Domains of Artificial Intelligence Relevant to Systems

This paper summarizes the authors' views of the areas where techniques from artificial intelligence may prove applicable to systems problems. For this paper, we define "artificial intelligence" as the application of symbolic reasoning on stored knowledge. The concept of knowledge is left imprecise; knowledge may be approximate and symbolic rather than exact and numeric. The components of the field of artificial intelligence which we consider most relevant to the systems community are expert systems, knowledge representation, knowledge base query and inference, data base design and access, and mixed-language programming. We will discuss candidate areas for research in the application of artificial intelligence from two perspectives: current problems in artificial intelligence the solution of which would positively affect system applications, and areas within systems which we feel would benefit from the application of artificial intelligence techniques.