Austria has gone through two cycles of university reforms since the 1960s. The first aimed to open the universities to social and labour market demand and to make their structures more democratic and flexible. The second reform cycle dealt with…

Knowledge-intensive processes are widely used to recover from errors, handle exceptional cases and complaints, and to improve or adapt a process itself. In this context, evolved Business-Process Reengineering (BPR) techniques are changing to give some answers to this reality. In…

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…

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…

If we are to understand how we can build machines capable of broad purpose learning and reasoning, we must first aim to build systems that can represent, acquire, and reason about the kinds of commonsense knowledge that we humans have…

Omega is a description system for knowledge embedding which incorporates some of the attractive modes of expression in common sense reasoning such as descriptions, inheritance, quantification, negation, attributions and multiple viewpoints. A formalization of Omega is developed as a framework…

The object oriented programming style used in the Smalltalk and Actor languages is available in Lisp Machine Lisp, and used by the Lisp Machine software system. It is used to perform generic operations on objects. Part of its implementation is…

This paper describes a method for limiting vibration in flexible systems by shaping the system inputs. Unlike most previous attempts at input shaping, this method does not require an extensive system model or lengthy numerical computation; only knowledge of the…

Explanation-based learning occurs when something useful is retained from an explanation, usually an account of how some particular problem can be solved given a sound theory. Many real-world explanations are not based on sound theory, however, and wrong things may…

This memo reports the results of a case study into how children learn in the absence of explicit teaching. The three subjects, an eight year old, a ten year old and a thirteen year old were observed in both of…