Preface [Special issue intro.]

This Special Issue is composed of the papers selected from the 1978 IEEE Computer Society Workshop on Pattern Recognition (PR) and Artificial Intelligence (Al) held in Princeton, NJ, April 12-14, 1978. The Workshop was sponsored by the Technical Committee on Machine Intelligence and Pattern Analysis. Inevitably, the contributors to the Workshop determined, to a large degree, the tone and complexion of this Special Issue. For this reason, a brief account of the Workshop Proceedings, though now history, is given. About half of the papers presented at the Workshop were also submitted for the Special Issue, a total of 37. Those of high quality were far more than the number that could be accommodated within the available number of pages. We decided to choose three topics where the interaction between the methodologies of PR and Al was most prevelant: analysis of images, analysis of speech, and certain general algorithms. All the selected papers present either theoretical, or experimental results, or both. We felt that such results clearly demonstrate the progress achieved and can be seen as very impressive if measured against the difficult problem of emulating functions associated with human intelligence by machines. It is true that they often fall short from some of the earlier ambitious goals, but the time is probably ripe to reexamine such goals in view of the accumulated experience. The following is a brief scanning of the contents of this issue, especially as related to the integration and/or interaction of PR and Al methodologies.