Dear Dr. Cesta May I draw your attention to a recent book with Subrata Das "Safe and Sound: Artificial Intelligence in Hazardous Applications" which was published in July 2000 by AAAI Press and MIT Press (foreword by Herb Simon). The book brings a range of ideas and techniques from knowledge based systems and software engineering together with methods from logic programming and AI planning. I am taking the liberty of writing because the book also discusses the potential risks as well as benefits of AI technologies and argues that quality and safety are critical research issues for our field. A summary follows. I apologise for duplicate postings John Fox -------------- Safe and Sound: Artificial Intelligence in Hazardous Applications By John Fox and Subrata Das Jointly published by AAAI and MIT Press, July 2000 326 pp., references, index, illus., $40.00 hardcover ISBN 0-262-06211-9 Computer science and artificial intelligence are increasingly used in hazardous and uncertain situations where small faults or errors can spell human catastrophe. This book describes a technology for supporting sound decision-making and safe process management from the perspectives of the practical software developer and theoretical AI. It champions the achievements of the logic programming community, and the role of logic and logic programming as uniquely powerful tools for addressing such important and difficult problems. The book grew out of a programme of research into AI and �cognitive� functions like reasoning, problem solving, decision-making and planning. These are well-established research topics but the programme described here is unusual in its focus on the integration of these functions into a unified model for building intelligent agents, and in the need to measure success in practical as well as theoretical terms. The book contains many examples of real-world applications in medical decision making and care planning. In many respects Fox and Das� approach instantiates current ideas in the logic programming community on logical agents and shows how such agents can be put to practical use. Although the application focus is medicine, the method and many of the underlying ideas can be applied to many other application domains. Building practical software agents may seem to require a purely engineering solution, but some of the medical challenges demanded new concepts and new computational techniques to capture and support the ideas. Logic and logic programming provided the necessary theory and tools. The authors were attracted to logic programming for a number of reasons. First, working in a cancer research institute the applications they were building were to be used in real patient care � and were therefore safety-critical. From the beginning they were interested in design tools that had a sufficiently strong formal foundation that they could provide some guarantees of quality and integrity. It seemed to them that the development of software using the concepts, formalisms, methods, results and technologies that have emerged from the study of mathematical logic as a computational paradigm had to be a good thing. The result is PROforma, a logic-based agent specification language and a powerful and intuitive development environment for designing and testing applications of logical agents. The book is divided into three parts, dealing with the motivation and development of the PROforma method, a discussion of safety issues and the role of logic in addressing them, and formalities. The first two parts are written in an informal style, beginning with the medical background and motivations, technical challenges, and solutions, before turning to a wide-ranging discussion of intelligent and autonomous agents, with particular reference to safety and hazard management. The final part provides a detailed discussion of the PROforma language and knowledge representation and other aspects of the agent model developed in the book, along with a rigorous formal treatment of the model grounded in classical an d non-classical logics. The authors believe that there are reasons to be optimistic that logic programming is due for a resurgence of interest in the practical world, not least because complex software is increasingly reaching into technical realms that are mission- and safety-critical. If this is so then Fox and Das � contribution provides considerable evidence of its practical power in a field that directly affects all of us, and proposes a set of engineering techniques that could bring logic programming to a much wider audience.
