Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR) General Information and Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) Compiled by Steven Minton Send questions/comments to jair-editor@ptolemy.arc.nasa.gov Last Updated 2/6/94 TABLE OF CONTENTS ----------------- Section 1: What is JAIR? Section 2: How do I subscribe to JAIR? 2.1) Accessing JAIR via newsgroups 2.2) Accessing JAIR via FTP or email 2.2.1) Obtaining announcements via the JAIR Mailing List 2.2.2) How to find the file name of an article you want 2.2.3) Obtaining articles via FTP 2.2.4) Obtaining articles via automated email 2.3) Other avenues: Gopher, WWW, etc. 2.4) How to obtain bound volumes of JAIR from Morgan Kaufmann. 2.5) What if I have trouble printing/previewing an article? 2.6) How should I cite JAIR articles? Section 3: Features 3.1) Online Table of Contents and Author Index 3.2) Online appendices for source code and data 3.3) PostScript previewers and where to find them 3.3) Newsgroup for discussing articles 3.4) Text search 3.6) How you can help! A request for software/suggestions. Section 4: Submitting papers to JAIR Section 5: Masthead 5.1) JAIR Staff and 1993 editorial board 5.2) Publishers: AI Access Foundation and Morgan Kaufmann ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Section 1: What is JAIR? The Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR) is a refereed publication, covering all areas of AI, that is distributed over the Internet. In addition, each complete volume of JAIR is published by Morgan Kaufmann. JAIR offers AI researchers several advantages over traditional journals: -- To promote rapid publication of research results, articles sent to JAIR are reviewed and returned to the authors in approximately 5 weeks. Electronic publication occurs immediately after the editor receives the final version of an accepted article. -- Articles are distributed free of charge over the internet via FTP, gopher, automated email, and a newsgroup. Articles are published in PostScript. -- We intend to support a variety of electronic services, including: A) online appendices containing data/code, facilitating replication and reuse of results, and B) an electronic newsgroup associated with the journal where published articles can be discussed, C) software for performing online text searches. JAIR will only publish articles of the highest quality. Papers should describe work that has both practical and theoretical significance. We encourage authors to be concise. Short, high-quality articles will be welcomed, in addition to the longer articles that traditionally appear in AI journals. JAIR will also publish technical notes -- very brief papers that extend or evaluate previous work. Submissions in all areas of AI are invited, including automated reasoning, cognitive modeling, knowledge representation, learning, natural language, perception, and robotics. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Section 2: How do I subscribe to JAIR? To make it easy for you to obtain articles, we have established a variety of ways to get JAIR. These include newsgroups, gopher, FTP and automated email. 2.1) Accessing JAIR via newsgroups The easiest way to subscribe to JAIR is via the Usenet newsgroups comp.ai.jair.announce and comp.ai.jair.papers. As soon as a paper is published, we post the title and abstract on the "announce" newsgroup. The PostScript article and any online appendices are posted to the "papers" newsgroup. (To read an article on the "papers" newsgroup, write the PostScript article out to a file, strip off the newsgroup header, and print or preview the file.) 2.2) Accessing JAIR via FTP or email 2.2.1) Obtaining announcements via the JAIR Mailing List If you do not read newsgroups, you can obtain the titles and abstracts of recently published papers by subscribing to the JAIR mailing list. Periodically we will send out a message to the list with the recently published papers. You can then obtain the papers you are interested in via FTP or automated email (see below). Of course, the disadvantage of the mailing list, compared to the newsgroups, is that you won't hear about papers right away, since we'll wait until we have a few papers to announce. (You can think of this as an "issue" of JAIR.) Furthermore, it's an extra burden for us to maintain this mailing list, so we encourage you to use the newsgroups if possible. To place yourself on the mailing list, send an email msg to jair@cs.cmu.edu or jair@ftp.mrg.dist.unige.it. The subject of the msg should be "autorespond" and the body should consist of the word "subscribe" followed by your email address. If you don't get a response, or you'd prefer to correspond with a human being, send an email msg to jair-ed@ptolemy.arc.nasa.gov asking to be added to the mailing list. To unsubscribe, follow the same procedure, but substitute the word "unsubscribe". 