Symposium honouring D.A. Pospeloc

Citation

Andrew, A.M. (2003), "Symposium honouring D.A. Pospeloc", Kybernetes, Vol. 32 No. 7/8. https://doi.org/10.1108/k.2003.06732gab.004

Symposium honouring D.A. Pospeloc

Conference reports

Symposium honouring D.A. Pospeloc

On 11 February 2003, a symposium was held in the Polytechnical Museum, Moscow, to mark the 70th birthday of Professor Dmitri Alexandrovich Pospelov, a foremost Russian worker in the field of Artificial Intelligence and an Academician of the Russian Academy of Natural Science. The meeting was hosted jointly by the Russian Association for Artificial Intelligence and the Polytechnical Museum, with both of which D.A. Pospelov has been associated.

In a Press Release announcing the event, Professor Vadim Stefanuk referred not only to the immediate contributions of Pospelov to the subject area, but also to his wide interests which attracted around him a group with diverse specializations, from computing technology to psychology, spanning applied as well as human sciences. He also had a long standing connection with the Polytechnical Museum and was an enthusiastic populariser of science and author of numerous books. He, and his students, gave important inputs to numerous symposia held in the museum.

Professor Pospelov was not able to join in all of the day's activities as he was severely injured in an accident about 4 years ago and is still confined to a wheelchair. He was able to attend the first part of the proceedings which was in a fairly small auditorium and consisted of relatively short addresses mostly from students and former colleagues. I was invited to participate, and referred to the very first beginnings of AI with Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage and the enormous developments since then in which Dmitri Pospelov played a major part. His work included analysis of fairy tales and fantasy, and so carries to new limits the departure from plain numerical computing first foreseen in the writings of Lovelace.

The second part of the day's activities was in a large auditorium and included longer presentations. The proceedings were open to anyone interested and were intended to be intelligible to non-specialists. At the end, participants were invited to an adjoining room where a generous buffet had been set out by the museum staff. As well as tea and coffee, Russian wine and vodka were provided in amounts that amply allowed for numerous toasts to Dmitri Pospelov and colleagues.

A number of the major contributions also appear in a special issue of AI News, the journal of the Russian Association for Artificial Intelligence. The issue (No. 6 for the year 2002) has the theme of “development of ideas on AI in our country” and is prompted by the birth anniversary of Dmitri Pospelov.

The papers are in Russian with brief abstracts in English and refer to Pospelov's theories of situation control and the related field of semiotics. The five papers in the issue, using the English-language versions of titles, are as follows:

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  “From situation control to applied semiotics” by G.S. Osipov, pp. 3-7.

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  “Knowledge in intelligent systems” by V.N. Vagin, pp. 8-18.

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  “Natural-language text processing from language understanding models to knowledge extraction technologies” by V.V. Khoroshevsky, pp. 19-26.

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  “Introduction to applied semiotics. Chapter 5: Operations in semiotic knowledge bases” by D.A. Pospelov and G.S. Osipov, pp. 28-35.

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  “Logical Linguistic Control as an introduction to Knowledge Management” by T.A. Gavrilova, pp. 36-40.

The presentations were in Russian (except for my few words, which were translated by Vadim Stefanuk) and I cannot report on the contents in detail. It is clear, though, that there is a vigorous school of thought built around the innovations and specific viewpoint of Dmitri Pospelov. Fortunately, for those who are poor linguists a good deal can be gleaned from his many publications in English. We congratulate him on his birthday and send best wishes for an early recovery from the effects of his accident.

Alex M. Andrew