Abstract
In recent years there has been much criticism of knowledge systems technology and of artificial intelligence (AI) in general. In addition to arguments concerning brittleness and lack of noise and fault tolerance the main thrust of the criticism has been, in essence, that cognition is “situated” while most AI systems are not. “Situated” means that an intelligent system can only be understood in its interaction with the real world in a particular situation in which it has to act. Traditional non-situated AI systems which are strongly based on the notion of models tend to suffer from the notorious frame problem. In the first part the basic criticism and the issues involved are introduced and reasons for the pertinent problems of AI are given. It is then argued that by taking the criticisms seriously we cannot only gain theoretical insights but we can also derive guidelines on how to build better knowledge systems. This will lead to a methodology of “situated adaptive design”. The methodology is illustrated with two successful examples. It is concluded that (a) the application of this methodology promises to resolve some of the basic problems, and (b) that research efforts in the area of knowledge systems should be re-directed.
On leave from: Institute for Informatics, University of Zurich
This research was partly supported by the Swift AI Chair, Free University of Brussels
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Agre, P. E., & Chapman, D. (1987). Pengi: An implementation of a theory of activity. AAAI-87, Seattle, WA, 268–272.
Breuker, J., & Wielinga, B. J. (1989). Models of expertise in knowledge acquisition. In G. Guida, & C. Tasso (ed.). Topics in expert system design, 265–295.
Clancey, W. J. (1989). The frame-of-reference problem in cognitive modeling. Annual conference of the cognitive science society, 107–114.
Floyd, C. (1984). A systematic look at prototyping. In R. Budde, K. Kuhlenkamp, L. Mathiassen, & H. Zullinghoven (eds.). Approaches to prototyping. Berlin: Springer, 1–18.
Gutknecht, M., Pfeifer, R., & Stolze, M. (1991). Cooperative hybrid systems. To appear in: Proceedings IJCAI-91.
Hatano, G., & Inagaki, K. (1986). Two courses of expertise. In H. Stevenson, H. Azuma, & K. Hakuta (eds.). Child development and education in Japan. San Franciso: Freeman.
Pfeifer, R., Rothenfluh, T., Stolze, M., & Steiner, F. (1991). Mapping expert behavior onto task-level frameworks: the need for “eco-pragmatic” approaches to knowledge engineering. To appear in: Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence. Berlin/Heidelberg: Springer.
Pfeifer, R., & Verschure, P. F. M. J. (1991). Distributed adaptive control: a paradigm for designing autonomous agents. Techreport, AI Lab, Free University of Brussels.
Pylyshyn, Z. W. (ed.). The robot’s dilemma. The Frame Problem in artificial intelligence. Norwood, N.J.: Ablex.
Rademakers, P. (1991). Task analysis of an equipment assignment problem. Techreport, AI-Lab, Free University of Brussels.
Simon, H. A. (1982). The sciences of the artificial. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press (2nd edition).
Soloway, E., Bachant, J., & Jensen, K. (1987). Assessing the Maintainability of XCON-in-RIME: Coping with the problems of a very large rule-based system. Proceedings of the Sixth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Seattle, Washington.
Steels, L. (1990). Components of expertise. AI Magazine, 11 (2), 28–49.
Stolze, M., Gutknecht, M., & Pfeifer, R. (1991). Integrated knowledge acquisition: toward adaptive expert system design. Techreport 91. 04, Institut für Informatik, University of Zurich.
Suchman, L. A. (1987). Plans and situated actions. Cambridge University Press.
Van de Velde, W. (1988). Learning from experience. Techreport 88 - 1, AI Lab, Free University of Brussels.
Winograd, T., & Flores, F. (1986). Understanding computers and cognition. Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 1991 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Pfeifer, R., Rademakers, P. (1991). Situated Adaptive Design: Toward a New Methodology for Knowledge Systems Development. In: Brauer, W., Hernández, D. (eds) Verteilte Künstliche Intelligenz und kooperatives Arbeiten. Informatik-Fachberichte, vol 291. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-76980-1_6
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-76980-1_6
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-54617-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-76980-1
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive