Drs. Milton, Diederich, and Fortuner are colleagues at the University of California at Davis, representing the fields of computer database theory, object-oriented computer programming, and systematic biology. They propose a workshop to bring together systematic biologists and computer scientists interested in Artificial Intelligence and Expert Systems, which include the most current efforts to mimic human reasoning in computers. During the workshop, five areas of mutual interest will be explored: design of software for a biologist's expert workstation; expert systems for identification of organisms; possible uses of artificial intelligence in deciding among alternate evolutionary trees; automatic extraction of data from literature sources; and machine vision and feature extraction from specimens. The proposed workshop will attract forward-thinking researchers in both computer science and systematic biology, and will help to define the most promising areas for future collaboration. The results of these collaborations will impact on agriculture, conservation biology, evolutionary theory, and a wide array of other sub-disciplines in both biology and computer science.
