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You can contribute to the newsletter by sending a short article about your projects and experiences in applying AI techniques to manufacturing. Information on conferences or workshops of interest to the SIGMAN members, announcements of books or journals, call for papers, are welcome. Pointers to other World Wide Web pages are specially welcome. Please send your material to Maria Gini, EE/CSci 4-192, 200 Union St SE, Minneapolis, MN 55455, USA or email to gini@cs.umn.edu.
Maria Gini
Here is an amendment to the SIGMAN Charter proposed by the SIGMAN Council. The full text of the Charter is listed later.
We propose to replace this paragraph from the current Charter:
A MATERIALS AND DESIGN AREA-CHAIR, an OPERATIONS AND PRODUCTION AREA-CHAIR, a DISTRIBUTION AND FIELD SERVICE AREA-CHAIR, and an ORGANIZATION AND MANAGEMENT AREA-CHAIR each of whom shall be elected to a two year term of office immediately prior to an annual business meeting. The duties of these AREA-CHAIRPERSONS shall include actively identifying the problems of interest in their title domain, actively identifying the SIGMAN members interested in these problems, organizing and executing workshops on the problems for the members, and representing their constituency in the SIGMAN COUNCIL.
by this new paragraph:
TWO MEMBER-AT-LARGE OFFICERS each of whom shall be elected to a two year term of office immediately prior to an annual business meeting. The duties of these officers shall include actively identifying problems of interest to the members, organizing workshops and other activities, and promoting cooperation among experts and practitioners in AI and Manufacturing.
The rational for the amendment is that by reducing the size of the SIGMAN Council interactions among officers will be easier. Also, by removing the specific areas represented by the area-chairs, the structure of the SIGMAN Council will be more flexible.
To guarantee continuity in the SIGMAN Council and, at the same time, to allow for new officers to be elected each year, half of the new officers will be elected for a two year term, the other half for a one year term.
Here are the candidates for the positions in the SIGMAN Council. Biographical information about the candidates is given below. Please indicate your choices on the enclosed ballot and mail it out. The ballots must be received by July 30, 1996 . The results of the elections will be announced at the SIGMAN meeting during the AAAI Conference.
Dr. Smith is a Senior Research Scientist in the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, where he is Director of the Intelligent Coordination and Logistics Laboratory. For the past 12 years, his research has focused on constraint-based reasoning frameworks and techniques for flexible planning, scheduling and control in practical domains. Dr. Smith has directed the development of innovative, constraint-based planing and scheduling systems in several complex domains, and he has consulted with a number of industrial and government organizations to develop and field derivative technologies. His current research is concerned with mixed-initiative planning and scheduling in large-scale domains, reconfigurable and self-organizing planning systems, and agent-based modeling and analysis of supply chain dynamics. Dr. Smith has served as a member of the SIGMAN executive council since 1992 and has served as academic co-chair since 1994.
Mark Boddy has received his PhD in Computer Science in 1991 at Brown University. Dr. Boddy has been a research scientist in the Automated Reasoning group at HTC since 1991. His research interests include planning and scheduling, constraint satisfaction problems, formal and implementation issues in temporal reasoning, managing risk while planning under conditions of uncertainty and incomplete information, mixed-initiative problem solving, and negotiation protocols for the relaxation or enforcement of constraints in distributed problem solving. He has worked on a variety of scheduling systems for domains including Shuttle Spacelab mission operations, discrete manufacturing of printed circuit cards, processor and communication scheduling for the Boeing 777 Aircraft Information Management System, image data archiving, retrieval, and analysis for the Earth Observing System, and batch manufacturing.
Bernard Nadel
Dr. Nadel is Founder and President of IntelliGineering Corp., a consulting and education firm based in Southfield, Michigan, specializing in Knowledge-Based Engineering. Dr. Nadel has 15 years of experience in teaching, research and application of AI in science and engineering. For the past six years, Dr. Nadel has been collaborating with the Ford Advanced Transmission Design Dept. in Livonia, MI in the development of an expert system, called TransForm, that automates the design of automobile power transmissions. TransForms had discovered thousands of patentable new transmissions as well as many previously-known commercially important designs. Dr. Nadel has been an Assistant Professor in the Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Michigan (1983-1986), and in the Computer Science Dept. at Wayne State University (1988-1994). Dr. Nadel has a B.Sc (Hons) in Physics and Mathematics, a M.Sc in Bioengineering and a PhD in Computer Science. He has taught tutorials on Constraint-Directed Reasoning and on AI in Engineering at national and international conferences. He also teaches courses on Knowledge-Based CAD/CAM and on Creativity in Engineering for the Society of Automotive Engineers and the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. He is also a board member of the Detroit chapter of the Society of Manufacturing Engineers and is the 1994-past president of the Southeast Michigan chapter of the ACM Special Interest Group on AI.
