Artificial Intelligence for Engineering Design, Analysis and Manufacturing has accomplished a lot, but we still have far to go in building a community. I was reminded of this earlier this year when I attended a workshop on a topic within the scope of AI EDAM's coverage. In addition to engineers and educators, workshop speakers included a linguist studying languages used by professionals, an ethnographer studying CAD users and a psychologist studying innovation. All three social scientists started their presentations essentially the same way:
My work is based on that of Professor A. Together with my colleagues B and C, I am extending A's work on topic X to take into account topics Y and Z as well.
Have you ever seen an AI EDAM article start with such a crisp statement of provenance and continuity? The usual AI EDAM section on related work (present company included) offers a perfunctory linear list of research publications without much sense of direction from the past—what the author received from the works referenced—or to the future—what the author hopes to contribute to the received knowledge.
In order for us to start standing on the shoulders of past generations and not step on each others' toes, I propose that each AI EDAM article contain a declaration roughly as follows:
Before undertaking the work to be described, I considered using/adapting/extending the concepts/methods/tools presented by A and B. The following properties of the application domain made this approach infeasible and required a new approach: … Nevertheless, the work extends the ideas of A and B as follows: …
