We report on a study of how people look for information within email, files, and the Web. When locating a document or searching for a specific answer, people relied on their contextual knowledge of their information target to help them…

In this paper we explore the degree to which patents are representative of the magnitude,
direction, and impact of the knowledge spilling out of the university by focusing on MIT, and in particular on the departments of Mechanical and Electrical…

Current approaches to generation for machine translation make use of direct-replacement templates, large grammars, and knowledge-based inferencing techniques. Not only are rules language-specific, but they are too simplistic to handle sentences that exhibit more complex phenomena. Furthermore, these systems are…

This paper describes the connection memory, a machine for concurrently manipulating knowledge stored in semantic networks. We need the connection memory because conventional serial computers cannot move through such networks fast enough. The connection memory sidesteps the problem by providing…

This paper describes some problems and opportunities associated with conceptual modeling for the kind of "open systems" we foresee must and will be increasingly recognized as a central line of computer system development. Computer applications will be based on communication…

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…

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…

This paper presents an intelligent, hybrid system for stamping process planning in progressive die design. The system combines the flexibility of blackboard architecture with case-based reasoning. The hybrid system has the advantage that it can use past knowledge and experience…

In a Communication Bootstrapping system, peer components with different perceptual worlds invent symbols and syntax based on correlations between their percepts. I propose that Communication Bootstrapping can also be used to acquire functional definitions of words and causal reasoning knowledge.…

A speech controlled animation system is both a useful application program as well as a laboratory in which to investigate context aware applications as well as controlling errors. The user need not have prior knowledge or experience in animation and…