Leslie D. Interrante is a Senior Member of the Technical Staff in the Information Systems Applications Department of Sandia National Laboratories, and chair of the Sandia Artificial Intelligence Interest Group. She is currently active in the development of supply chain integration software for the Integrated Textile Complex and the introduction of new software technologies for product realization in the nuclear weapons complex. Leslie is an honorary member of the editorial board of the Journal of Intelligent Manufacturing, a reviewer for the National Science Foundation, and a reviewer for a number of journals. She has authored a variety of papers and book chapters, primarily focused on active rescheduling and material handling applications. She has chaired a number of national workshops related to artificial intelligence and manufacturing. Prior artificial intelligence research projects include the development of new technologies for Chrysler Corporation, the National Science Foundation, the Marshall Space Flight Center, the US Army Missile Command, and Aerojet Corporation.
James K. McDowell
Dr. James K. McDowell is a Research Associate at the Composite Materials & Structures Center and Intelligent Systems Lab, at Michigan State University. Over the past several years I have been applying knowledge-based technology for intelligent decision support in polymer composite material, part/assembly and process design. Implicit within this field of polymer composites are a large number of challenges important for both design and manufacturing. I have presented this work in composites, chemical engineering and intelligent systems forums. This applied R&D work continues to thrive under both NSF and DARPA support. I have also served as R&D Marketing Manager for Auto-Air Composites, a small high tech. advanced materials component designer and manufacturer. I am also very active in the Function-based Reasoning Community and am chairing this year's workshop at AAAI'96. I earned my Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering in 1991 from Ohio State University where I did work in applying Generic Task Methodologies and model-based reasoning to problems in chemical process diagnosis. I am a member of AAAI, IEEE Computer Society and Society for the Advancement of Materials and Process Engineering.
Dana Nau
Dana Nau is a Professor at the University of Maryland, in the
Department of Computer Science and the Institute for Systems Research.
His research interests include AI planning and searching, and
computer-integrated design and manufacturing. Dr. Nau received his
Ph.D. in Computer Science from Duke University in 1979, where he was
an NSF graduate fellow. He has more than 150 technical publications;
copies of recent papers are available at
Barry Fox presently holds the title of Senior Specialist - Planning & Scheduling Technology, in McDonnell Douglas Aerospace - Houston. My group is responsible for the development and deployment of planning & scheduling technology for a variety of projects. At present our largest project is support of aircraft assembly operations, corporate wide. Other projects include support for facility scheduling, as well as training, and mission operations. During my last tenure as benchmarks chairman I developed the Planning and Scheduling Benchmarks found at http://www.neosoft.com/~benchmrx . From that experience I have learned two things. First, preparation and maintenance of a benchmark site is very difficult and time-consuming. During this next term I intend to provide additional problems and to increase its value and relevance by directly soliciting participation and contribution from key corporate and academic researchers. Second, benchmark problems are extremely important to practitioners in industry that require some way to evaluate the offerings of commercial vendors. I intend to provide additional problems that illustrate needs found in the "real-world."
Maria Gini is an Associate Professor at the University of Minnesota, Department of Computer Science, in Minneapolis. Before joining the University of Minnesota, she has been a Research Associate at the Politecnico of Milan, Italy and a Visiting Research Associate at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory of Stanford University. She is a member of AAAI, ACM, the IEEE Robotics Society, and CPSR. Her research interests are in the integration of Artificial Intelligence with robotics for navigation, exploration, and task execution in changing environments. Her research projects include navigation for mobile robots in the presence of moving obstacles, parallel algorithms for real-time path planning for articulated robots, task planning with incomplete or uncertain information, automatic detection and recovery from robot errors, object-oriented programming for robotics, and integration of planning with execution.
June 24-26, 1996, in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Organized by AAAI's Special Interest Group in Manufacturing.
Dear Colleague:
On behalf of the AAAI Special Interest Group in Manufacturing (SIGMAN), the
National Science Foundation, Sandia National Laboratories, ARPA, and NIST,
we welcome your participation in the 1996 Artificial Intelligence and
Manufacturing Research Planning Workshop.
Participants from government, industry and
academe are welcome. This
conference provides a focused gathering of researchers and funding agencies
who will engage in planning new directions for Artificial Intelligence and
Manufacturing.
The Workshop: The Workshop will be held at the Holiday Inn Pyramid, Albuquerque, New Mexico. Formal proceedings will include juried papers from the AI community. There will also be a poster session presenting research directions and a field trip to Sandia National Laboratories.
