Dear TC-12 members and WG officers,

Please find below the minutes of our last meeting in Nagoya. As you know, Gigina Aiello has resigned as the TC-12 chair. As her successor, I would like to thank her for her good work for TC-12.

Bernd Neumann

Present at the meeting:

Members TC12

A. Carlucci-Aiello (Italy, Chair), B. Neumann (Germany, Secretary), S. Doshita (Japan), Z. Shi (China), B. Faltings (Switzerland), D. Spyropoulos (Greece)

WG Representatives

W. Bibel (WG12.1)

Observers

M. Sgouros (Greece)

Duration of meeting:

Begin: 10:00 am

End: 1:30 pm

Agenda:

1. Opening

Chairperson opens the meeting and welcomes all persons attending the meeting. The agenda as listed is confirmed.

2. TC-12 Chairperson´s report

The activities of the TC12 chair and secretary after the last Council Meeting held in Bratislava have concentrated on the:

• Start of the review activity, including a review meeting organized in Hamburg in the Spring of 1997 between the secretary of TC12 and Prof. Brauer.
• Collection of reports of activities from the WG chairs, in view of the preparation of the report for the review committe. This has only partly been successful so far.
• Analysis of the status of the WG chairs and the need for the appointment of new chairs and vice chairs, whenever appropriate.
• Solicitation of new initiatives to be undertaken.
• Establishment and reinforcement of contacts with leading no profit societies active in AI in order to take advantage of synergetic initiatives.
• Support to J. Cuena, chair of WG5, in the organization of IT&KNOWS, in connection with the Computer World Congress IFIP-98.
• Announcement of the initiative of Prof. Bjorner regarding the 1999 Conference on Formal Methods to be held in Toulouse, in order to solicit the presence of TC12 in that important event. AI in fact has always been interested in automatic programmimg and automatic program synthesis, which are very relevant topics for this conference.
• Action aiming at forming a WG on Computational Logic in CS and AI, in cooperation with TC1. The action has not been successful so far, but it is still underway.

Chairperson announces her resignation as TC12 chair because of unexpected personal overload.

3. Report WG12.1: Knowledge Representation and Reasoning

A written report has been received from D. Etherington, chair of WG12.1. There have been several activities, albeit without a strong sense of IFIP identity.

 The terms for chair and vice chair have expired. There are no proposals for successors.

4. Report WG12.2: Machine Learning

No report has been received.

5. Report WG12.3: Reasoning Techniques

Z. Shi has provided a written report and is present at the meeting. There have been few activities in the past year. Z. Shi proposes to organize a TC12 conference at the IFIP World Computer Congress to be held in Bejing in the year 2000 and distributes a preliminary announcement. The proposal was unanimously approved in principle, with the warning that he should narrow the scope of the conference. This change should be reflected in both the title and the list of topics of the conference. It is further recommended that the conference should focus towards some application area, to make it more attractive both to potential authors and mainly to potential participants. Z. Shi is asked to submit the new version of his proposal to the TC12 chairperson, in order to get approval to proceed on behalf of TC12.

The terms for chair and vice chair have expired. There are no proposals for successors.

6. Report WG12.4: Natural Language Processing

No report has been received. The terms for chair and vice chair have expired. There are no proposals for successors.

7. Report WG12.5: Knowledge-Oriented Development of Applications

A written report of J. Cuena, chairperson of WG12.5, has been received prior to the meeting. Members of WG12.5 have attended the founding meeting of WG 2.9, focused on requirements engineering, in June 96. They also invited members of WG 2.9 as invited speakers for KAW-96 in Banff (Canada) organized by WG12.5. As a major activity of TC12, J. Cuena, the chair of TC12.5, is organizing the conference IT&KNOWS within the World Computer Congress IFIP-98.

The terms for chair and vice chair have expired. Both are eligible for another 3-year term.

8. Review and discussion of further development of TC12

In an extensive discussion, the participants of the meeting analyze the current situation of TC12 and possible ways for the TC to play an active role in IFIP. There is basic agreement about the following observations:

(1) AI is an important and healthy field which should be attended and represented in IFIP.

(2) The lack of activities in some WGs is mainly due to their profile which duplicates existing activities elewhere, and also due to stronger affiliations of AI people to other organisations than IFIP.

(3) The activities of J. Cuena in WG12.5 are a good example of successful work in TC12 with a profile not clearly covered by other AI organisations.

(4) For a revival of TC12 it is necessary to provide a new focus to several of the existing WGs.

(5) There seem to be at least two promising directions for future activities:

• activities towards integrating AI and main Computer Science
• activities towards bringing AI into praxis.

Several interesting foci of WGs are discussed, including multiagent technology, multilingual technology, CAD, formal software methods, and others. In order to effect integration with existing activities outside AI, links to the respective WGs will have to be established.

9. Election of new TC12 chair

Chairperson proposes B. Neumann, the current secretary of TC12, as a candidate for the TC12 chair following her resignation. There are no proposals of other candidates. B. Neumann is unanimously elected to be recommended to the president of IFIP for appointment as a new chair of TC12. The election will take immediate effect after the appointment by the president which is expected in September 1997.

10. Election of WG officers, discontinuation of WGs, start of new WGs

TC proposes to continue the operation of WG12.2 for one year until the time when new chairpersons have to be appointed. TC confirms the chairpersons of WG12.5 for another 3-year term. As for WGs 1, 3 and 4, even though the terms of the respective chairs are over and they cannot be reconfirmed, the TC chairperson - upon unanimous recommendation of the TC members - has decided not to proceed to the appointment of new chairpersons. Conversely, the TC has decided to suspend the activity of WGs 1, 3 and 4, in view of a redesign to be operated in the coming months, as the result of strategic planning.

 11. Preparation of IFIP-98 conference IT&KNOWS

The Call for Papers & Contributions of IT&KNOWS has been distributed world-wide, including the conference site of IJCAI-98. TC expresses appreciation of the work done so far by J. Cuena. It is apparent that in order for IT&KNOWS to be successful, active participation must be solicited. TC asks all members to advertise IT&KNOWS and solicit contributions.

12. IFIP (TC12) scientific sponsorship of international conferences

There are no requests for sponsorship of international conferences.

13. Setting up of web pages for the TC and WG

TC expresses appreciation for the efforts of D. O´Leary (USA) to maintain a web page for TC12. B. Neumann will see to it that the activities of TC12 are reported on the web page.

14. Miscellaneous

There are no items.

15. Next meeting

The next meeting will be on the occasion of IT&KNOWS during the World Computer Congress IFIP-98 in Vienna and Budapest from August 31 to September 4, 1998. The exact date is yet to be announced.

16. Close

Chairperson closes the meeting at 1:30.

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Prof. Dr. Bernd Neumann

FB Informatik

Universitaet Hamburg

Vogt-Koelln-Str. 30

D-22527 Hamburg

Germany

Tel.: +49 (40) 5494 2451 Fax: +49 (40) 5494 2572

Email: neumann@informatik.uni-hamburg.de