Information about IJCAI-95 is available at http://ijcai.org/. Also by gopher to ijcai.org port 70, FTP from pub/ijcai on ijcai.org, or email to info@ijcai.org. Deadline for tutorial, workshop, and panel proposals is 11/1/94. [Martha Pollack (pollack@cs.pitt.edu), intsys, 10/6/94. David Joslin.]

Weekly archives of the AI-related Usenet newsgroups (back to 7/23/94, or 1/90 for comp.lang.lisp) are now available as gzipped tar files in ftp.cs.cmu.edu:/user/ai/pubs/news/. Sub-directories include comp.{ai, ai.*, constraints, lang.{clos, dylan, lisp, lisp.*, prolog, scheme, smalltalk}, object.logic, org.lisp-users, robotics, speech, std.lisp, sys.ti.explorer, sys.xerox} and sci.lang. Contact ai+news-archives@cs.cmu.edu to suggest other newsgroups. [Mark Kantrowitz (mkant+@cs.cmu.edu), comp.ai, 10/10/94. David Joslin.]

Proceedings of the 8/92 workshop "Autopoiesis and Perception" are available in ftp://ftp.eeng.dcu.ie/pub/autonomy/bmcm9401/ (but not in hardcopy). The README.TXT file lists the articles. [Barry McMullin (mcmullin@eeng.dcu.ie), Neuron Digest, 10/5/94.]

Physicist Stephen Hawking says computer viruses are man-made life forms, parasitic on the metabolism of host computers. [St. Petersburg Times, 8/8/94, p. 8. EDUPAGE.]

ENCORE, the EvolutioNary COmputation REpository network, offers resources for evolutionary computing: genetic algorithms, genetic programming, evolution strategies, evolutionary programming, classifier systems, etc. The US site is ftp://alife.santafe.edu/pub/USER-AREA/EC/; there are also sites in Europe and Asia. [Joerg.Heitkoetter@germany.eu.net, GA-List, 9/5/94. Roy Turner.] See also CalTech's EClair service, ftp://ftp.krl.caltech.edu/pub/EC, esp. the README and handbook files. [GA-List. Chuck Morefield, 9/17/94.]

Gordon Baxter has been checking into freely available "production systems" that run on PCs. SOAR can be FTP'd from /afs/cs.cmu.edu/project/soar/5.2/2/public/ on ftp.cs.cmu.edu. For info, contact soar-request@cs.cmu.edu or check Part 6 of the Lisp FAQ at http://www.cs.cmu.edu:8001/Weg/Groups/AI/html/faqs /lang/lisp/top.html. ACT-R for Mac or Golden Common Lisp 4.3 comes with John Anderson's book "Rules of the Mind" (LEA, 1993). The CLIPS rule-based expert system shell is documented in /pub/clips on hubble.jsc.nasa.gov. [gordonb @phil-engl.dundee.ac.uk, comp.ai, 9/20/94. David Joslin.]

Behrouz H. Far has collected links to several qualitative-reasoning home pages, on http://knight3.cit.ics.saitama-u.ac.jp/ai/qr-index.html. [far@cit.ics.saitama-u.ac.jp, comp.ai, 10/12/94. David Joslin.]

A bibliographic server for decision support papers is being created by the IDSS laboratory at UTS. Contact Andrew Blair (andrew@socs.uts.edu.au). [IDSS Mailing List Newsletter, 10/13/94. Bill Park.]

Partek Inc. (St. Charles, MO) is marketing a "universal recognizer" environment for pattern recognition and visualization. Engineers Thomas Downey and D.J. Meyer have built a non- rectilinear analytic "spreadsheet" with sophisticated data preprocessing operations, pop-up graphics, principle-component analysis, non-linear mapping, cluster analysis, color-coded 2D/3D pattern-visualization (including n-dimensional scatter plots, histograms, and time series displays), and neural-network, unsupervised learning vector quantization (LVQ), or statistical classification. Users can add their own modules. [R. Colin Johnson, EETimes, 10/6/94.]