Erik Sandewall

• Linköping University

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights specifies a number of properties that characterize human beings, such as ‘dignity’, ‘conscience’, and several others. In this article we focus on these properties and on how they have been defined in the history of philosophy. We show how they can be interpreted in terms of a prototypical architecture for a...

During the centennial year of his birth Alan Turing 1912--1954 has been widely celebrated as having laid the foundations for Computer Science, Automated Decryption, Systems Biology and the Turing Test. In this paper we investigate Turing's motivations ...

For the communication with mobile robots during their missions to loca-tions that are inaccessible or danger-ous for people, it is desirable to make use of a combination of natural lan-guage, preferably in spoken form, and a graphical presentation of what is in the robot's field of sight. The present arti-cle addresses architectural and method-olog...

Open peer review has been proposed for a number of reasons, in particular, for increasing the transparency of the article selection process for a journal, and for obtaining a broader basis for feedback to the authors and for the acceptance decision. The review discussion may also in itself have a value for the research community. These goals rely o...

This note describes how the notion of nonmonotonic reasoning emerged in Artificial Intelligence from the mid-1960's to 1980. It gives particular attention to the interplay between three kinds of activities: design of high-level programming systems for AI, design of truth-maintenance systems, and the development of nonmonotonic logics. This was not...

This article introduces and uses a representation of defeasible inheritance networks where links in the network are viewed as propositions, and where defeasible links are tagged with a quantitative indication of the proportion of exceptions, called the doubt index. This doubt index is used for restricting the length of the chains of inference.The r...

The purpose of the research reported here is to explore an alternative way of organizing the general software structure in computers, eliminating the traditional distinctions between operating system, programming language, database system, and several other kinds of software. We observed that there is a lot of costly duplication of concepts and of...

This is the author's reply to three very different reviews of Mind As Machine: A history of Cognitive Science (Vols 1-2). Two of the reviews, written by Paul Thagard and Jerry Feldman, engage with the book seriously. The third, by Noam Chomsky, does ...

The concept of a 'publication' no longer applies only to printed works; information technology has extended its application to several other types of works. This article describes a facility called the Common Knowledge Library that publishes modules of formally structured information representing facts and knowledge of various kinds. Publications o...

We address the problem of formally proving high-level effect descriptions of actions from low-level operational definitions. The low-level operational description has a hybrid character, involving both continuous and discrete change; the effect description is wholly or predominantly discrete. Both descriptions are expressed in a logic of actions an...

The paper proposes that the basic idea of the WWW can be generalized to the domain of data structures or information structures. This means that packages of structured information are represented as short text files, stored in web-accessible locations (URL:s), and are loaded as needed by the web-oriented database tool. We suggest that this techniqu...

Robots are autonomous,agents whose actions are performed in the real world during a period of time. There are a number,of gen- eral constraints on such actions, for example that the same action can not have two separate instances during overlapping time intervals, or re- strictions that are due to which state variables afiect the action or are afie...

The work reported here is performed in a broader context where we propose to change the over-all software architecture (operating systems, pro-gramming languages, etc etc) in order to eliminate the considerable redundancy of concepts and con-structs that contemporary software technology ex-hibits. This requires, among other things, a realign-ment s...

The WITAS project addresses the design of an intelligent, autonomous UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle), in our case a helicopter. Its dialogue-system subprojects address the design of a deliberative system for natural-language and graphical dialogue with that robotic UAV. This raises new issues both for dialogue and for reasoning in real time. The foll...

The WITAS project addresses the design of an intelligent, autonomous UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle), in our case a helicopter. Its dialogue-system subprojects address the design of a deliberative system for natural-language and graphical dialogue with that robotic UAV. This raises new issues both for dialogue and for reasoning in real time. The foll...

Fundamental learnin8 strategies are discussed in the context of knowledse acquisition for expert systems. These strategies reflect the type of inference performed by the learner on the input infor- mation in order to derive the desired knowledge. They include learnin8 from instruction, learain8 by deduction, learning by analogy and learnin8 by indu...

