AI Magazine Volume 19 Number 4 (1998) (© AAAI) Workshop Report Venue Report on The Eighth Ireland Straddling the meandering River Foyle where it becomes Lough Foyle, Derry Conference on Artificial (from Doire [Oak Grove] in Gaelic), or Londonderry (and some other names Intelligence and Cognitive besides), has a rare scenic beauty. It is rich in history, encompassing monas- tic settlement and fully extant city Science (AICS-97) walls, the great siege of the late seven- teenth century, and much more. A vis- Theme: AI in “Crisis”? it to the renowned Tower Museum is more than rewarding. It is a northern European city of 100,000, almost on the border between the Republic of Paul Mc Kevitt Ireland and Northern Ireland. The area has wide renown for its writers (Brian Friel, Seamus Heaney, Jennifer Johnson) and musicians (Phil Coulter, Clannad, Dana, Enya, Daniel O Don- tion” at Dublin City University, he Eighth Ireland Conference nell) and, of course, its computer sci- Dublin, Ireland, on 15–17 September. on Artificial Intelligence and entists (www.ni-tourism.com/noplug- TCognitive Science (AICS-97), We advertised AICS-97 internation- in.htm, www.ireland.travel.ie/, and which was run in conjunction with ally to mail groups and on usenet as www.interknowledge.com/northern- the Irish Machine Vision and Image well as placed information at the Uni- ireland). Processing Conference (IMVIP-97), versity of Ulster on the World Wide To the east of the Foyle, we have the was a success. The delegates for both Web. The local press (The Derry Journal north Derry coast, with beautiful meetings enjoyed themselves and & Belfast Telegraph) and radio (BBC beaches at Benone and Castlenock expressed their congratulations on Northern Ireland) ran a number of and then through Coleraine to the the program and organization. Also, articles leading up to and during the seaside resorts of Portstewart and for the first time, AICS attracted a conference. All plenary invited speak- Portrush. A few kilometers further large number of delegates and papers er talks and the panel session went out along the north Antrim coast, we from abroad, including many from on streaming video and audio, stored arrive at the Giants’ Causeway and the United Kingdom, Europe, and Bushmills with the world’s oldest even the United States and Asia. whiskey distillery (www.infosites.net/ AICS-97 was hosted by the Faculty This article is a report of the Eighth tourism/topten/bushmills.html) that of Informatics, University of Ulster, Ireland Conference on Artificial Intel- delegates could visit as part of the con- Magee College; the Artificial Intelli- ligence and Cognitive Science (AICS- ference tour. 2 97), which was run in conjunction gence Association of Ireland (AI) , the The Inishowen Peninsula borders Cognitive Science Society of Ireland with the Irish Machine Vision and Image Processing Conference the West of Lough Foyle with a beauti- (CSSI), and the Society for the Study of (IMVIP-97), held at the University of ful “Inishowen 100” tour, and one can Artificial Intelligence and Simulation Ulster, Magee College in Derry/Lon- visit the rugged mountains and sea of Behavior (SSAISB). Sponsorship was donderry, Northern Ireland, on 10 to cliffs in the close hinterland of Done- provided by the University of Ulster, 13 September 1997. gal (for example, Glenveagh National the Industrial Research and Technolo- Park once owned by the McIlhenny gy Agency Unit (IRTU) of Northern Family, inventors of famed Tabasco Ireland, the International Association and live with the possibility of phone- Sauce!); Gweedore, home of the Clan- for Pattern Recognition (IAPR), the nad Family; and Enya and Kincass- in questions (organized by Ted Leath, European Computer Vision Network lagh, home of Daniel O Donnell. A University of Ulster, Magee). of Excellence (ECVnet), and the Opti- yearly calendar of events for Ireland Fionn Murtagh (University of cal Engineering Society of Ireland and Northern Ireland can be found at (OESI). A large number of other Irish Ulster, Magee) was the general chair www.emigrant.ie/calendar.htm. and British organizations, including for both AICS-97 and IMVIP-97, and The Faculty of Informatics at the the British Council, the Institution of Jon Campbell (University of Ulster, University of Ulster has a large Electrical Engineers, and the British Magee) coordinated local organiza- research team in AI covering a broad Computer Society, agreed to cooper- tion for AICS-97 as well as acted as range of themes. Particular strengths ate. The cognitive science strand of program chair for IMVIP-97. They did lie in the areas of evidential reasoning, AICS-97, the Annual Conference of a supreme job. More details on all the data mining and knowledge discov- the CSSI, was run as “MIND-II: Com- events are available at www.infm.ulst. ery, user modeling and natural lan- putational Models of Creative Cogni- ac.uk/research/conferences.html. guage processing, machine learning, Copyright © 1998, American Association for Artificial Intelligence. All rights reserved. 