AIAA Technical Committees

Artificial Intelligence

Minutes of the Committee Meeting on

May 30-31, 1996 at Draper Labs, Boston, MA

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May 30, 1996

• Meeting was called to order at 1:00 on May 30th by the new committee chairperson, K. Krishna Kumar.
• A solicitation was make, by K. Krishna Kumar, for review of papers for the AI tract of the AIAA National Conference. Various members volunteered to review papers. Others were encouraged to contact K. Krishna Kumar.
• A discussion was then conducted on Tutorials for the National Conference. Dick ? of Accurate Automation suggested one on the Waverunner Neural Control project. It was also suggested that a presentation on agents be solicited from Phil Anton based on the very interesting presentation given at the meeting in September, 1995. (Action Item to K. Krishna Kumar to contact Phil Anton) Members were encouraged to identify other tutorials and get back to K. Krishna Kumar (Action Item for All members).
• The issue of supporting ANNIE vs Computing in Aerospace 11 was discussed as the dates currently conflict. It was decided to support both as some members were already directly involved with ANNIE but Computing in Aerospace is more representative of the broad interests of the group.
• Mitch Kokar lead a discussion on the IEEE Symposium on Intelligent Controls, July 16-18, 1997. The program committee is interesting in boosting attendance and participation but has not specific suggestions as to how to do this. The next Symposium is in September in Dearborn, MI, which is too soon to be involved in. Next years is in Istanbul which is a problem for US residents but is attractive to the European community. We could chair a session if we had a volunteer. Mitch will be there but we still need a volunteer to organize a session and go. (Action Item to All members)
• A long discussion was conducted about Computing in Aerospace 11. The AITC traditionally sponsors this and we should be getting started at this point. K. Krishna Kumar suggested a dual tract of papers and tutorials. However, much is still unknown about the organisation of the conference at this point. Ethan Scarl was brought in by telecon because he has been involved with the organizing committee. According to Ethan, a lot is still unknown but the date and location (Williamsburg, VA) seem solid. An idea was raised of sponsorship - getting government and military agencies to sponsor sessions. There apparently has been little technical planning at this point.
• An invited presentation by Jill Crisman, on A Deictic Human-Robot Interface for Remote Exploration Task.
• A presentation was given by David Siegal of Gensym on the G2 Realtime expert system and modelling tool.
• The meeting ajourned for May 30th.

May 31, 1996

• The discussion continued on Computing in Aerospace 11. It appears to be an opportunity for the AITC to take charge. We should put together a position paper on what we want to do at the conference. (Action Item to All members)
• K. Krishna Kumar lead a dicussion on membership. We need to identify new members to build synergy. (Action Item to All Members)
• K. Krishna Kumar stated that he felt the charter of the committee needed to be updated. (Action to K. Krishna Kumar)
• The planning for the next meeting was discussed. It was decided that the next meeting would be a virtual meeting conducted over the internet tarketed for the September timeframe. (Action Item to Fred Highland to research ways to do this). The meeting after that would be in January at the National Conference.
• A discussion of the organization of the committed was conducted. It was generally felt that topic oriented subcommittees were not needed at this time being repaced by self-organizing groups of member to address various topics. The roles of a Chair, Vice-Chair, and Secratary were discussed. The Vice-Chair would serve as backup for the Chair when the Chair could not make a meeting. As Ethen Scarl had been a candidate in the last election, he was nominated as the Vice-Chair. It was decided that the Secratary position would remain floating.
• A review of the current web page was conducted by Fred Highland. A number of suggestions were made to improve it. We also need to coordinate with the AIAA as they now have the official AIAA site active with an "official" AI Technical Committee web page (which contains only the charter). (Action Item to Fred Highland to update the web page and coordinate with the AIAA webmaster)
• Jim Negro, the directory of Draper Labs Boston welcomed us to the facility (did I get this right?).
• An invited presentation was given by Monty Bello on a Hierarchical Multilayer Perceptron Network Based Fusion Algorithm for Detection/Classification of Mines Using Multiple Acoustic Images and Magnetic Data.
• Mike Richards gave an invited talk on Heuristics for Autonomy
• A tour was conduncted of MIT Labs including a discussion of the direction of the lab with Patrick Winston, demonstrations of some of their current work including the Phantom tactile feedback work, the automated ball catcher, and the Leg Lab.
• The meeting was officially closed.

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