More Information:
Additional information is available from the Sigman web page
or by calling Patti Sanchez, (505) 845-9595, via fax (505)844-2043, or email
pmsanch@sandia.gov .
We look forward to seeing you in Albuquerque.
Leslie Interrante, Conference Host
Patti Sanchez, Conference Coordinator
Genetic Programming 1996 Conference, July 28-31, 1996, Stanford University, California. In cooperation with the Association for Computing Machinery, SIGART, and the American Association for Artificial Intelligence. Contact: GP-96, AAAI, 445 Burgess Drive, Menlo Park, CA 94025; 415-328-3123; FAX: 415-321-4457; gp@aaai.org; http://www.aaai.org . Conference Chair: gp96@cs.stanford.edu.
KDD-96, Second International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, August 2-4, 1996, collocated with AAAI-96, Portland, Oregon. Contact: KDD-96, 445 Burgess Drive, Menlo Park, CA 94025; 415-328-3123; FAX: 415-321-4457; kdd@aaai.org; http://www.aaai.org . Conference Chair: http://www-aig.jpl.nasa.gov/kdd96 .
AAAI-96, Thirteenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, August 4-8, 1996, Portland, Oregon, USA. Contact: AAAI-96, 445 Burgess Drive, Menlo Park, CA 94025; 415-328-3123; FAX: 415-321-4457; ncai@aaai.org; http://www.aaai.org .
IAAI-96, Eighth Annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence, August 5-7, 1996, collocated with AAAI-96, Portland, Oregon, USA. Contact: IAAI-96, 445 Burgess Drive, Menlo Park, CA 94025; 415-328-3123; FAX: 415-321-4457; iaai@aaai.org; http://www.aaai.org .
Conference on Agile and Intelligent Manufacturing Systems , October 2-3, 1996, Troy, NY For information contact: Dr. Sunderesh S. Heragu, Electronics Agile Manufacturing Research Institute, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, CII Building, Room 9009, Troy, NY 12180-3590. Tel: (518) 276-6856; Fax: (518) 276-8227; E-Mail: herags@rpi.edu
Fifth International Conference on Data and Knowledge Systems for Manufacturing and Engineering (DKSME '96) , Phoenix, Arizona October 24-25, 1996. For information, contact Prof. Sudha Ram, Department of MIS, College of BPA, University of Arizona, Tuscon, Arizona 85721, Phone: 520-621-2748, Fax: 520-621-2433, e-mail: ram@bpa.arizona.edu
KR-96, Fifth International Conference on Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning, November 4-7, 1996, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA. Immediately prior to FSS-96. Contact: KR'96, AAAI, 445 Burgess Drive, Menlo Park, CA 94025; 415-328-3123; FAX: 415-321-4457; kr@aaai.org. http://www.aaai.org . Conference Chair: kr96-info@medg.lcs.mit.edu; http://www.medg.lcs.mit.edu/kr96.html .
AAAI 1996 Fall Symposium Series (FSS-96) , November 9-11, 1996, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Royal Sonesta Hotel, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA. Contact: FSS-96, AAAI, 445 Burgess Drive, Menlo Park, CA 94025; 415-328-3123; FAX: 415-321-4457; fss@aaai.org; http://www.aaai.org .
1) MISSION : The Special Interest Group in Manufacturing (SIGMAN) is an alliance of members of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) who are interested in the theory and practice of Artificial Intelligence (AI) as applied to manufacturing problems such as materials and design, operations and production, distribution and field service, and organization and management. SIGMAN exists to facilitate communication and cooperation among those interested in defining manufacturing problems which are amenable to AI-based solutions, developing and describing such solutions, and evaluating implementations in service and against one another. SIGMAN supports its members through such activities as holding business meetings, organizing workshops, publishing newsletters, and maintaining benchmark problem sets.
2) GUIDELINES : SIGMAN seeks contributions from the research community and from the applications community. It is vitally interested in helping applications set the priorities for research and research set the expectations for applications. SIGMAN is interested in research concepts which are applicable to manufacturing problems, and application examples which employ AI concepts. It is especially interested in projects which attempt critical evaluation of particular theories applied to specific real problems. Both positive and negative results are of interest. SIGMAN is interested in the precise definition of paradigmatic manufacturing problems, the clear and complete description of AI solutions, and the unambiguous evaluation of implementations. It is particularly interested in the availability of well-defined problem sets and performance benchmarks as aids to communication and progress.
3) MEMBERS : The membership of SIGMAN shall be open to any member of the AAAI as defined in the AAAI By-Laws. Application is made by request to AAAI to be included on the SIGMAN mailing list. Support of SIGMAN is included in AAAI membership fees. Termination of membership in AAAI includes termination of membership in SIGMAN.
