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…

If we are to understand how we can build machines capable of broad purpose learning and reasoning, we must first aim to build systems that can represent, acquire, and reason about the kinds of commonsense knowledge that we humans have…

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…

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…

The FAA is developing the Local Area Augmentation System (LAAS) to replace ground-based navigation aids as the primary means of aircraft precision approaches. Stringent requirements on the integrity of the system have caused significant delays and raised questions about the…

Build is a tool for keeping modular systems in a consistent state by managing the construction tasks (e.g. compilation, linking, etc.) associated with such systems. It employs a user supplied system model and a procedural description of a task to…

The goal of the work reported here is to capture the commonsense knowledge of non-expert human contributors. Achieving this goal will enable more intelligent human-computer interfaces and pave the way for computers to reason about our world. In the domain…

This thesis examines the evolution of Internet based knowledge networks (e-knowledge networks) in the domain of sustainable development. The objective of this thesis is to use an engineering systems approach to understand knowledge networks, identify the barriers to their sustainability…

A system for visual recognition is described, with implications for the general problem of representation of knowledge to assist control. The immediate objective is a computer system that will recognize objects in a visual scene, specifically hammers. The computer receives…

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…