0738-4602-1998 / $2.00 WINTER 1998 135 Workshop Report computational intelligence, intelli- in “crisis” and its failures/suc- lar experience in the VERBMOBIL Project, gent multimedia, and distributed cesses are particularly welcome! which integrates speech and language object computing (www.infc.ulst.ac. Ever since George Boolean processing as applied to a spoken dia- uk/informatics/). Logic (Cork), James Joyce’s logue machine-translation system The faculty hosts the Northern Ire- advances on streams-of-con- running on a mobile laptop computer. land Knowledge Engineering Labora- sciousness (see Dennett’s Joycean Okada focused on a similar theme to tory (NIKEL), a joint venture with machine), Claude Shannon Von Hahn with his paper “AESOP- International Computers Limited, found information theory and WORLD: An Integrated System for Intel- which carries out extensive work on John McCarthy made LISP and lectual Emotional Agents,” describing the application of AI techniques to gave the field its name (Dart- an integrated comprehension and industrial and medical problems. mouth, US, 1956) we have been generation system for integrating into artificial intelligence. vision, language, and motion. The sys- The Program tem simulates the protagonist, or fox, Invited Papers of an Aesop fable, “The Fox and the The Program Committee consisted of AICS-97 had 6 posters, 3 invited Grapes,” showing his mental and more than 80 members from both Ire- papers, and 21 papers split into 5 ses- physical behavior with graphic dis- land and Great Britain as well as inter- sions: (1) data analysis, (2) artificial life plays, a voice generator, and a music nationally renowned researchers from and neural networks; (3) knowledge generator that expresses the wolf’s farther afield. The program contained representation, (4) psychology and emotional states. a balanced and interesting set of philosophy, and (5) natural language papers in response to the following processing. We had a good group of Submitted Papers call for papers: international invited speakers: John Intelligent multimedia (Mc Kevitt AI in “Crisis”? McCarthy (Stanford University), 1995–1996) was a theme that came up Walther Von Hahn (University of a number of times: Paul Mc Kevitt pre- Has the field been in Hamburg, Germany), and Naoyuki sented a frame semantics for the `crisis’?—Some argue we’ve been Okada (Kyushu Institute of Technolo- CHAMELEON system (Brøndsted et al. in the wilderness with no break- throughs for decades except gy, Japan). These speakers were com- 1998) at Aalborg University, Denmark, minor shifts toward connection- plimented by a similarly good set for that integrates spoken dialogue, ges- ism and neural networks, artifi- IMVIP-97: James Crowley (Institut ture, and laser output and, in one cial life, data collection/corpora, National Polytechnique de Grenoble, application, gives information on two- and hybrid systems. Others say France), Anil Jain (Michigan State Uni- dimensional building plans placed on the move toward integration (e.g. versity), and Jean-Christophe Olivo a table. Ronan Reilly’s (University Col- intelligent multimedia integrat- (European Molecular Biology Labora- lege Dublin) paper, entitled “BROCA’s ing language/vision), Person- tory, Heidelberg, Germany). The Area and the Development of Object Kommunikation, mobile and IMVIP-97 speakers gave memorable Assembly and Language Production remote computing, more and talks on the latest results in vision and Skills,” explores, through simulation, more engineering and a focus on image processing, and David Vernon the various issues raised by Green- the significance or otherwise of (NUI, Maynooth, Ireland) gave an field’s work on motor coordination the self, mind and consciousness excellent tutorial on industrial vision. and speech, with results supporting is emphasizing the successes of It was a coup to have McCarthy, her homology hypothesis. AI.… who named the field artificial intelli- A number of the papers directly Ireland has hosted AI confer- gence at the Dartmouth, United addressed the theme of the conference ences usually annually since States, conference in 1956 and also (AI in “Crisis”?), and those that did 1988. This eighth AI-97 confer- gave us Lisp. McCarthy’s paper, enti- were memorable. In “Reinventing ence will continue the tradition tled “The Logic Road to Human-Level Behaviorism,” Patrick Juola from of emphasizing presentations of AI,” focused on a history of AI Oxford University noted that one of Ireland’s and international origi- throughout the years, going back as the fundamental problems of AI is its nal research in all areas of artifi- far as Frege, Boole, and Turing, with unwillingness to take credit for things cial intelligence and cognitive the clear theme that formal logic is that appear to be successes. He argues science including computer sci- central to achieving results in AI. Von that modern AI theories are sophisti- ence, psychology, linguistics, Hahn’s paper, entitled “Putting cated versions of long-discarded philosophy, neuroscience and Together the Parts: Complex Artificial behaviorist theories.