Abstraction, Reformulation, and Approximation: 4th International Symposium, SARA 2000 Horseshoe Bay, USA, July 26–29, 2000 Proceedings

Patrick Cousot (auth.), Berthe Y. Choueiry, Toby Walsh (eds.)3540678395, 9783540678397

This volume contains the proceedings of SARA 2000, the fourth Symposium on Abstraction, Reformulations, and Approximation (SARA). The conference was held at Horseshoe Bay Resort and Conference Club, Lake LBJ, Texas, July 26– 29, 2000, just prior to the AAAI 2000 conference in Austin. Previous SARA conferences took place at Jackson Hole in Wyoming (1994), Ville d’Est´erel in Qu´ebec (1995), and Asilomar in California (1998). The symposium grewout of a series of workshops on abstraction, approximation, and reformulation that had taken place alongside AAAI since 1989. This year’s symposium was actually scheduled to take place at Lago Vista Clubs & Resort on Lake Travis but, due to the resort’s failure to pay taxes, the conference had to be moved late in the day. This mischance engendered eleventh-hour reformulations, abstractions, and resource re-allocations of its own. Such are the perils of organizing a conference. This is the ?rst SARA for which the proceedings have been published in the LNAI series of Springer-Verlag. We hope that this is a re?ection of the increased maturity of the ?eld and that the increased visibility brought by the publication of this volume will help the discipline grow even further. Abstractions, reformulations, and approximations (AR&A) have found – plications in a variety of disciplines and problems including automatic progr- ming, constraint satisfaction, design, diagnosis, machine learning, planning, qu- itative reasoning, scheduling, resource allocation, and theorem proving. The – pers in this volume capture a cross-section of these application domains.

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Table of contents :
Partial Completeness of Abstract Fixpoint Checking….Pages 1-25
An Overview of MAXQ Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning….Pages 26-44
Recent Progress in the Design and Analysis of Admissible Heuristic Functions….Pages 45-55
GIS Databases: From Multiscale to MultiRepresentation….Pages 57-70
An Abstraction Framework for Soft Constraints and Its Relationship with Constraint Propagation….Pages 71-86
Abstractions for Knowledge Organization of Relational Descriptions….Pages 87-106
Grid-Based Histogram Arithmetic for the Probabilistic Analysis of Functions….Pages 107-123
Approximating Data in Constraint Databases….Pages 124-143
Linearly Bounded Reformulations of Unary Databases….Pages 144-163
A CSP Abstraction Framework….Pages 164-184
Interactions of Abstractions in Programming….Pages 185-201
Reformulation and Approximation in Model Checking….Pages 202-218
The Lumberjack Algorithm for Learning Linked Decision Forests….Pages 219-232
Reformulating Propositional Satisfiability as Constraint Satisfaction….Pages 233-246
Improving the Efficiency of Reasoning Through Structure-Based Reformulation….Pages 247-259
Using Feature Hierarchies in Bayesian Network Learning….Pages 260-270
On Reformulating Planning as Dynamic Constraint Satisfaction….Pages 271-280
Experiments with Automatically Created Memory-Based Heuristics….Pages 281-290
Abstraction and Phase Transitions in Relational Learning….Pages 291-301
An Agent-Based Approach to Robust Switching Between Abstraction Levels for Fault Diagnosis….Pages 303-308
A Compositional Approach to Causality….Pages 309-312
A Method for Finding Consistent Hypotheses Using Abstraction….Pages 313-316
Program Synthesis and Transformation Techniques for Simulation, Optimization, and Constraint Satisfaction….Pages 317-319
Using and Learning Abstraction Hierarchies for Planning….Pages 320-321
Learning Probabilistic Relational Models….Pages 322-323
Synergy between Compositional Modeling and Bayesian Networks….Pages 324-325
A CSP Abstraction Framework….Pages 326-327
Answering Queries with Database Restrictions….Pages 328-329
Research Summary….Pages 330-331