🚀 go-pugleaf

				   Workshop
				      on
			     DEVICE UNDERSTANDING

To be held at Ohio State University, March 2-3, 1990.

The problem of representing how intelligent agents understand the way things
work has long been recognized as an important problem in Artificial
Intelligence.  This necessarily includes representing the relationship between
the structure, behavior, and function of devices and the ability to express
the abstraction from states of components to states of the device in order to
make inferences about the behavior of compound devices, make predictions, and
diagnose failures.  Work on qualitative physics, and related areas, has made a
significant contribution to understanding how behavior can be derived from
structural descriptions, and how structure and behavior are related.  But
there is the additional problem of how function comes from relating behavior
to the goals or purposes of a device, i.e., the relationship between behavior
and teleology.  The fundamental questions for this problem are: (1) what is
the relationship between function and behavior, (2) how do functions of
devices arise from functions of components, (3) how are causal models of
devices organized, (4) how can such causal models be used for simulation,
diagnosis, design, etc.  A considerable amount of work has been done at Ohio
State on these issues in the domains of medicine and engineering.
Consequently, we plan to hold an informal workshop and invite participation of
those interested in the same issues.  We will host the workshop at Ohio State
University on March 2nd and 3rd, 1990.  If you are interested in attending,
please contact Mike Tanner or B. Chandrasekaran (addresses given below).

Michael C. Tanner
Department of Computer and
  Information Science
Ohio State University
2036 Neil Avenue Mall
Columbus, OH 43210-1277
Ph:  (614) 292-1413
Email:  tanner@cis.ohio-state.edu

B. Chandrasekaran
Professor
Department of Computer and
  Information Science
Ohio State University
2036 Neil Avenue Mall
Columbus, OH 43210-1277
Ph:  (614) 292-0923