2.2.2) How to find the file name of an article you want. JAIR announcements include the PostScript file name for each article. For example, the announcement for the article by Matt Ginsberg entitled "Dynamic Backtracking" will tell you that the PostScript file is called volume1/ginsberg93a.ps. Files with a "ps" extension are PostScript files. (Latex and other source files are also available in the "sources" subdirectory for each volume. The source files do not include the figures, so they won't be very useful.) JAIR also includes an online Table of Contents and Author Index, in the files information/table-of-contents and information/author-index, respectively. 2.2.3) Obtaining Articles Via FTP You can use anonymous FTP to obtain a file from the JAIR distribution sites at either Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) or the University of Genoa. CMU Machine: p.gp.cs.cmu.edu main directory: /usr/jair/pub Genoa Machine: ftp.mrg.dist.unige.it main directory: pub/jair/pub For example, to get the file volume1/ginsberg93a.ps from CMU, invoke the FTP program, then type "open p.gp.cs.cmu.edu". At the login prompt, enter "anonymous", and at the password prompt, enter your net address. You will then be logged in. Typing "cd /usr/jair/pub" will put you into our public directory. You can then type "cd volume1" followed by "get ginsberg93a.ps". Finally, type "quit". To get the same paper from Genoa, you use the same procedure, except that you type "open ftp.mrg.dist.unige.it" to get to the machine in Genoa, and "cd pub/jair/pub" for our public directory. 2.2.4) Obtaining Articles Via Automated Email As an alternative to FTP, you can use the automated email delivery system at the CMU and Genoa jair distribution sites. The address of the CMU site is jair@p.gp.cs.cmu.edu, and the address at Genoa is jair@ftp.mrg.dist.unige.it. To request a file, such as volume1/ginsberg93a.ps, simply send email to the site with the subject "autorespond", and the body "get volume1/ginsberg93a.ps". A message containing the requested file will be mailed back to you. (You can only request one file at a time.) If you don't receive a reply, please notify jair-ed@ptolemy.arc.nasa.gov. To print or preview the article, first write the message to a file and remove the email header. In addition to the "get" command, the email delivery system also responds to the "help" command, in which case it returns a copy of this information sheet, and the "subscribe" and "unsubscribe" commands, which allow you to get on/off the JAIR mailing list (see section 2.2). 2.3) Other avenues: Gopher, WWW, etc. JAIR is available via gopher. The gopher server is at p.gp.cs.cmu.edu (port 70). The server is also listed, among other places, in the main gopher directory at UMN under North America, USA, Pennsylvania. This route also enables you to access to JAIR via WWW, e.g., through the original UMN gopher server. The URL for our gopher server is gopher://p.gp.cs.cmu.edu/ 2.4) How to obtain bound volumes of JAIR from Morgan Kaufmann To order the hardcopy version of JAIR, send email to morgan@unix.sri.com or write to Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, 2929 Campus Drive, San Mateo, CA, 94403. Note that the bound volume will contain all the articles for the complete volume (i.e. it will be about the size of a book.) The price has not yet been finalized. 2.5) What if I have trouble printing/previewing an article? While standardization efforts are rapidly improving the situation, occasionally you may have difficulty printing an article because of PostScript incompatibility. In this case, try previewing the article instead of printing it out. Often a file that will not print correctly can be successfully previewed, and vice versa! As a last resort, you can try looking at the source file for the article (in the /source directory), or contacting the authors directly and asking them to send you a hardcopy of the article. 2.6) How should I cite JAIR articles? There is no reason to cite JAIR articles any differently than you would cite articles in "traditional journals", especially since each JAIR volume will be published in bound form by Morgan Kaufmann. For example, an appropriate bibliography entry for Ginsberg's "Dynamic Backtracking paper" would be: Ginsberg, M. "Dynamic Backtracking", Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, Vol. 1 (1993), pp. 25-46. To get the publication date and page numbers of an article, you can either look at the article directly, or check out JAIR's table of contents (in the file information/table-of-contents). Note that the date of publication is shown in the upper left-hand corner of the first page of each JAIR article. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Section 3: Features 3.1) Online Table of Contents and Author Index A table of contents for the journal and an author index can be found in the files information/table-of-contents and information/author-index. (There is also a file called table-of-contents-with-abstracts that includes the abstract for each paper.) Note that the table of contents and the author index includes the file names for each article. 3.2) Online appendices for source code and data An article may be accompanied on online appendices containing source code and data. Each appendix is contained in its own file. If an article is accompanied by online appendices, this will be stated in the announcement as well as in the Table of Contents. 3.3) PostScript previewers and where to find them We recommend that our readers use PostScript previewers to read/skim JAIR articles rather than always printing them out. This will help save many, many trees. The Ghostview previewer (built on top of Ghostscript) is recommended. Ghostview can be obtained by anonymous ftp from prep.ai.mit.edu from the direction /pub/gnu. 3.4) Newsgroup for discussing articles Unfortunately, the USENET gurus requested (strongly) that we create only two JAIR newsgroups initially, one for the announcements and one for the papers/appendices. They asked us to delay creating a JAIR discussion newsgroup until we were sure that there would be sufficient interest. So, for the time being, we ask our readers to use the comp.ai newsgroup for discussions of JAIR papers. When posting a comment/query about a JAIR article to comp.ai, please prepend the subject line with "JAIR:...". If there is a sufficient number of such posts, we will attempt to create a separate discussion newsgroup. 3.5) Text search We are planning to provide simple facilities for searching through JAIR articles for a given text string. We expect this to be up and running sometime in the fall of 1993. We are looking for volunteers who might be able to provide us with more sophisticated search mechanisms to experiment with! Please contact minton@ptolemy.arc.nasa.gov if you have anything to offer. 3.6) How you can help! A request for software/suggestions. JAIR can be improved with your help. In particular, please let us know about suggestions/software that you think might be useful to our readers. In particular, we are interested in software for intelligent text search (see above). Ideally, JAIR could serve as an interesting testbed for new AI technologies. We would be willing to provide experimental software that our readers could use if they choose to. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Section 4: Submitting papers to JAIR Information on submitting papers to JAIR, including our submission requirements and reviewing policies, can be obtained from the JAIR distribution sites at CMU and Genoa (see section 2). The file name is information/submission-info. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Section 5: Masthead 5.1) JAIR staff and 1993 editorial board EXECUTIVE EDITOR Steven Minton ASSOCIATE EDITORS Jon Doyle Wendy Lehnert Fausto Giunchiglia Richard Sutton Henry Kautz Daniel Weld Richard Korf EDITORIAL BOARD Jan Aikins David Haussler Martha Pollack Yuichiro Anzai Julia Hirschberg Ross Quinlan Rodney Brooks Lawrence Hunter Edwina Rissland Murray Campbell Takeo Kanade Paul Rosenbloom Thomas Dean Hiroaki Kitano Stuart Russell Rina Dechter Pat Langley Erik Sandewall Gerald DeJong Ramon Lopez de Mantaras Bart Selman Johan de Kleer David McAllester Stuart Shieber Didier Dubois Kathleen McKeown Douglas Smith Edmund Durfee Stephen Muggleton Luc Steels David Etherington Hideyuki Nakashima Anthony Stentz Oren Etzioni Nils Nilsson Peter Struss Kenneth Forbus Toyoaki Nishida Hozumi Tanaka Michael Georgeff Christos Papadimitriou Austin Tate Matthew Ginsberg Judea Pearl David Touretzky Walter Hamscher Tomaso Poggio Michael Wellman ADVISORY BOARD Jaime Carbonell Kenneth Forbus Paul Rosenbloom Thomas Dietterich Peter Friedland Bart Selman Oren Etzioni Matthew Ginsberg PRODUCTION SUPERVISORS Martha Del Alto Helen Stewart 5.2) Publishers: AI Access Foundation and Morgan Kaufmann JAIR is produced by AI Access Foundation, a nonprofit corporation whose purpose is to facilitate the dissemination of scientific results in artificial intelligence. AI Access Foundation is currently applying for tax exempt status as a 501(c)(3) public charity. We thank NASA and AAAI for their help in starting JAIR. The hardcopy version of JAIR is published by Morgan Kaufmann Publishers. The price has not yet been finalized. For further information, send email to morgan@unix.sri.com or write to Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, 2929 Campus Drive, San Mateo, CA, 94403