A logic for reasoning about dynamic systems should be defined on three levels. The material level is expressed in quantitative terms, the image level defines models in terms of discrete mathematics, and the logic level defines the logical language and deduction system. Consider the problem of guiding a vehicle that has to move within severe spatial...

This paper addresses the two-way relation between the architecture for cognitive robots on one hand, and a logic of action and change that is adapted to the needs of such robots on the other hand. The relation goes both ways: the logic is used within the architecture, but we also propose that an abstract model of the cognitive robot architecture sh...

. The purpose of this paper is to provide a broad overview of the WITAS Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Project. The WITAS UAV project is an ambitious, long-term basic research project with the goal of developing technologies and functionalities necessary for the successful deployment of a fully autonomous UAV operating over diverse geographical terrain co...

The WITAS Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Project is a long term basic research project located at Linkoping University (LIU), Sweden. The project is multi-disciplinary in nature and involves cooperation with different departments at LIU, and a number of other universities in Europe, the USA, and South America. In addition to academic cooperation, the proj...

This brief historical note describes research done in the period 1970-1973, and where continuations were introduced in a fairly pragmatic way together with partial evaluation in order to compile “rules” expressed as statements in first-order predicate calculus. Although the methods used at that time were quite straightforward, this work may shed so...

The article describes the resources and the requirements for an intelligent autonomous agent that assists the moderator-editor of an electronic colloquium, that is, an online facility for communication between researchers. Such an agent should receive information about actual and planned events in the “ world” of researchers in a specific area, and...

Logics of action and change were originally conceived for the design of intelligent agents, as McCarthy proposed the situation calculus as the logic to be used by a logic-based “advice taker”. In more recent research one can distinguish two motives for these logics, namely, for what is now called cognitive robotics and for common-sense reasoning. T...

This brief historical note describes research which was done in the period 1970-1973, and where continuations were introduced in a fairly pragmatic way together with partial evaluation in order to compile "rules" expressed as statements in first-order predicate calculus. The methods used at that time were quite straight-forward, but they may be of...

In earlier publications addressing logics of actions and change, we have developed an underlying semantics for the special case of strict inertia, and used it for assessment of the range of applicability of a number of entailment methods. The case of strict inertia does not allow for ramification, qualifications, or surprises. The present article a...

The paper analyzes and compares methods for ramification, or for update, which are based on minimization of change while respecting static domain constraints. The main results are: ffl An underlying semantics for propagation oriented ramification, called causal propagation semantics ffl Comparative assessments of a number of previously proposed ent...

This article reports on assessment results for several approaches to the ramification problem. Two types of assessments are reported: (1) Assessment of soundness for one minimization based and one causationbased method; (2) Relative range assessments for a number of minimization based methods. Assessment of soundness is based on an underlying seman...

In summary, the WWDB represents an apporoach that has significant similarities and significant differences with current HTML-oriented WWW technology. It is orthogonal to the Hot Java development since Java is a programming language, and WWDB addresses data structuring. Similarly, it has significant connections and significant differences compared t...

. The paper proposes that the basic idea of the WWW can be generalized to the domain of data structures or information structures. This means that "packages" of structured information are represented as short text files, stored in web-accessible locations (URL:s), and are loaded as needed by the web-oriented database tool. We suggest that this tech...

Most approaches to the ramification problem are based on the principle of minimization of change. It turns out, however, that this principle can not be applied uniformly, and many modern approaches use a classification of the fluents whereby change is only minimized in some of the fluents. The present article reviews these approaches and their unde...

We address the problem of formally proving high-level effect descriptions of actions from low-level operational definitions. Both descriptions are expressed in a logic of actions and change, with extensions for characterizing continuous change, discontinuities, the distinction between true and estimated values of state variables, and the distinctio...

The systematic approach to nonmonotonic logics of actions and change attempts to identify, for each proposed logic, what is its range of applicability relative to a precise definition of intended models. The article describes the concepts and methods that are used in this approach, and examples of assessed range of applicability for a few of the pr...

