Simplifying assumptions — everyone uses them but no one's programming tool explicitly supports them. In programming, as in other kinds of engineering design, simplifying assumptions are an important method for dealing with ...

This research will develop a methodology for designing user interfaces for general-purpose interactive systems. The central concept is the presentation, a structured pictorial or text object conveying information about ...

Our common sense views of physics are the first coin in our intellectual capital; understanding precisely what they contain could be very important both for understanding ourselves and for making machines more like us. ...

The image display tool GROK provides a facility for displaying images on the black-and-white screen of a Symbolics 3600 monitor. It allows display of images and their manipulation through a special window it manages. Images ...

This paper is a manual for an implementation of Logo graphics primitives in Lisp on the MIT Lisp Machine. The graphics system provides: Simple line drawing and erasing using "turtle geometry" Flexible relative and absolute ...

This paper describes a system which automatically generates program documentation. Starting with a plan generated by analyzing the program, the system computes several kinds of summary information about the program. The ...

In this paper we survey the current state of the art on fundamental aspects of concurrent systems. We discuss the notion of concurrency and discuss a model of computation which unifies the lambda calculus model and the ...

On June 9-11, 22 people gathered at Endicott House for the first workshop on the newly emerging topic of Distributed AI. They came with a wide range of views on the topic, and indeed a wide range of views of what precisely ...

This paper proposes an interactive debugging aid that exhibits a deep understanding of a narrow class of bugs. This system, called Sniffer, will be able to find and identify errors, and explain them in terms which are ...

Two well known programming methodologies for artificial intelligence research are compared, the so-called pattern-directed invocation languages and the object-oriented languages. The features and limitations of both ...

This paper builds on a technical report written by Carl Hewitt and Henry Baker called "Actors and Continuous Functionals". What is called a "goal-oriented activity" in that paper will be referred to in this paper as a ...

Knowledge-based applications will require vastly increased computational resources to achieve their goals. We are working on the development of a VLSI Message Passing Architecture to meet this need. As a first step we ...

An explanatory component is an important ingredient in any complex AI system. A simple generative scheme to build descriptive phrases from Lisp function calls can produce respectable explanations if explanation generators ...

This paper addresses theoretical issues involved for the implementation of security and modularity in concurrent systems. It explicates the theory behind a mechanism for safely delegating messages to shared handlers in ...

Contemporary concurrent programming languages fall roughly into two classes. Languages in the first class support the notion of a sequence of values and some kind of pipelining operation over the sequence of values. Languages ...

This paper introduces a frame-based description language and studies methods for reasoning about problems using knowledge expressed in the language. The system is based on the metaphor of a society of communicating experts ...

This paper gives some examples of the conceptual grammar approach to the representation of linguistic knowledge. First we give a short overview of the language we use to represent knowledge. Then we discuss an example ...

This paper contains an informal and sketchy overview of a new way of thinking about linguistics and linguistic processing known as conceptual grammar. Some ideas are presented on what kind of knowledge is involved in a ...