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\address 
Professor Stephen Riter
Computer Science Department
University of Texas at El Paso
El Paso, Texas 79968-0518

\body
Dear Professor Riter:

	This is to support the nomination of Professor Michael
Gelfond for an award for distinguished contributions in the area
of research.  His work is an important contribution to artificial
intelligence research --- specifically to the formalization of
commonsense knowledge and reasoning, the goal of which is to make
it possible for computers to reason as flexibly as people.

	His work is distinguished in three areas.

	(1) He has compared the various formalisms for nonmonotic
reasoning, established their mutual relations and their relation
to logic programming.

	(2) He has identified several conditions under which
other formalisms can be compiled into logic programs and
conveniently computed.  He has done this both for circumscription
and for the newer autoepistemic logic.  This is important for making
nonmonotonic

	(3) He has helped extended the formalized areas of
commonsense knowledge and reasoning to include reasoning about
concurrent actions, a problem that has been prominent since the
1960s.

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Sincerely,
John McCarthy
Professor
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