If we are to understand human-level intelligence, we need to understand how meanings can be learned without explicit instruction. I take a step toward that understanding by focusing on the symbol-grounding problem, showing how symbols can emerge from a system…

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…

This paper describes an approach to supporting work in the office. Using and extending ideas from the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) we describe office work as a problem solving activity. A knowledge embedding language called Omega is used to…

A program, some TECO macros, and some small modifications to existing systems software have been written, called PRO, whose purpose is to reduce the large number of control languages and system programs it has been necessary to know about and…

This reference manual consists of two parts. The first (sections 1 through 6) is intended for those who are either interested in the ITS 1.5 time sharing monitor for its own sake or who wish to write machine language programs…

The paper advocates the need for systems which support maintenance of LISP-type data bases, and describes an experimental system of this kind, call DABA. In this system, a description of the data base's structure is kept in the data base…

As advances in computer architecture and changing economics make feasible machines with large-scale parallelism, Artificial Intelligence will require new ways of thinking about computation that can exploit parallelism effectively. We present the actor model of computation as being appropriate for…

This paper describes a new statistical, model-based approach to building a contact state observer. The observer uses measurements of the contact force and position, and prior information about the task encoded in a graph, to determine the current location of…

The shift towards global networking brings with it many opportunities and challenges. In this paper, we discuss key technologies in achieving global semantic interoperability among heterogeneous information systems, including both traditional and web data sources. In particular, we focus on…

Data quality issues have taken on increasing importance in recent years. In our research, we have discovered that many “data quality” problems are actually “data misinterpretation” problems – that is, problems with data semantics. In this paper, we first illustrate…