Freud's theory of jokes explains how they overcome the mental "censors" that make it hard for us to think "forbidden" thoughts. But his theory did not work so well for humorous nonsense as for other comical subjects. In this essay…

Omega is a description system for knowledge embedding which incorporates some of the attractive modes of expression in common sense reasoning such as descriptions, inheritance, quantification, negation, attributions and multiple viewpoints. A formalization of Omega is developed as a framework…

The object oriented programming style used in the Smalltalk and Actor languages is available in Lisp Machine Lisp, and used by the Lisp Machine software system. It is used to perform generic operations on objects. Part of its implementation is…

This paper describes a method for limiting vibration in flexible systems by shaping the system inputs. Unlike most previous attempts at input shaping, this method does not require an extensive system model or lengthy numerical computation; only knowledge of the…

Explanation-based learning occurs when something useful is retained from an explanation, usually an account of how some particular problem can be solved given a sound theory. Many real-world explanations are not based on sound theory, however, and wrong things may…

This memo reports the results of a case study into how children learn in the absence of explicit teaching. The three subjects, an eight year old, a ten year old and a thirteen year old were observed in both of…

Sketches are commonly used in the early stages of design. Our previous system allows users to sketch mechanical systems that the computer interprets. However, some parts of the mechanical system might be too hard or too complicated to express in…

The goal of the commodity expert project was to develop a prototype program that would act as an intelligent assistant to a commodity market analyst. Since expert analysis must deal with very large, yet incomplete, data bases of unreliable facts…

Austria has gone through two cycles of university reforms since the 1960s. The first aimed to open the universities to social and labour market demand and to make their structures more democratic and flexible. The second reform cycle dealt with…

Defining qualified reasoning as reasoning containing such loose qualifying words as 'probably,' 'usually,' 'probable, 'likely,' 'ceteris paribus,' and 'primafacie, Ennis argues that typical cases of qualified reasoning, though they might be good arguments, are deductively invalid, implying that such arguments…