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From: jair-ed@ptolemy.arc.nasa.gov
Subject: JAIR report
Message-ID: <1996Jul29.152936.28367@ptolemy-ethernet.arc.nasa.gov>
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Date: Mon, 29 Jul 1996 15:29:36 GMT
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JAIR Volume 4 is complete, and the table of contents is below. 

This seems like a good time to make a report to the AI community on
the state of the journal and our accomplishments so far.  I've
received some requests recently by people who were curious as to how
we are doing, so I imagine that many people are interested in this
information. The short answer is that JAIR is doing extraordinarily
well and continues to exceed our expectations.

We are now moving to a regular schedule of publishing two volumes per
year, as planned.  We are currently receiving submissions at a rate of
approximately 120 papers per year. Our acceptance rate is between 20
and 25 percent.  Our submission and publication rates have continued
to rise since JAIR's inception. We published 6 papers in 1993
(starting in August), 14 papers in 1994, 27 papers in 1995, and 18
papers in the first half of 1996.  JAIR is one of the few electronic
journals that appear in in Science Citation Index.  I haven't done a
careful study of citation counts (it's probably too early) but I
believe that the citation rates are highly competitive with other AI
journals (for citations to articles published after 1992), in spite of
the fact that JAIR is so young.

One of our goals is to review papers rapidly. Currently the median
processing time (from receipt of a paper until a decision letter is
sent) is about 2 months -- slightly over 9 weeks to be exact.  That is
a bit over our target of 7 weeks, but I believe it is considerably
faster than other journals in the field.

It is difficult to tell how many people are accessing the online
version of JAIR each day, since JAIR is distributed by newgroup, ftp,
WWW, gopher, and automated email, and several servers are used.
However, the home page of our WWW site at the University of Washington
alone gets at least a hundred "new" hits a day (i.e., not counting
accesses from cached pages). The volume can be much higher when new
papers or announcements are published. We've just installed a publicly
accessible counter on this page.

We are continuing to experiment with new electronic services. For
instance, we are currently unveiling a new service called "ASK THE
AUTHOR (AA)" that enables authors and readers to engage in a public
dialogue if they wish.  Our web site has a full text search engine, an
author index, pointers to other AI resources, and other services.
Many of our papers now have HTML versions, in addition to the
"official" PostScript version. Some papers also have "online
appendices" containing source code or demos.  

We invite you to check out our Web site.  Access is free. The URL is:

     http://www.cs.washington.edu/research/jair/home.html 

Although we are quite busy handling submissions, we'd be happy to have
more, and we invite you to consider sending an article to JAIR.  
We invite submissions in all areas of AI, including automated
reasoning, cognitive modeling, knowledge representation, learning,
natural language, neural networks, planning, search, perception, and
robotics.  JAIR will accept only technical contributions, and these 
must meet the most stringent scientific standards.

JAIR is organized under the auspices of AI Access Foundation. The
electronic version of JAIR is supported by USC/ISI, the University of
Washington, Carnegie-Mellon University, the University of Genoa, and
NASA's Ames Research Center. A hardcopy version of JAIR is published
by Morgan Kaufmann Publishers.

For more information about JAIR send electronic mail to
jair@cs.cmu.edu with the subject AUTORESPOND and the message body
HELP, or contact jair-ed@ptolemy.arc.nasa.gov. You can also see
comp.ai.jair.announce (and comp.ai.jair.papers), or our FTP sites at
CMU (ftp://p.gp.cs.cmu.edu/usr/jair/pub/) and the University of
Genoa (Italy) (ftp://ftp.mrg.dist.unige.it/pub/jair/pub/).


------------------------------------------------------------------

   		  Table of Contents, Volume 4


van Beek, P. and Manchak, D.W. (1996)
  "The Design and Experimental Analysis of Algorithms for Temporal Reasoning", 
   Volume 4, pages 1-18.

