Communications of the ACM articles from March 1994

Communications of the ACM archives from March 1994

Editorial Pointers. (Editorial)
March 1, 1994... Ask five computing professionals to define "artificial intelligence" and you're likely to get five different answers. About the only statement all will agree on is that AI is a sensitive area, particularly in terms of what it is, what it can...

Newstrack.
March 1, 1994... THE GREAT EQUALIZER...In U.S. schools, computers have helped close the learning gap between girls and boys and the rich and poor, says a study conducted by the Netherlands-based International Association for the Evaluation of Education...

Emerging dynabase tools. (includes a related article on computer industry news items)(Personal Computing) (Column)
March 1, 1994... An earlier column [10] talked about dynabases, databases that seamlessly integrated all of the information received or generated by an individual or an organization over a long period of time. I never expect to have the ultimate dynabase (it...

Public interest and the NII. (National Information Infrastructure)(From Washington) (Column)
March 1, 1994... In government and the private sector, planning and policy-making for a new National Information Infrastructure are steaming ahead full speed. Anyone trying to follow the furor of legislation, government task forces, company mergers and...

Commercial and industrial AI. (Artificial Intelligence) (Cover Story)
March 1, 1994... The practical application of artificial intelligence (AI) has been the center of controversy for many years. Certainly, if we mean AI to be a realization of real human intelligence in the machine, its current state may be considered primitive....

The state of knowledge-based systems. (Artificial Intelligence) (Cover Story)
March 1, 1994... Knowledge-based systems (KBS) burst onto the computing scene in the 1970s, as a result of the seminal impressive results obtained by the DENDRAL system [5] for elucidating chemical structures and the MYCIN system that could diagnose infectious...

Basic technology ingredients. (knowledge-based system design) (Artificial Intelligence) (Cover Story)
March 1, 1994... KBS are applications that generate quality solutions to problems requiring computer-based reasoning with knowledge. This kind of computer processing of knowledge is termed knowledge processing. Knowledge refers to those kinds of data that...

Case-based reasoning: business applications. (Artificial Intelligence) (Cover Story)
March 1, 1994... Case-based reasoning (CBR) is an approach to problem solving based on the retrieval and adaptation of cases, or episodic descriptions of problems and their associated solutions. In theory, CBR can be considered as a five-step problem-solving...

Computer vision applications. (Artificial Intelligence)(Cover Story) (Technical)
March 1, 1994... If a creature-either biological or mechanical-is to interact effectively with its environment, it needs to know what objects are where. Computer vision provides a primary method for understanding how to make intelligent decisions about an...

Survey of current speech technology. (includes related articles on speech recognition and synthesis technology) (Artificial Intelligence)(Cover Story) (Technical)
March 1, 1994... Speech recognition and speech synthesis are technologies of particular interest for their support of direct communication between humans and computers through a communications mode humans commonly use among themselves and at which they are...

New technologies and applications in robotics. (Artificial Intelligence)(Cover Story) (Technical)
March 1, 1994... Material transfer robots first appeared in the mid-1960s for use in traditional industrial applications. By the 1980s, robots found use in more demanding industrial applications such as welding, assembly, and inspection, with the help of...

Fuzzy systems: an overview. (fuzzy logic-based systems) (Artificial Intelligence)(Cover Story) (Technical)
March 1, 1994... Born in the United States around 1965, fuzzy set theory has grown to become a major scientific domain collectively referred to in this article as "fuzzy systems," which include fuzzy sets, logic, algorithms, and control. For the past few...

A tutorial on fuzzy sets, logic, and control. (Artificial Intelligence)(Cover Story) (Tutorial)
March 1, 1994... We will briefly sketch limited highlights of fuzzy sets, logic, and control. (For more on fundamentals, see [4, 9, 10, 12, 17, 23, 25].) In an ordinary (nonfuzzy) set, an element of the universe either belongs to or does not belong to the set....

Fuzzy logic, neural networks, and soft computing. (Artificial Intelligence)(Cover Story) (Technical)
March 1, 1994... In retrospect, the year 1990 may well be viewed as the beginning of a new trend in the design of household appliances, consumer electronics, cameras, and other types of widely used consumer products. The trend in question relates to a marked...

The basic ideas in neural networks. (Artificial Intelligence)(Cover Story) (Technical)
March 1, 1994... Interest in the study of neural networks has grown remarkably in the last several years. This effort has been characterized in a variety of ways: as the study of brain-style computation, connectionist architectures, parallel...

Neural networks: applications in industry, business and science. (Artificial Intelligence)(Cover Story) (Technical)
March 1, 1994... Just four years ago, the only widely reported commercial application of neural network technology outside the financial industry was the airport baggage explosive detection system [27] developed at Science Applications International Corporation...

Neural networks in Japan. (Artificial Intelligence)(Cover Story) (Technical)
March 1, 1994... Applications of neural networks made their debut in Japan in 1988. Fujitsu used a neural network for robot control [21], and NEC used one to recognize printed characters [4]. Since then, neural networks have been used extensively in Japan, and...

Genetic and evolutionary algorithms come of age. (includes a related article on products, services, and sources of information) (Artificial Intelligence)(Cover Story) (Technical)
March 1, 1994... Before there were computers, there was thinking about the mind as a computer--as a machine. And in this way, computer science and engineering trace their roots to using natural examples. Within these fields of endeavor, AI drew its initial...

Calendar of Events.
March 1, 1994... ACM's calendar policy is to list open computer science meetings that are sponsored by ACM, sister societies, or other scientific, technical or educational tax-exempt organizations. Educational seminars, institutes, and courses are not included...

Professional Activities.
March 1, 1994... Professional Activities The following courses, tutorials, seminars and recruitment events are sponsored or offered in cooperation with ACM. Please contact the companies, SIG Conferences or ACM Chapters for details. Technology...

Calls for Papers.
March 1, 1994... March 15* Informatics Week 1994 (IW'94) HoChiMinh City, Viet Nam. Aug. 2-6, 1994. Submit 3 copies of paper (written in English, French or Vietnamese) to Phan Dinh Dieu, Chair, Programme Committe, INFORMATICS WEEK 1994, 36C y Nam...

Career Opportunities.
March 1, 1994... Millsaps College Department of Mathematics and Computer Studies Tenure track position at the Assistant Professor level in Computer Studies beginning August 1994. Responsibilities include teaching core and upper level computer...

Technology, laws, and society. (Inside Risks ) (Column)
March 1, 1994... Computers and communications have the potential to stimulate unparalleled human advances. However, phenomenal increases in computer system speed, storage capacity, interconnectivity, and information mobility are seriously exacerbating many...