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Abstract. Many researchers are working towards the goal of a semantic Weba Web that provides information in a way that is useful to artificial intelligences. A semantic Web would allow artificial agents to do the work of searching for and organizing services required by humans or organizations. DAML-S is a Web service ontology intended to facilitate the semantic Web by describing the properties and capabilities of Web-available services in an unambiguous, computerinterpretable form. In this paper, we propose that an important new perspective on the semantic Web can be obtained by regarding its content as behavioral intelligence. The services encoded in DAML-S can then be viewed as specifications either for extensions of the user agents attempting to exploit the services, or as independent, collaborative agents that can be 'awakened' to assist the user agents. We draw on our experience in agent development to elaborate the specification, particularly of the process ontology of DAML-S, in order to support this vision.

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Inheritance and delegation are alternate methods for incremental definition and sharmg. It has commonly been believed that delegation provides a more powerful model. This paper demonstrates that there is a "natural" model of inheritance which captures all of the properties of delegation.Independently, certain constramts on the ability of delegation to capture inheritance are demonstrated. Finally, a new framework which fully captures both delegation and inheritance is outlined, and some of the ramifications of this hybrid model are explored.

Sis estimated to average 1 hour 9eo eidorse. . incldiunq the time for reviewing. intrucions. searching exsting data This paper describes a theory of inheritance theories. We present an original theory of inheritance in nonmonotonic hierarchies. The structures on which this theory is based delineate a framework that subsumes most inheritance theories in the literature, providing a new foundation for inheritance. "* Our path-based theory is sound and complete w.r.t. a direct model-theoretic semantics."* Both the credulous and the skeptical conclusions of this theory are polynomial-time computable."* We prove that true skeptical inheritance is not contained in the language of path-based inheritance.Because our techniques are modular w.r.t. the definition of specificity, they generalize to provide a unified framework for a broad class of inheritance theories. By describing multiple inheritance theories in the same "language" of credulous extensions, we make principled comparisons rather than the ad-hoc examination of specific examples makes up most of the comparative inheritance work. IntroductionInheritance reasoning is ubiquitous. Hierarchies provide a concise encoding of much of our comrmonsense knowledge. They appear in various guises in the literature of artificial intelligence, but also throughout the various arts and sciences. Open nearly any textbook, and some hierarchy is likely to appear. Reasoning with inheritance hierarchies is of particular interest to the artificial intelligence community because hierarchies are not only useful and native to human reasoning, but also simple and often tractable. The simplicity of the "inheritance problem" makes it attractive as a topic that can be considered in its entirety; its tractability makes it practical for the implementation of knowledge representation systems.In this paper, we present several equivalent formulations of inheritance reasoning. Each approach may be useful in a particular context; by demonstrating their equivalence, we show that the most appropriate definition may be chosen. The techniques that we develop here generalize to a broad class of existing systems, providing a unified foundation for inheritance theory and a basis for comparative analysis, as well as extending previous results.We begin, in section 2, by providing an intuitive description of what we intend by inheritance reasoning. We view inheritance hierarchies as representing primitive assertions in the knowledge base of some reasoning agent, and the inheritance problem as that of determining the agent's derived beliefs. The work in the remainder of this paper builds on this foundation.In section 3, we give a formal path-based definition of inheritance. A path-based inheritance theory gives rules describing the admissible conclusions of a hierarchy. The theory presented here combines rules concerning the transitivity of primitive assertions with an ambiguity-resolution criterion to be invoked when two paths conflict. We describe the transitivity component by the notion of reachability; ...

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What is the core of Computing? This paper defines the discipline of computing as centered around the notion of modeling, especially those models that are automatable and automatically manipulable. We argue that this central idea crucially connects models with languages and machines rather than focusing on and around computational artifacts, and that it admits a very broad set of fields while still distinguishing the discipline from mathematics, engineering and science. The resulting computational curriculum focuses on modeling, scales and limits, simulation, abstraction, and automation as key components of a computationalist mindset.

Engineering for Humanity, an interdisciplinary engineering design and anthropology course at Olin College of Engineering, is a semester-long service-learning partnership between the college and nearby Councils on Aging. This paper examines the effects of this service learning on our students and their partners. Our research suggests that this experience has positively impacted students' and elder partners' behavior and attitudes. We collected data from student and partner surveys, from interviews with the community partners, and from student reflections. By comparing student behavior and attitudes before and after this course, we have observed the following behavioral and attitudinal changes: 1) development of empathetic knowledge and understanding, 2) increased appreciation for user-centered design, 3) redefinition of career trajectories. We also saw transformations in the lives of the community partners. Outcomes for elders were related to quality of life and wellbeing, including 1) decreases in isolation, 2) increased purpose and meaning, and 3) improved feelings of wellbeing. Lasting effects included continuation of decreased isolation through a sustained increase in social engagement, as well as positive thoughts about and mechanisms for aging in place. This paper briefly describes the curriculum and reports on these trends over three years of coursework.