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Expert systems 85: Proceedings of the fifth technical conference of the British computer society specialist group on expert systems
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Book Reviews
Martin MERRY (ed.)
Expert Systems 85: Proceedings of the Fifth Technical Conference of the British Computer Society Specialist Group on Expert Systems The British Computer Society Workshop Series, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1985, ix + 334 pages, £22.50
A. Tate, and D. Croft) that are resulting from research in the U.K., namely the AI applications Institute at the University of Edinburgh.
C.C. WHITE University of Virginia Charlottesville, VA 22901, USA
Raymond T U R N E R According to the Preface, this Proceedings includes all the refereed papers which were presented at the conference and the invited papers by Austin Tate and Abe Mamdani. With respect to the readership of EJOR, several of the papers present material on topics that operational research workers also investigate but by using perhaps more formally mathematical, less ad hoc problem solving and decision making approaches. In fact, there is a growing trend among expert systems specialists to investigate representations of deep knowledge (as is done in a paper by A.G. Cohn) in order to enhance the flexibility of the resulting expert system. This suggests that the formal integration of current expert systems concepts with mathematical models for problem solving (e.g., operational research tools) may not be far away, which should be of particular interest to a large portion of the EJOR readership. One specific OR tool deserves mention here: multiattribute utility theory (MAUT). A portion of the Expert S y s t e m / O R community is currently active in investigating how expert systems can be integrated with MAUT in order to develop systems sufficiently robust and sensitive to user (rather than expert) values and goals. A related discussion can be found in A. Sloman's paper on real-time multiple-motive expert systems. Much of the Proceedings contains papers on important topics: search (for guiding expert system question selections, by C.S. Mellish), process control (e.g., a paper by A. Paterson et al.), uncertain inference (e.g., papers by J.G. Ganascia and Y. Kodratoff and by A. Mamdani et al.), and a variety of application areas (e.g., diagnosis/ troubleshooting, statistics, VLSI design, and planning). A natural topic for the integration of procedures for alternative selection (e.g., MAUT) and expert systems is design. Particularly worthy of mention is the exciting knowledge-based planning techniques (e.g., papers by A. Tate, K. Currie and
Logics for Artificial Intelligence Ellis Horwood Series in Artificial Intelligence, Ellis Horwood, Chichester, 1984, + 121 pages, £16.50 This book is intended to serve both as an elementary text and as a reference work on the applications of non-standard logics to artificial intelligence. The book requires more than elementary knowledge of classical first-order logic, because it discusses the rivals of classical logic, such as multi-valued logic, fuzzy logic, and intuitionistic logic. Apart from the introductory chapter, the book contains 7 short chapters on various nonstandard logics. Each chapter begins with a short introduction, explaining why a specific category of non-standard logic has been developed. Next, several sections introduce models within the main category. Usually, a few simple examples relate the formalism to applications in computer science and sometimes to AI. Although the practicality of these examples is not always persuasive, they give same impression on the direction of research. The last section of each chapter gives bibliographical notes and a list of references to recent publications. The book is well written, and contains few errors. Some formalisms may not easily be grasped by the reader who is not familiar with the field. However, the chapters and even the sections are largely self-contained and they can be read in any order. Therefore the author has managed to find a reasonable balance between the two seemingly conflicting goals to write an elementary text and a reference work.
J.C. W O R T M A N N Eindhoven University of Technology Eindhoven, Netherlands
Book Reviews
Martin MERRY (ed.)
Expert Systems 85: Proceedings of the Fifth Technical Conference of the British Computer Society Specialist Group on Expert Systems The British Computer Society Workshop Series, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1985, ix + 334 pages, £22.50
A. Tate, and D. Croft) that are resulting from research in the U.K., namely the AI applications Institute at the University of Edinburgh.
C.C. WHITE University of Virginia Charlottesville, VA 22901, USA
Raymond T U R N E R According to the Preface, this Proceedings includes all the refereed papers which were presented at the conference and the invited papers by Austin Tate and Abe Mamdani. With respect to the readership of EJOR, several of the papers present material on topics that operational research workers also investigate but by using perhaps more formally mathematical, less ad hoc problem solving and decision making approaches. In fact, there is a growing trend among expert systems specialists to investigate representations of deep knowledge (as is done in a paper by A.G. Cohn) in order to enhance the flexibility of the resulting expert system. This suggests that the formal integration of current expert systems concepts with mathematical models for problem solving (e.g., operational research tools) may not be far away, which should be of particular interest to a large portion of the EJOR readership. One specific OR tool deserves mention here: multiattribute utility theory (MAUT). A portion of the Expert S y s t e m / O R community is currently active in investigating how expert systems can be integrated with MAUT in order to develop systems sufficiently robust and sensitive to user (rather than expert) values and goals. A related discussion can be found in A. Sloman's paper on real-time multiple-motive expert systems. Much of the Proceedings contains papers on important topics: search (for guiding expert system question selections, by C.S. Mellish), process control (e.g., a paper by A. Paterson et al.), uncertain inference (e.g., papers by J.G. Ganascia and Y. Kodratoff and by A. Mamdani et al.), and a variety of application areas (e.g., diagnosis/ troubleshooting, statistics, VLSI design, and planning). A natural topic for the integration of procedures for alternative selection (e.g., MAUT) and expert systems is design. Particularly worthy of mention is the exciting knowledge-based planning techniques (e.g., papers by A. Tate, K. Currie and
Logics for Artificial Intelligence Ellis Horwood Series in Artificial Intelligence, Ellis Horwood, Chichester, 1984, + 121 pages, £16.50 This book is intended to serve both as an elementary text and as a reference work on the applications of non-standard logics to artificial intelligence. The book requires more than elementary knowledge of classical first-order logic, because it discusses the rivals of classical logic, such as multi-valued logic, fuzzy logic, and intuitionistic logic. Apart from the introductory chapter, the book contains 7 short chapters on various nonstandard logics. Each chapter begins with a short introduction, explaining why a specific category of non-standard logic has been developed. Next, several sections introduce models within the main category. Usually, a few simple examples relate the formalism to applications in computer science and sometimes to AI. Although the practicality of these examples is not always persuasive, they give same impression on the direction of research. The last section of each chapter gives bibliographical notes and a list of references to recent publications. The book is well written, and contains few errors. Some formalisms may not easily be grasped by the reader who is not familiar with the field. However, the chapters and even the sections are largely self-contained and they can be read in any order. Therefore the author has managed to find a reasonable balance between the two seemingly conflicting goals to write an elementary text and a reference work.
J.C. W O R T M A N N Eindhoven University of Technology Eindhoven, Netherlands