive Physics, Connectionism, Concepts and Folk Psychology: The Legacy of Alan Turing, vol. 2, , ed. A.Clark and P.J.R.Millican, Oxford University Press (1996).
  • M.P.Shanahan, What Sort of Computation Mediates Best between Perception and Action? Working Notes of the 1996 AAAI Fall Symposium on Embodied Cognition, pages 107-112.
  • Abstract

    Reason Maintenance Systems

    This is mostly my PhD work, which was to do with applying ideas from Reason Maintenace Systems to Logic Programming. Here's the thesis (this one's a dvi file, not Postscript).
  • M.P.Shanahan, An Incremental Theorem Prover, Proceedings IJCAI 87, pages 987-989.
  • M.P.Shanahan, Incrementality and Logic Programming, in Reason Maintenance Systems and their Applications, ed. G.Kelleher and B.Smith, Ellis Horwood (1988), pages 21-34.
  • M.P.Shanahan and R.W Southwick, Search, Inference and Dependencies in Artificial Intelligence, Ellis Horwood, 1989.