4) OFFICERS : The officers of SIGMAN shall be drawn from the membership of the SIG. No person may hold more than one office simultaneously. The officers shall include ...
An ACADEMIC CO-CHAIR, normally a full-time employee of an academic institution, who shall be elected to a two year term of office immediately prior to the annual business meeting in even years (beginning in 1990), and an INDUSTRIAL CO-CHAIR, normally a full-time employee of a commercial corporation, who shall be elected to a two year term of office immediately prior to the annual business meeting in odd years (beginning in 1989). The duties of these CO-CHAIRPERSONS shall include organizing and conducting the yearly business meeting, representing SIGMAN to the AAAI parent (the senior current CO-CHAIRPERSON shall be designated as the "AAAI Liaison"), promoting interaction between SIGMAN and other bodies, supporting the organization and execution of workshops, and assuring interaction between the sub-areas of SIGMAN.
A MATERIALS AND DESIGN AREA-CHAIR, an OPERATIONS AND PRODUCTION AREA-CHAIR, a DISTRIBUTION AND FIELD SERVICE AREA-CHAIR, and an ORGANIZATION AND MANAGEMENT AREA-CHAIR each of whom shall be elected to a two year term of office immediately prior to an annual business meeting. The duties of these AREA-CHAIRPERSONS shall include actively identifying the problems of interest in their title domain, actively identifying the SIGMAN members interested in these problems, organizing and executing workshops on the problems for the members, and representing their constituency in the SIGMAN COUNCIL.
A NEWSLETTER SECRETARY, who shall be elected to a two year term of office immediately prior to an annual business meeting. The duties of the NEWSLETTER SECRETARY shall include actively soliciting and collecting material of interest to the membership, and compiling and issuing the newsletter as appropriate (not less than 4 times per year), in machine readable and transmittable form when possible.
A BENCHMARK SECRETARY, who shall be elected to a two year term of office immediately prior to an annual business meeting. The duties of the BENCHMARK SECRETARY shall include actively promoting the definition of problems, description of solutions, and evaluation of implementations by the SIGMAN membership, and maintaining these definitions, descriptions, and evaluations, in machine readable and transmittable form when possible. (NOTE: These activities should in no way be construed as involving "standardization" of any kind, and no member is required to use the benchmarks.)
5) ELECTIONS : Nominations shall be made by the SIGMAN membership, at least 90 days prior to the annual business meeting, generally in response to a call for nominations published in the SIGMAN newsletter. Nominations shall be validated by the SIGMAN COUNCIL including verification of qualifications and confirmation of desire to serve if elected. Ballots shall be circulated to the SIGMAN membership at least 45 days prior to the annual business meeting, generally by inclusion in the SIGMAN newsletter. Election shall be made by simple majority of returned ballots post-marked not later than 15 days prior to the annual business meeting. Results shall be announced at the annual business meeting. Terms of office shall begin at the close of the annual business meeting.
6) COUNCIL : The SIGMAN COUNCIL shall consist of the eight SIGMAN Officers as identified in this document, and the most recent past CO-CHAIRPERSON. The senior current CO-CHAIRPERSON shall organize and conduct SIGMAN COUNCIL meetings. Each current SIGMAN officer shall have one vote, the most recent past CO-CHAIRPERSON voting only in case of a tie. Any vacancy occurring in the COUNCIL shall be appointed by the COUNCIL until the next regular election.
7) BUSINESS MEETINGS : The yearly business meeting of SIGMAN shall be held at the AAAI Conference in years when such a conference is held, or during the IJCAI Conference in years when such a conference is held in North America and there is no separate AAAI Conference, or at the discretion of the COUNCIL with thirty day written notice to the SIGMAN membership in years when neither a AAAI Conference nor a North American IJCAI Conference is held. These meetings shall be chaired by the CO-CHAIRPERSONS of SIGMAN.
8) TECHNICAL MEETINGS : SIGMAN shall hold technical meetings as suggested by the members, validated by the COUNCIL, and approved by the Conference Committee and Executive Council of the AAAI parent. Unless otherwise approved by the COUNCIL, the technical meetings shall be chaired by one or more of the CO-CHAIRPERSONS or AREA-CHAIRPERSONS of SIGMAN. While it is strongly encouraged that domain experts (including non-members of SIGMAN) be included in technical meetings as active participants, the meeting chair must approve their attendance in advance in the context of the goals of the particular meeting.
9) MISCELLANEOUS : Matters arising during the conduct of the business of SIGMAN which are not explicitly defined in this document shall be decided by the COUNCIL of SIGMAN with reference to the AAAI By-Laws. The Executive Council of the AAAI parent shall have final authority over any and all disputes.