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 6/24/97 TABLE OF CONTENTS ----------------- Section 1: What is JAIR? Section 2: How do I subscribe to JAIR? 2.1) Accessing JAIR via World Wide Web 2.2) Accessing JAIR via newsgroups 2.3) Accessing JAIR via FTP or email 2.3.1) Obtaining announcements via the JAIR Mailing List 2.3.2) How to find the file name of an article you want 2.3.3) Obtaining articles via FTP 2.3.4) Obtaining articles via automated email 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 3.4) Newsgroup for discussing articles 3.5) Text search 3.6) Forward pointers 3.7) How you can help! A request for software/suggestions. Section 4: Submitting papers to JAIR Section 5: Masthead 5.1) JAIR Staff and 1997 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, automated email, and a newsgroup. Articles are published in PostScript. -- A variety of electronic services are available that allow authors and readers to take full advantage of the electronic medium. Many articles are accompanied by online appendices containing data and/or source code. JAIR will only publish articles of the highest quality. Submissions in all areas of AI are invited, including automated reasoning, cognitive modeling, knowledge representation, learning, natural language, perception, and robotics. Submissions will be evaluated on their originality and significance. All claims should be clearly articulated and justified either empirically or theoretically. Ideally, papers should describe work that has both practical and theoretical significance. We encourage authors to be concise. Short, high-quality articles are welcome, in addition to the longer articles that traditionally appear in AI journals. Research notes and survey articles may also be submitted. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 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 WWW, newsgroups, FTP and automated email. 2.1) Accessing JAIR via World Wide Web JAIR is available via World Wide Web via several avenues. The URL (Uniform Resource Locator) for our home page is: http://www.jair.org/ The JAIR World Wide Web site contains the most up-to-date and accurate information about the journal.If you use the web to access JAIR, we recommend you also check out our newsgroups (see Sec 2.2), or subscribe to our mailing list (see Sec 2.3.1) so that you will be notified when new articles become available. Our webserver includes several features that cannot be accessed using the more primitive methods. These include an online author index and online search methods. 2.2) 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.) 2.3) Accessing JAIR via FTP or email 2.3.1) 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". 2.3.2) 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 a list of abstracts for each paper, in the files information/table-of-contents and information/table-of-contents-with-abstracts. 2.3.3) 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: ftp.cs.cmu.edu main directory: project/jair 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 ftp.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 project/jair" 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. 2.3.4) 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@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 2.3.1). 2.4) How to obtain bound volumes of JAIR from Morgan Kaufmann Volumes of JAIR are presently being offered for sale in hardcopy by Morgan Kaufmann Publishers. It is available from your technical bookseller or directly from Morgan Kaufmann. Current ordering information is available from our web site. 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 using our WWW server. Only the Table of Contents is available using the more primitive servers. It exists in the file information/table-of-contents (There is also a file called table-of-contents-with-abstracts that includes the abstract for each paper.) Note that the table of 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 JAIR includes online facilities for searching through JAIR articles for a given text string. Readers can also search using a list of machine-generated keywords. 3.6) Forward Pointers The table of contents in JAIR's Web Site includes forward pointers so that authors can publicize subsequent papers on the same topic. 3.7) 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 WWW site and our FTP distribution sites at CMU and Genoa (see section 2). (The file name is information/submission-info.) ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Section 5: Masthead 5.1) JAIR staff and 1997 editorial board EXECUTIVE EDITOR Michael Wellman ASSOCIATE EDITORS Craig Boutilier Pandurang Nayak William Cohen Bernhard Nebel Thomas Dean Martha Pollack Lawrence Hunter Stuart Russell David McAllester Bart Selman Johanna Moore Pascal van Hentenryck EDITORIAL BOARD David Aha Georg Gottlob Raymond Mooney James Allen Russell Greiner Andrew Moore Fahiem Bacchus Steve Hanks Dana Nau Christer Backstrom David Heckerman Fernando Pereira Andrew Barto Lisa Hellerstein David Poole Ivan Bratko Haym Hirsh Claude Sammut Gerhard Brewka Tad Hogg Jonathan Schaeffer Eric Brill Robert Holte Marco Schaerf Eugene Charniak Eric Horvitz Jeffrey Schlimmer Gregory Cooper Michael Jordan Lenhart Schubert James Crawford Leslie Pack Kaelbling Jude Shavlik Adnan Darwiche Subbarao Kambhampati David Smith Thomas Dietterich Michael Kearns Devika Subramanian Bonnie Dorr Craig Knoblock Moshe Tennenholtz Thomas Eiter Daphne Koller Tetsuo Tomiyama Boi Faltings Richard Korf Peter Turney Usama Fayyad Sarit Kraus Peter van Beek Douglas Fisher Benjamin Kuipers Frank van Harmelen Hector Geffner John Laird Mark Wallace Janice Glasgow Alon Levy David Waltz Diana Gordon Alan Mackworth Brian Williams Tom Mitchell Stefan Wrobel MANAGING EDITOR Steven Minton ADVISORY BOARD Jaime Carbonell Fausto Giunchiglia Thomas Dietterich Henry Kautz Jon Doyle Richard Korf Oren Etzioni Steven Minton Kenneth Forbus Paul Rosenbloom Peter Friedland Richard Sutton Matthew Ginsberg Daniel Weld ADVANCED INFORMATION COORDINATOR Peter Turney PRODUCTION SUPERVISORS Dolores Bolsenga Sheila Coyazo 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