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…

Computers have dramatically changed the nature of structural engineering practice by shifting work from process-oriented tasks, such as performing hand calculations and drafting, to structural modeling and interpretation of computer results. To perform these new functions, engineers need to have…

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…

When faced with challenging technical problems, R&D personnel would often turn to technical papers to seek inspiration for a solution. The building of a corpus of such papers and the easy retrieval of relevant papers by the user in his…

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…

his dissertation analyzes how local knowledge improves environmental decisions. The premise is that controlling pollution and addressing public health disparities are not problems that professionals alone can solve. Concerned lay publics, especially low-income populations and people of color that experience…

How can we insure that knowledge embedded in a program is applied effectively? Traditionally the answer to this question has been sought in different problem solving paradigms and in different approaches to encoding and indexing knowledge. Each of these is…

We develop a qualitative method for understanding and representing phase space structures of complex systems and demonstrate the method with a program, MAPS --- Modeler and Analyzer for Phase Spaces, using deep domain knowledge of dynamical system theory. Given a…

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…

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.…