Brewka, G. (1996)
  "Well-Founded Semantics for Extended Logic Programs with Dynamic 
   Preferences", Volume 4, pages 19-36.

Delcher, A.L., Grove, A.J., Kasif, S. and Pearl, J. (1996)
  "Logarithmic-Time Updates and Queries in Probabilistic Networks", 
   Volume 4, pages 37-59.

Saul, L.K., Jaakkola, T. and Jordan, M.I. (1996)
  "Mean Field Theory for Sigmoid Belief Networks", Volume 4, pages 61-76.

Quinlan, J.R. (1996)
  "Improved Use of Continuous Attributes in C4.5",   Volume 4, pages 77-90.

Hogg, T. (1996)
  "Quantum Computing and Phase Transitions in Combinatorial Search", 
   Volume 4, pages 91-128.

Cohn, D.A., Ghahramani, Z., and Jordan, M.I. (1996)
  "Active Learning with Statistical Models", 
   Volume 4, pages 129-145.

Fisher, D. (1996)
  "Iterative Optimization and Simplification of Hierarchical Clusterings", 
   Volume 4, pages 147-178.

Marchiori, E. (1996)
  "Practical Methods for Proving Termination of General Logic Programs", 
   Volume 4, pages 179-208.

Walsh, T. (1996)
  "A Divergence Critic for Inductive Proof", 
   Volume 4, pages 209-235.

Kaelbling, L.P., Littman, M.L., and Moore, A.W. (1996)
  "Reinforcement Learning:  A Survey", 
   Volume 4, pages 237-285.

Pryor, L. and Collins, G. (1996)
  "Planning for Contingencies: A Decision-based Approach", 
   Volume 4, pages 287-339.

Nienhuys-Cheng, S.-H. and de Wolf, R. (1996)
  "Least Generalizations and Greatest Specializations of Sets of Clauses", 
   Volume 4, pages 341-363.

Gratch, J. and Chien, S. (1996)
  "Adaptive Problem-solving for Large-scale Scheduling Problems: A Case 
   Study", Volume 4, pages 365-396.

Webb, G.I. (1996)
  "Further Experimental Evidence against the Utility of Occam's Razor", 
   Volume 4, pages 397-417.

Bhansali, S., Kramer, G.A. and Hoar, T.J. (1996)
  "A Principled Approach Towards Symbolic Geometric Constraint Satisfaction", 
   Volume 4, pages 419-443.

Tadepalli, P. and Natarajan, B.K. (1996)
  "A Formal Framework for Speedup Learning from Problems and Solutions", 
   Volume 4, pages 445-475.

Brafman, R.I. and Tennenholtz, M. (1996)
  "On Partially Controlled Multi-Agent Systems", 
   Volume 4, pages 477-507.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

	            Masthead for Volume 4

	JAIR Editors, Staff and 1996 Editorial Board


EXECUTIVE EDITOR

   Steven Minton USC/ISI


ASSOCIATE EDITORS

   William Cohen, AT&T Bell Laboratories
   Jon Doyle, MIT
   Fausto Giunchiglia, IRST
   Lawrence Hunter, National Library of Medicine
   Henry Kautz, AT&T Bell Laboratories
   Richard Korf, UCLA
   David McAllester, AT&T Bell Laboratories
   Johanna D. Moore, Univ. of Pittsburgh
   Richard Sutton, Univ. of Mass.
   Pascal van Hentenryck, Brown Univ.
   Daniel Weld, Univ. of Wash.
   Michael Wellman, Univ. of Michigan



