The AAAI-2000 Workshop on

Parallel and Distributed Search for Reasoning

held at the National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-2000)

July 30-August 3, 2000, Austin, Texas

Many AI systems, such as learners, planners, deduction or expert systems, base their reasoning on intelligently searching in very large search spaces. By intelligently searching, we mean that the system combines various pieces of general knowledge it has with information found so far and uses this combined knowledge to decide where to search next; thus, only limited predictions about the search are possible.

Also, many concepts for systems have been developed to speed up search by using several computing nodes (computers or processors). These concepts must deal with problems like balancing the processor loads or avoiding idle times, bottlenecks, and redundancy. Very often these problems are solved by using a simple search control that is easy to predict.

Thus, it is difficult for systems to use intelligent search while taking advantage of parallel or distributed search. Naturally, this can be fixed by communication between the nodes, but too much communication drastically reduces the gains by the use of several computing nodes. Nevertheless, in the last few years several systems for different application areas have been developed that achieve the combined benefits of using several computing nodes and intelligent knowledge based search. By cooperating, several search systems were often able to solve harder problem instances than each single system could. Although the systems use in most cases domain-specific knowledge, certain types of knowledge and certain parallelization and distribution concepts can be identified that are usable for several application domains.

This workshop aims at bringing together researchers from various application areas that are interested in performing intelligent search using several computing nodes. As a result of this workshop we hope to come to a better understanding of the kinds of applications and knowledge that are well-suited for certain parallelization and distribution concepts and to identify the basic components of such concepts.

Topics

• parallelization and distribution concepts for
  • learning
  • planning and scheduling
  • deduction
• cooperation concepts for search systems
• partitioning of problems
• limiting information exchange
• configuring parallel and distributed search systems
• adaptation in parallel and distributed search systems

Workshop format

The workshop will be a mixture of invited talks (by

• Tad Hogg, Xerox PARC, and
• Sesh Murthy, Cooperative Decision Support Group at IBM Watson Research Center),

Workshop Program

This is a list of the titles of the talks of our invited speakers and the titles of the accepted contributions. The exact schedule has to be approved by AAAI-2000 and will be put here when it is fixed.

• Tadd Hogg
  Parallel Search Using Portfolios
• Sesh Murthy
  A-teams for search and decision support in electronic commerce
• Solomon Eyal Shimony, Amnon Meisels, and Gadi Solotorevsky
  Problem Difficulty Estimation for Distributed Problem Solving
• Bernhard Rinner, Reinhard Schneider
  Lessons Learned from Prototyping Parallel Computer Architectures for AI Algorithms
• Dimitris Vrakas, Ioannis Refanidis and Ioannis Vlahavas
  An Operator Distribution Method for Parallel Planning
• Kazuo Iwama, Daisuke Kawai, Shuichi Miyazaki, Yasuo Okabe, and Jun Umemoto
  Parallelizing Local Search for CNF Satisfiability Using PVM

Important dates

• Deadline for Submissions/Requests for Participation: March 10, 2000
• Invitations will be send out: March 24, 2000
• Camera-ready versions of contributions due: April 26, 2000
• Registration deadline for AAAI workshops: June 1, 2000
• Workshop: July 30, 2000

Organizing Committee

Jörg Denzinger (Chair) Computer Science Department University of Kaiserslautern Postfach 3049 67653 Kaiserslautern Germany FAX: +49-631-205-3558 Phone: +49-631-205-2181 Email: denzinge@informatik.u ni-kl.de	Yasuhiko Kitamura Department of Information and Communication Engineering Faculty of Engineering, Osaka City University 3-3-138 Sugimoto, Sumiyoshi-ku Osaka 558-8585 JAPAN FAX : +81-6-6605-3081 Phone: +81-6-6605-3081 Email: kitamura@info.eng.osaka-cu.ac.jp
Eugene Santos Jr. Department of Computer Science and Engineering University of Connecticut Storrs CT 06269-3155 USA FAX: 860-486-4817 Phone: 860-486-1458 Email: eugene@engr.uconn.edu	Bruce Spencer Faculty of Computer Science University of New Brunswick P.O. Box 4400 Fredericton, New Brunswick CANADA E3B 5A3 FAX: 506-453-3566 Phone: 506-453-4566 Email: bspencer@unb.ca

Last Change: 04/07/2000