REASONING ABOUT FUNCTION

                    Special Track to be held during
      The Ninth Florida Artificial Intelligence Research Symposium
                             (FLAIRS '96)
                   May 20-22, 1996, Key West, Florida


                           Call for Papers
                        ----------------------

  The explicit representation and use of function knowledge is 
gaining considerable attention in various research communities because of:
 * its potential to organize and provide access to causal knowledge of 
   an object (eg., focuses on missing causality during redesign),
 * the improved resolution it brings to the reasoning process 
   (eg., discriminates among suspects during diagnosis) and
 * its utility in addressing the scaling problem. 

Function is an abstraction of behavior, and relates behavior to human
notions of utility, i.e., purpose/goal. It forms a useful
bridge between objective and quantifiable knowledge about a component
(of a device/organization/organism/environment/argument), and
subjective notions of its use/purpose. Hence, the interest in
reasoning about function.

Function has been used to motivate decisions (such as in design), 
discriminate among choices at hand (such as in diagnosis, vision), 
or explain an observation (such as in explanation generation).
It is being used, in addition to structure and behavior knowledge in 
domains as varied as Electrical, Aerospace, Industrial and Chemical
Engineering, mechatronics, Architecture, Law, Medicine, Human Physiology, 
and Software Engineering.

Papers are invited for the special track from researchers in all 
fields/domains on topics including:
 * Reasoning techniques that use function
 * Representation formalisms for function
 * Applications of reasoning about function: reports, results
It is expected that extended and revised versions of selected papers from 
this special track will be published as special issue of a journal.


IMPORTANT DEADLINES:

November 15th, 1995:  Submission of paper
January 19th, 1996:   Notification of Acceptance/Rejection
March 18, 1996:       Camera Ready Copy due to 
                      FLAIRS '96 Program Chair: John Stewman

SUBMISSION DETAILS:

Maximum Length: 2000 words
 
Preferred Submission Method:
* Fold your paper into one postscript or text file: This must be anonymous, 
i.e., author's name and affiliation should not be included in this file;
* Put it in the users/amruth directory at ftp.cs.buffalo.edu site by
anonymous ftp; The file name should be the first author's last name;
* Send a mail message to amruth@ultrix.ramapo.edu, listing: the name of the
paper, names, affiliations, phone/fax and email addresses of all the authors, 
and the name of the submitted file. This step is mandatory!

Alternatively, you may send 4 hard copies of the paper to:
Amruth Kumar,
Computer Science, TAS,
Ramapo College of New Jersey
505, Ramapo Valley Road
Mahwah, NJ 07430-1680
Ph: (201) 529-7712

FOR MORE INFORMATION:

If you are unsure whether your work fits into the above topic,
  please refer to the following reports for clarification. 
   * AI Magazine, 15(1): Spring 94 issue, pp 64-65
   * SIGART Bulletin 5(3): July 94 issue, pp 49-51
   * The Knowledge Engineering Review, Vol. 9(3), 9/94, pp 301-304.
   * Special Issues of 
   `International Journal of Applied Artificial Intelligence',
    Vol 8(2), 8/94 and Vol9(1), 1/95.

Please direct any enquiries to:
Amruth Kumar (amruth@ultrix.ramapo.edu) 
Luca Chittaro (chittaro@dimi.uniud.it)
Co-Chairs

PROGRAM COMMITTEE

A. Abu-Hanna, Utrecht University, Netherlands
D. Allemang, PTT Telecom, Switzerland
B. Chandrasekaran, Ohio State University
L. Chittaro, University of Udine, Italy
J. Hodges, San Francisco State University
Y. Iwasaki, Stanford University
A. Kumar, Ramapo State College
M. Lind, Technical University of Denmark, Denmark
J. McDowell, Michigan State University
C. Price, University of Wales, U.K.
Y. Umeda, University of Tokyo, Japan