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
Genoa Machine: ftp.mrg.dist.unige.it
main directory: /usr/jair/pub
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
Fausto Giunchiglia
Henry Kautz
Richard Korf
Wendy Lehnert
Richard Sutton
Daniel Weld
EDITORIAL BOARD
Jan Aikins
Yuichiro Anzai
Rodney Brooks
Rissland
Murray Campbell
Rosenbloom
Thomas Dean
Rina Dechter
Gerald DeJong
Johan de Kleer
Didier Dubois
Edmund Durfee
David Etherington
Oren Etzioni
Kenneth Forbus
Michael Georgeff
Matthew Ginsberg
Touretzky
Walter Hamscher
Wellman
David Haussler
Julia Hirschberg
Lawrence Hunter
Martha Pollack
Ross Quinlan
Edwina
Takeo Kanade
Paul
Hiroaki Kitano
Pat Langley
Ramon Lopez de Mantaras
David McAllester
Kathleen McKeown
Stephen Muggleton
Hideyuki Nakashima
Nils Nilsson
Toyoaki Nishida
Christos Papadimitriou
Judea Pearl
Stuart Russell
Erik Sandewall
Bart Selman
Stuart Shieber
Douglas Smith
Luc Steels
Anthony Stentz
Peter Struss
Hozumi Tanaka
Austin Tate
David
Tomaso Poggio
Michael
ADVISORY BOARD
Jaime Carbonell
Thomas Dietterich
Oren Etzioni
Kenneth Forbus
Peter Friedland
Matthew Ginsberg
PRODUCTION SUPERVISORS
Martha Del Alto
Helen Stewart
Paul Rosenbloom
Bart Selman
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