This manual is intended to be a guide to the philosophy and use of the programming language CONNIVER, which is "complete," and running at the AI Lab now. It assumes good knowledge of LISP, but no knowledge of Micro-Planner, in…

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…

Complex goods and processes require ever more sophisticated and specialized knowledge; harnessing multiple kinds of expertise to execute tasks, solve problems, and develop strategies is increasingly critical to organizations' survival. When specialists come together, however, they often speak in different…

This paper presents a knowledge-based approach for capturing data and rationale, so
that the experience and insights gained while pursuing a major project or endeavor can
be utilized when pursuing future endeavors of a similar nature. The proposed

A real-time motion engine for interactive synthetic characters, either virtual or physical, needs to allow expressivity and interactivity of motion in order to maintain the illusion of life. Canned animation examples from an animator or motion capture device are expressive,…

In this paper, we study the asset pricing implication of imprecise knowledge about rare events. Modeling rare events as jumps in the aggregate endowment, we explicitly solve the equilibrium asset prices in a pure-exchange economy with a representative agent who…

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…

How does a person answer questions about children's stories? For example, consider 'Janet wanted Jack's paints. She looked at the picture he was painting and said 'Those paints make your picture look funny.' The question to ask is 'Why did…

The Artificial Intelligence Laboratory proposes to continue its work on a group of closely interconnected projects, all bearing on questions about how to make computers able to use more sophisticated kinds of knowledge to solve difficult problems. This proposal explains…

How can we construct a program that will understand stories that children would understand? By understand we mean the ability to answer questions about the story. We are interested here with understanding natural language in a very broad area. In…