IJCAI-91 Workshop on Objects and Artificial Intelligence

Jacques Ferber (LAFORIA, France); Mamdouh Ibrahim (EDS/AI Services), chair; and Mario Tokoro (SONY Computer Science Laboratory/Keio University, Japan). The primary topics of the workshop were (1) object-oriented architectures for AI, (2) integration of objects and AI, (3) object-oriented knowledge representation, and (4) object-oriented AI applications. Twelve papers were accepted, and 18 contributors representing research in Australia, Austria, France, Germany, Italy, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States were invited to the workshop. This article concentrates on the main issues raised and the major points made during the presentations of the eight papers in the workshop’s four sessions. The workshop started with an introduction by Ibrahim in which he briefly emphasized the challenges facing research in AI and questioned whether object-oriented programming has achieved the expected impact on this field. Ibrahim posed a number of questions related to the theme of the workshop and asked the participants to address some of these questions during their talks and discussion. The questions were the following: Are objects suitable for some but not all AI tasks? Given the object-oriented programming lack of formalisms and semantics, can we expect objectoriented knowledge representation to achieve real advances in AI? When objects are viewed as modules of knowledge or activities, how can they contribute to AI? How can concurrent object-oriented programming benefit AI systems? What is missing from existing object-oriented programming ■ The Objects and Artificial Intelligence Workshop was held on 25 August 1991 in conjunction with the 1991 International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence. The workshop brought together researchers in AI and objectoriented programming to exchange ideas and investigate possible avenues of cooperation between AI and objectoriented programming. The workshop dealt with both the theoretical and the practical aspects of this cooperation.