Randy H.
Katz, Computer Sciences Division,
UC Berkeley, Evans Hall, Berkeley, CA
94720.
4$ Workshop on Computer Architecture
for Pattern and Machine Intelligence,
October 5-8, Seattle, Washington. Contact
Steve Tanimoto, Dept. of Computer Science,
FR-35, University of Washington, Seattle, WA
98195; (206) 543-1695.
Compsac 87, October 5-9, Tokyo,
Japan. Contact Tosiyasu L. Kunii, Busi-
ness Center for Academic Societies Japan,
Yamazaki Bldg. 4F, 2-40-14, Hongo, Bunkyo-
ku, Tokyo 113, Japan; phone 81 (3) 817-5831-or
Stephen S. Yau, Northwestern Univer-sity,
Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Com-
puter Science, Evanston, IL 60201; (312)
491-3641.
AAAIC 87-Aerospace Applications of Arti-
ficial Intelligence Conference, October 5-9,
Dayton. Ohio. Contact Michael Johnston,
BDM Corp., 1900 Founders Dr., Kettering,
OH 45420; (513) 259-4434.
IEEE International Workshop on Al
4$ Applications to CAD Systems for Elec-
tronics, October 8-10, Munich, West Ger-
many. Contact Helmuth Benesch, Siemens
AG, Otto-Hahn-Ring 6, 8000 Munich 83,
West Germany; telephone (89) 636-46666.
Second Knowledge Acquisition for
Knowledge-Based Systems Workshop,
October 19-23, Banff, Canada. Contact John
Boose, Advanced Technology Center, Boeing
Computer Services, PO Box 24346, Seattle,
WA 98124-or Brian Gaines, Dept. of Com-
puter Science, University of Calgary, 3500
University Dr. NW, Calgary, Alta., Canada
T2N IN4.
4 Third Annual Expert Systems in
Government Conference (AIAA),
October 19-23, Washington, DC. Contact
Peter Bonasso, Mitre Washington Al Center,
7725 Colshire Blvd., MS W952, McLean, VA
22102; (703) 883-6908.
4$ FJCC 87, Fall Joint Computer Confer-
ence, October 25-29, Dallas, Texas.
Contact Computer Society of the IEEE,
FJCC 87, 1730 Massachusetts Ave. NW,
Washington, DC 20036-1903; (202) 371-0101.
November 1987
11th Symposium on Computer Applications
in Medical Care, November 1-4, Washington,
DC. Contact SCAMC Secretariat, George
Washington University Medical Center,
Office of Continuing Medical Education,
2300 K St. NW, Washington, DC 20037.
Third Annual Conference on Artificial Intel-
ligence for Space Applications, November
2-3, Huntsville, Alabama. Contact Thomas S.
Dollman, NASA/EB4, MSFC, AL 35812;
(205) 544-3823.
92
4 IEEE International Conference on
Computer-Aided Design, November
9-12, Santa Clara, California. Contact
ICCAD-87 Secretary, Mentor Graphics
Corp., 1940 Zanker Rd., San Jose, CA 95112;
(408) 436-1500.
December 1987
4 Eighth Real-Time Systems Symposium,
December 1-3, San Francisco, Califor-
nia. Contact Kang G. Shin, Dept. of EE and
Computer Science, University of Michigan,
Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1109.
January 1988
4$ Second International Conference on
Computer Workstations, January
31-February 3, Santa Clara, California. Con-
tact Patrick Mantey, 335A Applied Science
Bldg., Dept. of Computer Science, University
of California, Santa Cruz, CA 95064.
February 1988
4$ IEEE Compcon Spring 88, February
7 29-March 3, San Francisco, California.
Contact Compcon Spring 88, 1730 Mas-
sachusetts Ave. NW, Washington, DC
20036-1903; (202) 371-0101.
March 1988
4 Fourth Artificial Intelligence Applica-
tions Conference, March 14-18, San
Diego, California. Contact Al Conference,
Computer Society, 1730 Massachusetts Ave.
NW, Washington, DC 20036-1903; (202)
371-0101.