This memo contains an overview of current and recent research in our laboratory related to the "Features and fluents" approach. The current specific topics in this research are: 1. Semantics-based assessment of nonmonotonic entailment methods for actions and change. 2. Implementation techniques for nonmonotonic entailment methods. Current Research...

We present assessments for a number of previously proposed theories of action and change as well as some new ones. Each assessment identifies a class of scenarios for temporal reasoning where the theory is guaranteed to obtain the correct results. For some of the theories we have also obtained upper-bound results on the range of correct applicabili...

We present assessments for a number of previously proposed theories of action and change as well as some new ones. Each assessment identifies a class of scenarios for temporal reasoning where the theory is guaranteed to obtain the correct results. For some of the theories we have also obtained upper-bound results on the range of correct applicabili...

Non-monotonic logics for reasoning about time and action have traditionally been verified through their informal plausibility and their application to a small number of test examples. I present a systematic method using an underlying semantics, where a preferential nonmonotonic logic is correct if the maximally preferred models equals the set of hi...

We introduce and use a new methodology for the study of logics for action and change. The methodology allows one to define a taxonomy of reasoning problems, based in particular on the properties of the actions in those worlds where the actions take place, and on the au- toepistemic assumptions that are being made. For each of a number of previously...

There is a mutual relationship between the software architecture of an intelligent autonomous agent and a logic for reasoning about action and change. The logic can be used as a formal basis for the software, and at the same time the design of the agent defines the reality that the logic is supposed to describe. In the work reported here we have de...

Common-sense reasoning about time and action is a significant and enigmatic research topic in artificial intelligence. A number of approaches have been proposed in recent years, many of them using preference-based non-monotonic logics. Like for other aspects of common-sense reasoning, the strength and the weakness of each approach has been analyzed...

A framework for developing hierarchical control systems consisting of layers that group transformation types, the tools to help implement the layers and validate timing properties, and the mechanisms for communicating among layers is discussed. The layered framework supports the design and implementation of control systems with both continuous and...

It is usually agreed that programming languages for implementing (other) programming languages, or ‘implementation languages’, should be simple low-level languages which are close to the machine code and to the operating system. In this paper it is argued that a very high level implementation language is a good idea, of particular importance for kn...

Mechanical systems, of the kinds which are of interest for qualitative reasoning, are charac­ terized by a set of real-valued parameters, each of which is a piecewise continuous function of real-valued time. A temporal logic is intro­ duced which allows the description of param­ eters, both in their continuous intervals and around their breakpoints...

This volume contains revised and extended versions of the papers presented at the Second International Workshop on Non-Monotonic Reasoning, held in Grassau (FRG), June 13-15, 1988. The workshop brought together researchers with different backgrounds, including non-monotonic logic, logic programming, truth maintenance and philosophy. Their papers co...

The logic of preferential entailment is generalized to the case where the preference ordering is a part of the models, so that axioms can make statements about the preference ordering, and thereby constrain it. The following technique is used: An aggregate is a pair , , where is a set of partial interpretations, and is a preference order on the mem...

Co-occurrence constraints play an important role in rule-based systems such as natural language processing. The constraints appear in many forms including agreement restrictions (e.g., number agreement between subjects and predicates), selectional restrictions ...

An abstract is not available.

The semantics of inheritance "hierarchies" with multiple inheritance and exceptions is discussed, and a partial semantics in terms of a number of structure types is defined. Previously proposed inference systems for inheritance with exceptions are discussed. A new and improved inference system is proposed, using a fixed number of nonmonotonic infer...

Many of the presentations at this workshop have described systems and systems design. Since the conference was about “AI and Data Bases” I have been puzzled that the presentations consistently described systems and systems design in terms which seemed quite familiar from a DB background and “culture”. There was, to my mind, no presentation which se...

