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…

We develop a theory to explain the transition from stagnation to modern growth. We focus on the forces that shaped the evolution of total factor productivity in agriculture and manufacturing across history. More specifically, we build a multisector model of…

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 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…

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…

Current methods for bipedal walking control include playback of recorded joint motion and the derivation of dynamic equations to map desired forces at the body to the required torques at the joints. Both methods require a significant amount of up-front…

In a defeasible argumentation formalism, an argument is used as a defeasible reason for supporting conclusions. A conclusion q will be considered valid only when the argument that supports it become a justification. Building a justification involves the construction of…