Date: Fri, 20 May 94 14:34:33 -0400 From: rich@merl.com To: kr@merl.com Dear KR Advisory Board members: I would like to officially enter into the record for the upcoming executive meeting the following exchange of letters between KR and AAAI. You will note that we have gotten a warm and flexible response to our initial approach. What needs to be done now is to begin to work out the substance. I continue to think that this arrangement could have great benefit for a small, (dare I say?) haphazard organization such as KR. However, having taken things this far, I think that the best person to continue this process is the person most directly affected, namely the conference chair for KR'96. I would be happy, as a member of the Advisory Board to make the appropriate introductions when the new chair is known. Some general advice I would like to pass on to the new chair regarding KR & AAAI is the following: (1) Don't try to define a comprehensive legal agreement up front. Instead, let the legal relationship for now be buyer/vendor (we are buying services from them) which is much simpler. For that, all AAAI has to do is make sure it will be paid. This can be handled by paying them part in advance, if necessary. This will also avoid a lot of expensive legal fees all around (2) I think the other important thing to put in place is some kind of *continuity*. Concretely, I would ask AAAI to (a) assign a "permanent" person to be the liason with KR (b) there should be well-defined *place* in the AAAI office (e.g., a file cabinet), for KR-related stuff --- in some sense this will become the "KR office", where we can have official mail sent, etc. I know that these two points are in some sense contradictory, but I think that this is a useful balance for now. By the way, as of this executive meeting, I officially step down as President, to be replaced by Erik. This is a change of legal officers, which will require a legal vote of the Board of Directors, which currently consists of myself, Jon Doyle, and Jim Schmolze. This can be done after the meeting. Note that from a *functional* point of view, we are organized as described in the final attachment below. I propose that we keep the legal Board of Directors as it stands as long as the three of us remain on the Advisory Board; it just makes it easier to do legal votes without circulating documents around the world. Best wishes for a successful conference, Chuck ________________________________________________________________ {Carol Hamilton \\Executive Director \\American Association for Artificial Intelligence \\445 Burgess Drive \\Menlo Park, CA 94025-3496 } \opening{\RE Dear Carol,} This letter is to follow up on our conversation in October at the Fall Symposium Series regarding potential future relationships between AAAI and Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning, Inc. (KR hereafter). I would appreciate if you would circulate this letter along with your thoughts on the matter to the AAAI Officers and Board for discussion. For your information, KR was incorporated in March 1993 as a Massachusetts charitable corporation and has been awarded tax-exempt status under the Internal Revenue Code Section 501(c)(3). At the moment, our only activity is to organize the biannual international conference with which you are already familiar. I have attached a list of the current officers and board of KR, all of whom are individuals well-known to AAAI. The most recent KR conference, KR'92, was in Boston in October 1992. The next conference, KR'94, will be in Germany in May 1994. Although it has not yet been decided, I expect that KR'96 will be in North America in May 1996. Before getting into details, let me first state what I see as the toplevel goals of a relationship from the standpoint of each organization. From the KR side, we seek to improve the functioning of our organization in two areas: continuity and logistics. From the AAAI side, I think the primary motivation is that a relationship with KR would be consistent with one of charter purposes of AAAI, namely to foster research in artificial intelligence. A secondary benefit to AAAI would be the opportunity for synergy between the KR conference and other AAAI activities. Basically, what I would like to propose is an arrangement in which the AAAI office serves as the permanent office for KR in exchange for regular payment by KR of a negotiated amount that approximates AAAI's actual costs for performing the necessary services. Presently, each successive KR conference committee has to invent its own ad hoc mixture of volunteer services, ``bootlegged'' administrative support, and paid consultants. This is not only very stressful (and therefore makes it hard to recruit new conference chairs), but not very efficient in terms of time or money. The AAAI office, on the other hand, has (if you will forgive the clich\'e) well-oiled machinery for doing all the things that need to be done for a conference. Below is a list of the kinds of services that AAAI could provide to KR. It might make sense to choose some subset of these to start with and add others later as we get experience with the relationship. \begin{itemize} \item permanent address for mailing and enquiries \item advertising \item mailing \item processing conference registration \item administration of conference paper submissions and reviewing