Still Intelligent Systems
The following is an early draft of my editorial for the next IEEE Intelligent systems. Your comments welcome.
Intelligent Readers,
At the time I write this, we have just completed the Editorial board meeting for this magazine. This meeting is a time when members of our Editorial and Advisory Boards get together and discuss the status of the publication, make “strategic” decisions about the magazine, and generally brainstorm about where the field is going, and what topics we should be covering in special issues and columns. We also discuss possible areas for Trends and Controversies, one of our most popular departments, and who could edit these. (The meeting generally includes a nice dinner for the board, some years having more wine than others, but that’s not relevant to this letter.)
This year, one of the more interesting things we did was to revisit some of the texts used to describe our magazine in various places and to update them to better reflect what it is we do and what the special competences of our publication are. To do so, we also had to discuss where we see the field going and how we fit into it. Essentially, we were revisiting the vision of this magazine, and exploring whether we were still providing the right kind of material to our readers, especially given trends and change in AI and related fields. I thought I would share a summary of some of our discussion, in the hopes that it will help you better understand where we see the magazine going, and give you a chance to provide feedback if you feel we are missing a trend or otherwise misinformed.
IMPACT
To start with, there was one piece of text which we are quite proud of and decided not to change. If you go to our website (http://www.computer.org/intelligent) you will see that we claim to be “The #1 Magazine in Artificial Intelligence!” If you click on the text, you see the explanation:
IEEE Intelligent System’s 2004 Journal Citation Reports impact factor is 2.86, placing it 9th among ranked AI publications (the top-ranked magazine), 10th among all IEEE publications (the 2nd magazine), and 20th among all computer science publications (the top-ranked magazine). The impact factor measures the frequency with which an average article in a publication has been cited in a particular year, thus indicating the publication’s relative importance in its field.
We, the Ed Board, thank you our contributors and readers for making this possible, and we are happy not to change a word.
MISSION
While impact is important, to keep our impact up we really need to have an understanding of where the field is and where it is going. We are required by IEEE to have a mission statement, and for years the one we have used read “IEEE Intelligent Systems’ mission is to provide its readers with high-quality, peer-reviewed research covering intelligent systems theory and applications in a readable, accessible format.” Not wrong, but pretty vague and somewhat circular, defining intelligent system in terms of intelligent systems. Readers who read my Editorial. “Systems, Systematically Speaking” in the May/June 2005 issue know that I’ve been grappling with a better explanation, and at the Editorial Board meeting we decided to see if we could come up with words that would explain what we were after more clearly.
Dennis Taylor, the Lead Editor for Intelligent Systems at IEEE, prepared a stab at this for us to consider. He proposed the words “the theory and applications of systems that understand, reason, and learn.” The group felt this was a step in the right direction, but that it didn’t quite cover the areas of interest to our magazine. For example, we publish papers about language and language-based interactions, we include articles about robotic systems that can be integrated with other systems, we have become one of the key publishers of descriptions of research in the emerging Semantic Web area (some of our most cited recent papers), and we have a number of papers on agent-based systems that interact with real world sources. While these system might be said to understand, reason and/or learn, we didn’t feel that was quite sufficient.
As you might imagine, given a group of AI experts in one room, the list of words we wanted to use rapidly grew as we tried to be inclusive. We publish papers on systems that “communicate, interact, effect, describe,” and “sense.” We are interested in papers about getting computers to “mine, summarize, process, collect,” and “filter” information. We explore programs that do these things via “logic, representation, evolution, adaption,” and “cognition.” AI is a large domain, and we cover quite a lot of it.
However, the more we attempted to expand the definition, and the more words we added, the more we worried about whether we were leaving anything our. Trying to assert our coverage in full simply made it less and less clear what the higher concepts were. There’s a story from the Talmud, the guide to Jewish learning, that relates that at a certain point someone leading the praying went on and on with more and more adjectives about how wonderful the creator was. The Rabbis chastised him after and asked, essentially, “is that all?” The more one said, the more likely one was to leave something out. Instead, the Rabbis chose a smaller set of adjectives, and set them out as the terms that should be used from then on. We didn’t have any Rabbis with us, but I think we realized we were in the same situation.
Finally, we decided that Dennis had almost caught it. “Understand” was a bit too broad, but “reason” and “learn” really did capture a significant portion of what we cared about. It did, however, seem to leave out the many aspects of the field that concern interacting with users, with other sources, and with the physical world. We decided that if we added “perceive” to capture the many aspects of input, and “act” to cover the many ways a program can interact with other entities, we would have covered the spectrum at a level where almost everything we publish will fit. Thus, our new mission statement reads:
IEEE Intelligent Systems provides its readers with high-quality, cutting-edge research on the theory and applications of computer systems that perceive, reason, learn and act. It presents this research via peer-reviewed articles that are readable and accessible.
This, I think you’ll agree is not a bad summary of what this magazine is all about.
Name that magazine
As well as getting our mission right, we had one other issue we needed to address, is the name of our magazine, Intelligent Systems, the right name? This magazine, which is now publishing it’s twenty-first volume, started during Expert Systems explosion of the mid-1980s, and was called IEEE Expert. As the years went by, however, the board felt this was narrower than what we covered and in <<DENNIS, insert the right year>> the title was officially changed to IEEE Intelligent Systems. I asked the Ed Board if they felt this was still the right name, given that we’ve been expanding the coverage to include more from what our friend Rod Brooks calls the “New AI,” that we are starting to branch more into issues with respect to the ethics and politics around AI and its use, and that we have gone beyond the traditional bounds of AI in our coverage of areas such as information retrieval, datamining, and Human-Language Technology.
Pondering this, Advisory Board member David Waltz said something to the effect that he actually liked the “Intelligent Systems” name. Dave pointed out that we are still one of the few places with a concentration not just on AI for AI’s sake, but with an emphasis on research into tools and techniques that can lead to use in real-world applications. We don’t focus primarily on the applications themselves, but we certainly aim for work that will inform those working on applied projects and for research that is transitioning from the laboratory to use. There really is no better current term, Dave opined, than Intelligent Systems to cover the wide area that is encompassed in our pages.
Dave Waltz is a very smart man, and thus I would like to announce that from here into the foreseeable future the title of our magazine is, and will remain, IEEE Intelligent Systems, and we’re proud of that.
