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…

This paper presents a novel algorithm for learning in a class of stochastic Markov decision processes (MDPs) with continuous state and action spaces that trades speed for accuracy. A transform of the stochastic MDP into a deterministic one is presented…

Sketches are commonly used in the early stages of design. Our previous system allows users to sketch mechanical systems that the computer interprets. However, some parts of the mechanical system might be too hard or too complicated to express in…

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…