Reasoning with Diagrammatic Representations II:
Papers from the AAAI Fall Symposium
Michael Anderson, Chair
Technical Report FS-97-03
154 pp., $35.00
978-1-57735-043-9
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Diagrammatic representations and reasoning (DR) are pervasive in many human endeavors. Understanding and modeling the facility that human beings have in DR could be of great benefit, for instance, in terms of computational efficiency through explicit representation, improved human-machine interfacing, and the development of an artificially intelligent agent that interacts with its environment as fluently as a naturally intelligent agent now does.
We define diagrammatic representations as those that analogically model the semantics of a problem domain and diagrammatic reasoning as the process by which we make inferences from such representations. We believe the following broad issues are central to DR:
- Cognitive theories of imagery and imaginal reasoning
- Formal theories of DR
- Computational models of DR
- Synergy between cognitive theories, formal theories, and computational models of DR
- Application of DR in AI, logic, human-machine interfacing, visual languages, information visualization, etc.
The explosion of graphical and visual information has made research in DR of paramount importance. The prevalence of graphical user interfaces, the burgeoning of visual languages, the rapid growth of geographic and molecular structure databases, and the massive graphical content of the World Wide Web exemplify the urgency of this research. This symposium, a sequel to the 1992 AAAI Symposium on Reasoning with Diagrammatic Representations, is in response to that urgency. Its intent is to consolidate research efforts since the original and provide a forum in which to disseminate recent results and initiate new research.