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Forget human modeling
Joe Carter s provocative and controversial speech on the opening day of IAAI 93 was a highlight of the more businessoriented conference. In a deceptively soft voice, Carter (of Andersen Consulting) claimed that AI will be a nonstarter er view of knowledge. (Some members of the audience raised concerns that AI s commercial side should not define all of the field s research agenda, since some researchers explicitly seek to understand human intelligence.)

B. Chandrasekaran
IAAI 93 and AAAI 93 met in a climate of concern about AI. Technologically, there was general acknowledgment that AI hadn t quite exploded as hoped and hadn t defined itself clearly. Theoretically, there was an awareness that the field, its assumptions, and its methodology had been under criticism from both outside and inside AI. On top of all this was - and is - a whole set of funding uncertainties due to the end of the cold war and its implications for the way we justify AI research and technology, and due to the general budget malaise. Thus these were important meetings for AI. Most of us went hoping for a honest and open discussion of the issues. We were not disappointed. Those of us attending the tutorials and workshops before the conferences started felt somewhat relieved to be out of the constant commercial glare, and to discuss and share our work with others who are equally committed to AI over the long term. Attendance at these preconference events seemed smaller than a few years ago, but I had the sense that we have become a somewhat more normal research community now that the commercial fever has died down. Once the conferences started, I attended some of the major talks and panels, concentrating on areas with strategic implications for the entire field. I left the technical program alone except for an occasional talk or two, nor did I spend much time at the exhibits or the robot competition. 78

New Al technologies
After Carter s talk, IAAI presented a number of carefully selected applications where AI ideas had made an impact in the world, and several panels on new ideas coming down the pike. Herb Schorr, who was IBM s major strategist for knowledge systems before becoming director of the University of Southern California s Information Sciences Institute, moderated a panel on new technologies from the labs that might ease some of AI s commercial difficulties. Schorr pointed out that AI as a business has not been spectacular: Individual successes abound, but the growth has not been exponential, there is no market leader, and applications have tended to be complex and one-shot, leading to high costs per application. George Klinker from DEC said that the technology has not been solving the right kinds of problems, that we need to build models of how work is actually done in the workplace, and develop reusable knowledge acquisition models that are less expensive to build than the preconceived, fixed models used to date. Bob MacGregor of USC/IS1 talked about the need for large-scale knowledge
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Those of us attending the tutorials and workshops before the conferences started felt somewhat relieved to be out of the constant commercial glare. I had the sense that we have become a somewhat more normal research community.
as a technology if its goal is to imitate people. The world is reeling from an excess of people, many without jobs, so replacing people cannot be the business reason to invest in AI. Carter argued that the human metaphor is all wrong; instead, knowledge must be viewed in the broader context of organizations. Knowledge in all its forms - not just the knowledge of experts - should find its way into machines. The opportunity for AI is not in automating decisions that are already being made by people, but in helping to make all the decisions that are not being made now but that could be with a broad-