April 1988
4$ Compeuro 88, April 11-15, Brussels,
Belgium. Contact Jacques Tiberghien,
VRIJE Universiteit Brussels, Pleinlaan 2,
1050 Brussels, Belgium.
May 1988
4 NCC 88-National Computer Confer-
ence, May 31-June 3, Los Angeles,
California. Contact AFIPS, 1899 Preston
White Dr., Reston, VA 22091; (703) 620-8900.
June 1988
Third Conference on Man-Machine Systems
(IFAC, IFIP, IEA, IFORS), June 14-16,
1988, Oulu, Finland. Contact Third MMS,
The Finnish Society of Automatic Control,
PO Box 165, SF-00101 Helsinki, Finland.
Book Reviews
Induction: Processes of
Inference, Learning,
and Discovery
John H. Holland, Keith J. Holyoak,
Richard E. Nisbett, and Paul R.
Thagard (MIT Press; Cambridge, Mass.,
1986, 416 pp., $24.95, hardcover)
In "The Current State of Al: One
Man's Opinion" (AI Magazine win-
ter/spring 1983), Roger Schank offered
"a definition of Al that will disqualify
most of its practitioners. . . Al is the
science of endowing programs with the
ability to change themselves for the bet-
ter as a result of their own
experiences. "
People exhibiting such behavior are
said to be engaged in induction,
manifested by activities such as induc-
tive inference, learning, and discovery.
How people exhibit such behavior has
greatly concerned both psychologists
and philosophers. When addressing
their concerns, more questions than
answers arise. Neat and plain solutions
(to paraphrase H.L. Mencken) have
quickly revealed their inadequacies.
Schank's manifesto can be viewed as a
call to arms, rallying Al forces to face
this imposing problem.
It's not as if Al has ignored this
topic. Marvin Minsky's bibliography
for Computers and Thought devotes a
whole category to "inductive inference
machines," replete with several dozen
citations. More recently, induction has
become a major concern in machine
learning. Unfortunately, these concerns
have not yielded impressive fruit. In the
following excerpt, Holland et al.
explain why insights into induction have
been so disappointing:
. . . most treatments of the topic
have looked at purely syntactic
aspects of induction, considering
only the formal structure of the
knowledge to be expanded and
leaving the pragmatic aspects,
those concerned with goals and
problem-solving contexts, to look
out for themselves. In our view,
this stance has produced little
insight into the way humans do,
or efficient machines might,
make just the inferences that are
most useful. This is not to say
that syntactic considerations are
irrelevant; indeed, at some level
IEEE EXPERT
 they are inescapable in any com-
putational system. Our claim is
simply that pragmatic considera-
tions are equally inescapable.
This observation serves as overture to
their own study of induction.
As the authors carefully emphasize,
this book describes a computational
framework for implementing induction.
We should not confuse such a frame-
work with an actual implementation.
Rather, we should consider it a feasibil-
ity study indicating issues that must ulti-
mately be addressed and suggesting
potentially valuable exploration paths.
We should not dismiss these suggestions
as idle speculation, however; each is
reinforced with behavioral evidence
recorded by experimental psychologists.
Thus, they can be considered desiderata
of the following form: When humans
exhibit induction, they also exhibit the
following behavior; therefore,
implementations of induction should
exhibit the same behavior.
Induction is not a traditional
scientific-method exercise culminating
in the validation of theory; the authors
will not even go so far as to formulate a
scientific theory. Their modesty and
humility is revealed in the final chap-
ter's epilogue- "Toward a Theory of
Induction." They gather essentials from
the preceding 11 chapters, suggest
where the evidence is heading, and hope
that further interdisciplinary research
(clearly emphasizing "interdiscipli-
nary") will lead to more concrete
results.
Such modesty should not turn
prospective readers away from this
book. Ultimately, more food for
thought exists in the desiderata inves-
tigated than in the "syntactic" accounts
of induction decried. Furthermore,
principles behind the authors' frame-
work are not particularly outrageous,
they simply reflect basic "pragmatic
considerations" the authors feel have
been neglected:
We view cognitive systems as
constantly modeling their envi-
ronments, with emphasis on local
aspects that represent obstacles to
the achievement of current goals.