Axiom sets and their extensions are viewed as functions from the set of formulas in the language to a set of four truth values, t, f, u for undefined, and k for contradiction. Such functions form a lattice with “contains less information” as the partial order ?, and “combination of several sources of knowledge” as the least-upper-bound operation ⊔....

In a life cycle perspective on software, the paper describes a strategy for initialization and successive growth of software, which emphasizes flexible introduction and flexible use. The examples in the paper are taken from office information systems or personalized data processing systems. The key points in the paper are as follows: 1. The system...

Special-purpose languages have several advantages for rapid prototyping purposes: they allow very fast development of applications; facilitate the dialogue with end users in the specification work; and simplify the work of updating the prototype iteratively. We have been working with a modelling language based on the concept of information flow in...

A notation for description of information flow networks has been developed to facilitate the design and programming of computerized information handling systems. It uses a number of graphic symbols to describe operations on the information flow. Each symbol has a corresponding formal expression which may be entered into a computer via an interactiv...

The paper describes the design for a software environment which unifies the dialogue management support of a number of existing software tools, such as command-language handlers, operating-system shells, transition diagram interpreters, and forms management systems. The unification is accomplished without undue complexity: the resulting design is c...

This paper describes an alternative approach to software architecture, where the classical division of responsibilities between operating systems, programming languages and compilers, and so forth is revised. Our alternative is organized as a set of self-contained environments which are able to communicate pieces of software between them, and whose...

The SCREEN system is an experimental tool for development and maintenance of application software. It is organized as a System of Communicating REsidential ENvironments, where each environment may be e.g. a programming environment or an end-user environment. Environments are able to send and receive modules which contain programs and data, and the...

The Linköping Office Information System (LOIS) is an integrated system of facilities for text preparation, data base management, communication by computer, and miscellaneous other services. It is an experimental research system, which is used by researchers and secretaries in our own research group.

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The robot in the common science fiction nmnrel appears as a tram an the surface, but is built mechanically from wheels and levers inside. In A.I., we usually visualize an A.I. system as having a similar structure: it communicates in man's language (English), or performs other tasks which make it appear man-like, but it is in fact a large program, w...

A strategy and a system for computer-aided development of data processing systems has been developed for use in medical applications. Each new application is first described as a model which can be executed (interpreted) by the development; system, and which then serves as a prototype for the final system. When it has been sufficiently tested and m...

Lisp systems have been used for highly interactive programming for more than a decade During that time, special properties of the Lisp language (such as program/ data equivalence) have enabled a certain style of interactive programming to develop, characterized by powerful interactive support for the programmer, nonstandard program structures, and...

The paper surveys the work in Artificial Intelligence done in Western Europe with a focus on scientific contributions from France, Germany, Italy, and Sweden.

The problem of converting axioms in predicate calculus to deterministic programs, which are to be used as "rules" by a general problem solver (GPS)-type supervisor is considered. It is shown that this can be done, but that the "objects" must then contain procedure closures or "FUNARG-expressions" which are later applied.

Dieser Beitrag diskutiert das allgemeine Konzept der „Heuristik“ und den am häufigsten untersuchten Spezialfall, nämlich die „Baum-Suche“. Am Ende dieses Aufsatzes ist eine Liste von gutbekannten heuristischen Programmen zu finden. Obwohl man eventuell einige wenige Namen darauf vermissen könnte, sollte die Liste dennoch hinreichend vollständig sei...

Work reported herein was conducted partly at Uppsala University, Swden, with support from the Swedish Board of Technical Development, and partly at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology research program supported in part by the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the Department of Defense and monitored by...

Programs which perform partial evaluation, beta-expansion, and certain optimizations on programs, are studied with respect to implementation and application. Two implementations are described, one “interpretive” partial evaluator, which operates directly on the program to be partially evaluated, and a “compiling” system, where the program to be par...

The paper considers the problem of converting axioms in predicate calculus to deterministic programs, which are to be used as "rules" by a GPS-type supervi­ sor. It is shown that this can be done, but that the "objects" must then contain procedure closures or "FUN- ARG-expressions" which are later applied.