The special issue you are browsing is the outcome of one of the final stages in an initiative commemorating Marco Somalvico (1941–2002), and hosted by several journals, each of them with a special issue: the “Marco Somalvico Memorial Issue” in the Journal of Intelligent & Fuzzy Systems, Vol. 18, No. 3 (2007); the “Special Issue in Memory of Professor Marco Somalvico” in the International Journal on Artificial Intelligence Tools, Vol. 16, No. 2 (2007); “Robotics, Virtual Reality, and Agents and their Body: A Special Issue in Memory of Marco Somalvico” in the Journal of Intelligent and Robotic Systems, Vol. 52, Nos. 3–4 (2008); “Papers in Sensing and in Reasoning: Marco Somalvico Memorial Issue” in Cybernetics and Systems, Vol. 39, No. 4 (2008); another memorial issue now in Annals of Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence, in press, and the “Marco Somalvico Memorial Issue” in which the first part is now in press in Computational Intelligence with a sequel under consideration.
Memories of Marco are vivid among his disciples, collaborators, and colleagues who knew him. Some of them have undertaken the present initiative. The issue you have in your hands is the end result of a painstaking refereeing process (a large, shared pool of referees was extremely valuable); still, for every article in this issue, at least one of the authors at the very least knew Marco Somalvico. Marco was one of the first two scholars who introduced research in artificial intelligence into Italian academia, and since the early stages, he undertook research in robotics as well. His disciples have been contributing to several areas of scholarship within artificial intelligence or robotics, and this reflects his openness; provided the quality was there, he would encourage us to pursue a number of directions of research.
There are five articles in this special issue. The first one makes general considerations about method. The other papers describe specific applications, which come in various domains: museology, generating courses in e-learning, chemometrics and toxicity in pharmaceuticals, and x-ray diffractometry for the identification of materials in materials engineering.
In “The Computer's Subconscious,” Roger Schank offers a critique of the prevailing paradigm of planning in AI. He argues against planning from scratch, and for a cognitively more sensible approach of selecting plans from a repertoire, and adapting them to the circumstances at hand. | |||||
Operations research is applied to museums, in the article by Amigoni and Schiaffonati. An expert in visual cultures who read that article, was highly appreciative and willing to adopt software carrying out the task described in that article. This article clearly meets the test of satisfying also domain experts and not only computer scientists (irony intended). | |||||
Arrigoni Neri and Colombetti are concerned with semantic technologies from ontology engineering and the semantic web, and use a semantic model of the repository to improve both learning objects retrieval and composition. Their application of ontological reasoning is to e-learning. They do so by ensembling several models, in order to improve performance, and reduce the prediction error. | |||||
The aim of Gini, Garg, and Stefanelli is in predicting acute toxicity in pharmaceuticals while being developed by the industry, before they are administered. This is for the purpose of regulatory systems. “This exploratory study concluded that it is possible to significantly improve the performance of the Quantitative Structure Activity Relationship (QSAR) model using techniques derived from machine-learning and data mining.” | |||||
Kimmel, HaCohen-Kerner, Nissan, and Berman propose to apply case-based reasoning to the identification of materials by means of x-ray diffractometry. “A large database of spectral diffraction patterns includes entries with different quality marks; moreover, several diffraction patterns happen to be equivalent, identifying the same material (crystalline phase), even though it also happens that a spectral diffraction pattern alone would not identify a crystalline phase, and parameters such as density also have to be involved for identification.” | |||||
Our thanks go to Robert Trappl for playing host, and to the referees who made this multi-journal initiative feasible; they are all listed alphabetically as follows (even though not all of them were involved in this particular special issue): Francesco Amigoni, Silvana Badaloni, Mirko Bordignon, Andrea Bonarini, Will Browne, Vincenzo Caglioti, Stefano Cagnoni, Riccardo Cassinis, Aldo Franco Dragoni, Susi Dulli, Efstratios (Stratis) Gallopoulos, Giuseppina Gini, Maria Gini, Moshe Goldstein, Janis Jefferies, Rodger Kibble, Jacob Kogan, Jixin Ma, Vittorio Maniezzo, Emanuele Menegatti, Richard Mitchell, Ephraim Nissan, Corrado Petrucco, Matteo Roffilli, Daniel Stamate, and Jin Tian. Some feedback also came from legal scholars, for a particular article.
Professor Marco Somalvico.
MARCO SOMALVICO (1941–2002)
Marco Somalvico was born in Como (the famous lakeside resort), on 10 October 1941, the son of a professional musician, and in fact he inherited a passion for music, being a skilled organ player. A prized high school graduate in 1960, he was to start his career as a high school teacher in the same town of Como. In 1965, he earned the Dottore Ingegnere degree in Electronics Engineering at the prestigious Technical University (Politecnico) of Milano, and this came along with the Medaglia D'Oro (golden medal) award of the Politecnico di Milano Alumni Association as that year's best graduate in electronics engineering. A research associateship at the Politecnico followed. After spending 3 years at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory of the Computer Science Department at Stanford University (a stay that deeply influenced him), in 1971 Marco Somalvico returned to Milan, to the Computer Engineering Section of the Electronics and Information Department at Technical University, and took an assistant professor post.
