Verification and validation of intelligent systems: Five years of aaai workshops

One of the longest sequences of ongoing workshops at the AAAI (American Association for Artificial Intelligence) meeting has been the “Workshop on Verification, Validation and Testing of Intelligent Systems” (“V&V workshop” or “workshop”). These workshops have been actively attended by a V&V researchers, tool developers, and practitioners. They have played an important role in facilitating communication between these groups and in the dissemination of major new results and systems. The first five workshops on V&V occurred from 1988-1992. Over that time period there were about 125 articles accumulated in the yearly workshop proceedings. However, those proceedings have been limited primarily to those in attendance at those workshops (e.g., Bellman,’ Culbert,2 O ’ L e a r ~ , ~ Miller,4 and Preeces). This edited collection presents 11 of the papers presented at these meetings. Although this set of articles focuses on those AAAI workshops from 19881992 there are other meetings that have focused on V&V issues. The International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI) has had workshops on V&V at each meeting since 1989. First, the 1989 AAAI V&V workshop was a joint AAAI and IJCAI workshop in Detroit. Second, there were workshops on V&V organized at both the 1991 Australia and 1993 Chambery IJCAI meetings. Further, the European Conference on A1 (ECAI) has had a number of workshops on verification and validation. In addition, EUROVAV recently began yearly organized meetings on V&V. Finally, in 1992 (at Houston, NASA) and 1993 (at the IEEE Conference on Artificial Intelligence Applications in Or-