EDITORIAL BOARD

   David W. Aha,  Naval Research Lab. 
   James F. Allen, Univ. of Rochester
   Yuichiro Anzai, Keio Univ.
   Andrew G. Barto, Univ. of Mass.
   Craig Boutilier,  Univ. of British Columbia 
   Ivan Bratko, Ljubljana Univ. 
   Gerhard Brewka,  Tech. Univ. of Vienna 
   Wray Buntine, NASA Ames Res. Center 
   Murray Campbell, IBM
   James Crawford, CIRL, Univ. of Oregon
   Adnan Darwiche,  Rockwell 
   Thomas Dean, Brown Univ.
   Rina Dechter, UC Irvine
   Bonnie J. Dorr, Univ. of Maryland
   Edmund Durfee, Univ. of Michigan
   Douglas Fisher, Vanderbilt Univ.
   Kenneth Forbus, ILS, Northwestern Univ.
   Hector Geffner, Simon Bolivar Univ.
   Matthew Ginsberg, CIRL, Univ. of Oregon
   Janice Glasgow,  Queen's Univ. 
   Georg Gottlob,   TU Wien 
   Steve Hanks, Univ. of Washington
   Barbara Hayes-Roth, Stanford University
   Julia Hirschberg, AT&T Bell Laboratories
   Haym Hirsh, Rutgers Univ.
   Eric Horvitz,  Microsoft Research 
   Toru Ishida, Kyoto Univ.
   Leslie Pack Kaelbling, Brown Univ.
   Subbarao Kambhampati, Arizona State Univ.
   Michael J. Kearns,  AT&T Bell Laboratories
   Hiroaki Kitano, Sony Computer Sci. Laboratories
   Craig A. Knoblock, USC/ISI
   Daphne Koller,  Stanford Univ.
   Kurt Konolige, SRI
   Benjamin Kuipers, Univ. of Texas at Austin
   John E. Laird,  Univ. of Michigan
   Pat Langley, ISLE and Stanford Univ.
   Alan Mackworth, Univ. of British Columbia
   Raymond J. Mooney, Univ. of Texas at Austin
   Andrew W. Moore, Carnegie Mellon Univ
   Stephen Muggleton, Oxford Univ.
   Pandu Nayak,  NASA Ames Res. Center
   Bernhard Nebel, Universitaet Ulm
   Nils Nilsson, Stanford Univ.
   Toyoaki Nishida, Kyoto Univ.
   Christos Papadimitriou, UC San Diego
   Michael Pazzani, UC Irvine
   Judea Pearl, UCLA
   Martha Pollack, Univ. of Pittsburgh
   Ross Quinlan, Univ. of Sydney
   Paul Rosenbloom, USC/ISI
   Stuart Russell, UC Berkeley
   Erik Sandewall, Univ.
   Jonathan Schaeffer,   Univ. of Alberta 
   Jeffrey C. Schlimmer,  Washington State Univ.
   Lenhart K. Schubert, Univ. of Rochester
   Bart Selman, AT&T Bell Laboratories
   Jude W. Shavlik, Univ. of Wisconsin
   Stuart Shieber, Harvard Univ.
   Douglas R. Smith, Kestrel Institute
   Anthony Stentz, Carnegie Mellon Univ.
   Peter Struss, Technical Univ. of Munich
   William Swartout, USC/ISI
   Austin Tate, AIAI, Edinburgh Univ.
   Peter Turney,  NRC Canada 
   Peter van Beek,  Univ. of Alberta 
   Mark Wallace,  Imperial College, London 

ADVISORY BOARD

   Jaime Carbonell,  Carnegie Mellon Univ.
   Thomas Dietterich, Oregon State
   Oren Etzioni, Univ. of Washington
   Kenneth Forbus, ILS, Northwestern Univ.
   Peter Friedland, NASA Ames Res. Center 
   Matthew Ginsberg, CIRL, Univ. of Oregon
   Paul Rosenbloom, USC/ISI
   Bart Selman, AT&T Bell Laboratories


ADVANCED INFORMATION  SYSTEMS COORDINATOR

   Peter Turney, National Research Council Canada 


PRODUCTION SUPERVISORS

   Sheila Coyazo, USC/ISI 
   Martha Del Alto, NASA Ames Research Center 