Models are best understood as
assemblages of synchronic and
diachronic rules organized into
default hierarchies and clustered
into categories. The rules com-
prising the model act in accord
with a principle of limited paral-
lelism, both competing with and
supporting one another. Goal
attainment often depends in part
on flexible recategorization of the
FALL 1987
environment combined with the
generation of new rules. New
rules are generated via triggering
conditions, most of which are
best understood as responses to
the success or failure of current
model-based predictions.
The authors represent three depart-
ments at the University of Michigan-
computer science, psychology, and
philosophy-each of which has helped
forge their framework. Each contribu-
tion was subject to review and interpre-
tation by practitioners from the other
disciplines, resulting in a gestalt whole
that surpasses the sum of its parts. Let's
consider the influence of each dis-
cipline.
Computer science contributed two
technologies, one well established and
one emerging-the former, the produc-
tion system; the latter, the body of con-
nectionist models. The production rule
is fundamental to the framework. The
major criticism against rule-based
architectures resides in the attention
such architectures devote to deciding
which rule to fire, as opposed to using
rules as knowledge representations. For
this reason, the framework introduces
limited parallelism with competition
and support among rules. Such compe-
tition and support exists in connec-
tionist models, but this framework
eschews the more massive parallelism of
connectionism-a decision the authors
base on evidence from experimental
psychology.
Results of such experiments consti-
tute psychology's major contribution-
experiments covering many instances of
human behavior, as well as some of
lower animals: conditioning, category
formation, modeling the physical and
social worlds, understanding of varia-
bility, inferencing based on statistics
and deduction, and the use of analogy.
In addition, the concept of a "mental
model" (recently attracting considera-
ble attention in cognitive science) is
basic to the framework. Indeed, the
framework can be regarded as propos-
ing an architecture for mental models.
Philosophy's contribution is the con-
cern for basic epistemological issues,
particularly addressing the nature of
knowledge and explanation. The
emphasis is on the philosophy of
science, reviewing the framework in
light of historical evidence detailing the
formation of scientific theories-
particularly fascinating since it demon-
strates that philosophy, like psychol-
ogy, provides experimental evidence
vital to the resulting framework's
strength. In fact, this examination of
scientific theory culminates in a discus-
sion of how the framework may accom-
modate history recording the
development of the wave theory of
sound.
One could enumerate at great length
the many contributions of this book.
Most important, however, Holland et
al. directly and honestly confront a fun-
damental question-how experience
contributes to intelligence. Of almost
equal importance, this book presents an
object lesson of how computer science's
"mechanistic" materials can profitably
be brought to bear on psychological and
philosophical issues concerning great
mysteries of the mind. Such a mechanis-
tic approach is of particular interest in
the attempt this book makes to harness
intuitively appealing notions regarding
mental models for the ultimate imple-
mentation of intelligent machines.
Holland et al. provide some excellent
counters to points raised by Hubert and
Stuart Dreyfus in Mind Over Machine
(reviewed for IEEE Expert by Lotfi
Zadeh, summer 1987, p.1 I0- 11 1), a sec-
tion of which appeared in our summer
1986 issue. A fundamental element of
the Dreyfus argument, excerpted below,
concerns thought's holistic nature:
Experimental psychologists have
shown that people actually use
images, not descriptions as com-
puters do, to understand and
respond to some situations.
Humans often think by forming
images and comparing them
holistically. This process is quite
different from the logical, step-
by-step operations that logic
machines perform.
While this book cites no Dreyfus
literature, Holland et al. are aware of
these arguments (they base their discus-
sion on the writings of Fodor and
Quine). The preceding points are
addressed and demonstrated as being
either inaccurate or irrelevant criticisms
of the proposed framework.
Simply put, this book effectively
demonstrates what happens when sepa-
rate disciplines support rather than
attack each other.
-Stephen W. Smoliar
USC Information Sciences Institute
4676Admiralty Way, Ste. 1001
Marina del Rey, CA 90292
93