process \item local arrangements \item on-site administration at conference \end{itemize} In the limit, the AAAI office would provide the same services to the biannual KR conference commmittee as it does to the yearly NCAI committee, with one important exception: the separate incorporation of KR protects AAAI from any financial liability in connection with the KR conference. I have discussed all of this with the KR Board and we are interested in proceeding with further discussions with AAAI as quickly as possible. Even though the paper review process has already started for KR'94, there may be some limited cooperative arrangements that would be helpful for this conference. Our main goal, however, would be to get an arrangement fully in place for KR'96. \newpage One final thought: I suspect that if a good arrangement is worked out between KR and AAAI, there will be quite a bit of interest from other parts of the AI community that are at a similar stage of self-organizing, such as the planning and machine learning workshops/conferences. I think this could be a good thing for AAAI and the field. {\raggedleft \closing{Yours truly,}} \signature{Charles Rich \\President, KR, Inc. \\[5pt]{\small c/o Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs \\201 Broadway \\Cambridge, MA 02139}} \cc{Barbara Grosz} \encl{KR Officers and Board} ________________________________________________________________ Date: Wed, 12 Jan 94 10:52:18 PST From: Carol Hamilton To: rich@merl.com Subject: Proposed KR/AAAI Affiliation Cc: ai-prez@das.harvard.edu, hamilton@aaai.org Charles Rich President, KR, Inc. c/o Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs 201 Broadway Cambridge, MA 02139 Dear Chuck: After careful consideration by the Executive Council, AAAI is pleased to accept your proposal to form an affiliation between AAAI and the Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning, Inc. Since this is a new venture for AAAI, we would like to take you up on your offer to start things off slowly, and then assess the situation again after KR'94. In addition, we are currently investigating any complications such an affiliation might have with regard to our nonprofit tax status, and will keep you informed of any issues that might arise. While the response from the Executive Council was overwhelmingly positive, a couple of concerns were raised during the course of discussing your proposal. These included the following: (1) Complications inherent in planning an event outside North America, and AAAI's lack of experience in doing so; and (2) KR's ability to cover the cost of AAAI's services, since KR currently operates almost completely on voluntary labor (I may be wrong about this). Based on our initial conversation, it is my understanding that KR will want AAAI to plan the conference when it is being held outside of North America. If that is the case, it is probably wise to spell out what role AAAI would play and what role the local arrangements committee would play. In addition, we will need to work out how the finances of an international event will be handled, and how AAAI will be involved. When we talked in Raleigh in October, I think I mentioned that I normally allocate overhead costs to programs on a percentage basis. This is, of course, because I am very familiar with AAAI's programs and what it takes to organize them. However, until I become equally familiar with KR's procedures, we will probably want to agree on an hourly fee or a project fee for each phase of the conference preparations. This system would protect both KR and AAAI from miscalculated costs. Aside from these concerns, I would be interested to know what (if any) involvement AAAI might have in 1994, especially since May is fast approaching. In order to get things rolling, I would assume that a formal agreement should be prepared by KR, which we will then review, modify, and eventually cosign. At this point, the agreement could be limited to our 1994 involvement or could be broad enough to include 1996 and beyond. I would like to reiterate that we are very excited about this new relationship with KR, and the benefits it will provide to both communities. Warmest regards, Carol McKenna Hamilton Executive Director, AAAI ________________________________________________________________ PRINCIPLES OF KNOWLEDGE REPRESENTATION AND REASONING, INC November, 1993 PRESIDENT: Charles Rich (KR'92 Conference Chair) Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories CLERK/TREASURER: James Schmolze Tufts University KR'94 CONFERENCE CHAIR: Erik Johan Sandewall Linkoeping University KR'94 PROGRAM CHAIRS: Jon Doyle Massachusetts Institute of Technology Pietro Torasso Universita' di Torino KR'94 LOCAL ARRANGEMENTS CHAIR: Walter Gerhard Lakemeyer University of Bonn KR'94 PUBLICITY CHAIR: Werner Horn Austrian Research Institute for AI ADVISORY BOARD: William Roy Swartout (KR'92 Program Chair) USC/Information Sciences Institute Bernhard Georg Nebel (KR'92 Program Chair) DFKI James F. Allen (KR'91 Conference Chair) University of Rochester Richard Fikes (KR'91 Program Chair) Stanford University Raymond Reiter (KR'89 Conference Chair) University of Toronto Ronald Jay Brachman (KR'89 Program Chair) AT&T Bell Laboratories Hector Levesque (KR'89 Program Chair) University of Toronto ________________________________________________________________