The central thesis of this report is that human language is NP-complete. That is, the process of comprehending and producing utterances is bounded above by the class NP, and below by NP-hardness. This constructive complexity thesis has two empirical consequences.…

Dynamic systems which undergo rapid motion can excite natural frequencies that lead to residual vibration at the end of motion. This work presents a method to shape force profiles that reduce excitation energy at the natural frequencies in order to…

In recent years, researchers in artificial intelligence have become interested in replicating human physical reasoning talents in computers. One of the most important skills in this area is predicting how physical systems will behave. This thesis discusses an implemented program…

This paper describes a system for the computer understanding of English. The system answers questions, executes commands, and accepts information in normal English dialog. It uses semantic information and context to understand discourse and to disambiguate sentences. It combines a…

All intelligence relies on search --- for example, the search for an intelligent agent's next action. Search is only likely to succeed in resource-bounded agents if they have already been biased towards finding the right answer. In artificial agents, the…

Se despliega una mirada sobre el saber y la práctica médica desde finales del siglo XX abordando su discurso desde la ética principialista basada en la autonomía de las personas, en el principio de no maleficencia, de beneficencia y de…

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…

This report develops a conceptual framework in which to talk about mathematical knowledge. There are several broad categories of mathematical knowledge: results which contain the traditional logical aspects of mathematics; examples which contain illustrative material; and concepts which include formal…

This report shows how knowledge about the visual world can be built into a shape representation in the form of a descriptive vocabulary making explicit the important geometrical relationships comprising objects' shapes. Two computational tools are offered: (1) Shapestokens are…

This report investigates some techinques appropriate to representing the knowledge necessary for understanding a class of electronic machines -- radio receivers. A computational performance model - WATSON - is presented. WATSONs task is to isolate failures in radio receivers whose…