He also spent some time in Stanford in 1977 and 1989, and a few months in Edinburgh in 1972 (at the Department of Computational Logic in the School of Artificial Intelligence). As early as 1971, Marco established the Artificial Intelligence and Robotics Project at the Politecnico di Milano, where he directed the team up until his untimely demise. In 1974, he became associate professor locally—then in 1980, full professor. He also was a member of the Istituto di Studi Superiori dell'Insubria Gerolamo Cardano, an Institut de France-type prestigious though young institution.
In the early 1970s, he was the man who, at about the same time as Ugo Montanari, first introduced artificial intelligence into Italian academia. He soon brought in a robot prototype, obtained from Olivetti, which his team at the prestigious Technical University of Milan radically modified. He was among the founders of the Società Italiana di Robotica Industriale (the 10th International Symposium of Industrial Robotics was held in Italy in 1983), as well as of the Associazione Italiana per l'Intelligenza Artificiale. In 1987, Marco Somalvico hosted the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI) in Milan. The team carried out disparate research, with a focus on AI or robotics, but touching upon a great number of subjects. One of the projects which Marco especially cherished was applied to the assistance to people with disability, and for that reason Marco earned an award, the Ambrogino d'Oro, by the City of Milan. In 1998, he was awarded the Joseph F. Engelberger Robotics Award for Education (of the USA Robotic Industries Association), the equivalent of the Nobel Prize for Academics in Robotics. These are but a few of the honors he received.
His output of scholarly publications includes five books, and over 150 articles. Apart from robotics, his research has included automated problem-solving, parallel problem-solving (especially using cellular automata), automated program synthesis, natural-language processing, machine vision, multi-agent systems, computer-aided design, expert systems, home and urban automation (home automation he used to call domotica in Italian), virtual museums, man-machine interaction, and AI systems of assistance to the disabled. He concerned himself as well with philosophy, and authored the entry “Intelligenza Artificiale” for the Enciclopedia Italiana. Marco Somalvico is survived by his wife, linguist Graziella Tonfoni.
In the last several years, Marco had been constantly very tired, yet always very active. An intensely honest and deeply religious man, he also used to be combative about his convictions. There is no room for anecdotes about Marco's remarkable personality, blunt candor, and sometimes rather impolitic courage to stand by his conscience. He was a protagonist, and knew that. His attitude towards the academic profession and to his fellow humans was very personal. He had been ill in late 2002. In a phone conversation from his house in Lesmo (midway between Como and Milan), he had mentioned a recent pleural extravasation, but expected to be soon back to work. Then in the evening of 17 November 2008, in Milan, he suffered fatal heart failure. Italian newspapers commemorated him for the general public, at various lengths; unsurprisingly, the most showy newspaper cuts are from his native Como, whose university he co-founded. His contribution to artificial intelligence research and education was important, yet for all of his scholarly stature, it is his personality that stands out even more. His positive personal impact on those who had the opportunity to know him and work with him was immense.
SOME INFORMATION ABOUT THE OTHER JOURNAL ISSUESIN THIS INITIATIVE
Let us also say something about the other special issues in this initiative. The issue in the Journal of Intelligent & Fuzzy Systems, Vol. 18, No. 3 (2007) included the following papers: “Knowledge Propagation in a Distributed Omnidirectional Vision System” (by Emanuele Menegatti, Cristiano Simionato, Stefano Tonello, Grazia Cicirelli, Arcangelo Distante, Hiroshi Ishiguro, Enrico Pagello); “Incremental Pose Estimation for Mobile Robots within Curvilinear Environments” (by Vincenzo Caglioti); “Problems and Solutions for Anchoring in Multi-Robot Applications” (by Andrea Bonarini, Matteo Matteucci, and Marcello Restelli); “Solving Temporal Overconstrained Problems Using Fuzzy Techniques” (by Silvana Badaloni, Marco Falda, and Massimiliano Giacomin); “Winner Determination in Combinatorial Auctions for Tasks with Time and Precedence Constraints” (by Güleser K. Demir and Maria Gini); “Goals, Arguments, and Deception: A Formal Representation from the AURANGZEB Project” (in two parts, by Ephraim Nissan).
The issue in the International Journal on Artificial Intelligence Tools, Vol. 16, No. 2 (2007) included these papers: “A- and V-uncertainty: An Exploration About Uncertainty Modelling from a Knowledge Engineering Perspective” (by Pietro Baroni, Massimiliano Giacomin, and Giovanni Guida); “A Psychogenetic Algorithm for Behavioral Sequence Learning” (by Vittorio Maniezzo and Matteo Roffilli); “The Multiagent Technology and Paradigm within Scientific Discovery” (by Francesco Amigoni and Viola Schiaffonati); “e-modelling: Foundations and Cases for Applying AI to Life Sciences” (by Giuseppina Gini and Emilio Benfenati); “Learning Fuzzy Classifier Systems: Architecture and Exploration Issues” (by Andrea Bonarini, Matteo Matteucci, and Marcello Restelli); “Emulation of Human Feelings and Behaviours in an Animated Artwork” (by Riccardo Cassinis, Laura Morelli, and Ephraim Nissan); “Combining Audio and Video Surveillance with a Mobile Robot” (by Emanuele Menegatti, Manuel Cavasin, Enrico Pagello, Enzo Mumolo, and Massimiliano Nolich).
The issue “Robotics, Virtual Reality, and Agents and their Body: A Special Issue in Memory of Marco Somalvico” in the Journal of Intelligent and Robotic Systems, Vol. 52, Nos. 3–4 (2008), comprises these articles: “From Abstract Task Knowledge to Executable Robot Programs” (by Steffen Knoop, Michael Pardowitz, and Ruediger Dillmann); “Performance Evaluation of a Multi-Robot Search and Retrieval System: Experiences with MinDART” (by Paul E. Rybski, Amy Larson, Harini Veeraraghavan, Monica Anderson LaPoint, and Maria Gini); “Issues on Autonomous Agents from a Roboticle Perspective”(by Antonio D'Angelo, Enrico Pagello, and [posthumously] Hideo Yuasa); “An Approach to the Development of Multirobot Flexible Systems: The Potential of Using Mobile Code Technology” (by Francesco Amigoni); “Determining Radius and Position of a Sphere from a Single Catadioptric Image” (by Vincenzo Caglioti and Simone Gasparini); “A Multi Modal Haptic Interface in Virtual Reality and Humanoid Robotics” (by Michele Folgheraiter, Giuseppina Gini, and Dario Vercesi); “From Embodied Agents Reasoning About the Body, to Virtual Models of the Human Body: A Quick Overview” (by Ephraim Nissan); “Nested Beliefs, Goals, Duties, and Agents Reasoning About Their Own or Each Other's Body in the TIMUR Model: A Formalism for the Narrative of Tamerlane and the Three Painters” (by Ephraim Nissan).
The issue “Papers in Sensing and in Reasoning: Marco Somalvico Memorial Issue” in Cybernetics and Systems, Vol. 39, No. 4 (2008) includes the following papers. Section “Sensing and Vision from Robotics” comprises: “The Spatial Semantic Hierarchy Implemented with an Omnidirectional Vision System” (by Emanuele Menegatti, Giovanni Aneloni, Mark Wright, and Enrico Pagello), and “Ultrasonic-Based Localization of Cow Teats for Robotized Milking” (by Domenico Sorrenti, Marco Cattaneo, and Vincenzo Villa). Section “Paradigms of Reasoning and Their Applications” comprises: “Very Strongly Constrained Problems: An Ant Colony Optimization Approach” (by Vittorio Maniezzo and Matteo Roffilli); “Identifiability in Causal Bayesian Networks: A Gentle Introduction” (by Marco Valtorta and Yimin Huang); and “Select Topics in Legal Evidence and Assistance by Computer Tools” (by Ephraim Nissan).
The memorial issue now in press in Annals of Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence comprises three long articles rather heavy with formulae: “Mental States as Multi-Context Systems” (by Franco Aldo Dragoni); “Epistemic Formulae, Argument Structures, and a Narrative on Identity and Deception: A Formal Representation from the AJIT Subproject Within AURANGZEB” (by Ephraim Nissan); and “On the Completeness of an Identifiability Algorithm for Semi-Markovian Models” (by Yimin Huang and Marco Valtorta).
And finally, the “Marco Somalvico Memorial Issue” in Computational Intelligence is divided in two parts, of which the first part is now in press and comprises these articles: “Clustering Very Large Datasets Using a Low Memory Matrix Factored Representation” (by David Littau and Daniel Boley); “Communication Languages for Multiagent Systems” (by Marco Colombetti and Mario Verdicchio). Part II of the memorial issue in Computational Intelligence is now in preparation, and comprises further articles.
ENVOI
As already noted, in the present miscellaneous special issue, the unifying feature is the pool of authors (at least one author in every jointly authored paper had some professional connection to Marco Somalvico; in Roger Schank's case, it was friendship). The full range, in all of the memorial special issues within this initiative, is broad indeed, but there are detectable threads that run through them. Also Marco Somalvico's interests within AI and robotics were far-ranging. Those who knew him will remember not only his scholarly and other academic qualities, but also his qualities as a very humane, indeed noble human being. To those disciples who were fortunate enough to interact with him while being trained in research (beyond the classroom setting), his contribution was not only professional, but also one of personal growth.
Guest Editors
Ephraim Nissan
Giuseppina Gini
Marco Colombetti
