Communications of the ACM

Paradigm-shifting landmark buildings are cherished by their occupants and remembered because they reshape our expectations of schools, homes, or offices. Classic examples include Thomas Jefferson's communal design of the “academical village” at the ...

Welcome to the first installment of Digital Village. This new column will be a reliable source of information on modern digital network technologies, particularly from the client side, and the use of those technologies for the betterment of society. In ...

AI as a field has undergone rapid growth in diversification and practicality. For the past 10 years, the repertoire of AI techniques has evolved and expanded. Scores of newer fields have recently been added to the traditional domains of practical AI. ...

Since 1984, a person-century of effort has gone into building CYC, a universal schema of roughly 10⁵ general concepts spanning human reality. Most of the time has been spent codifying knowledge about these concepts; approximately 10⁶ commonsense axioms ...

Because meaningful sentences are composed of meaningful words, any system that hopes to process natural languages as people do must have information about words and their meanings. This information is traditionally provided through dictionaries, and ...

Natural language processing will grow into a vital industrial technology in the next five to 10 years. But this growth depends on the development of large linguistic databases that capture natural language phenomena [1, 2]. Another important theme for ...

I applaud Miller's WordNet project and feel that there is much in common in our approaches, even though there are fundamental differences in the two expressions of that spirit. Here, I list the four differences I noted, closing with a crucial ...

Most work done in distributed artificial intelligence (DAI) had targeted sensory networks, including air traffic control, urban traffic control, and robotic systems. The main reason is that these applications necessitate distributed interpretation and ...

Machine learning is the study of computational methods for improving performance by mechanizing the acquisition of knowledge from experience. Expert performance requires much domain-specific knowledge, and knowledge engineering has produced hundreds of ...

Techniques of machine learning have been successfully applied to various problems [1, 12]. Most of these applications rely on attribute-based learning, exemplified by the induction of decision trees as in the program C4.5 [20]. Broadly speaking, ...

Vast quantities of text are becoming available in electronic form, ranging from published documents (e.g., electronic dictionaries, encyclopedias, libraries and archives for information retrieval services), to private databases (e.g., marketing ...

Computer journals and magazines are currently filled with stories about object technology, just as they were filled with stories about artificial intelligence (AI) and expert systems in the early 1980s. The naive reader might think that expert systems ...

Rough set theory, introduced by Zdzislaw Pawlak in the early 1980s [11, 12], is a new mathematical tool to deal with vagueness and uncertainty. This approach seems to be of fundamental importance to artificial intelligence (AI) and cognitive sciences, ...

There lies a behavior between rigid regularity and randomness based on pure chance. It's called a chaotic system, or chaos for short [5]. Chaos is all around us. Our notions of physical motion or dynamic systems have encompassed the precise clock-like ...

Since deterministic chaos is not only a profound concept in science but also a ubiquitous phenomenon in real-world nonlinear systems, extending to a variety of temporal and spatial scales, it can be naturally related to applications in science and ...

The relatively new field of artificial life attempts to study and understand biological life by synthesizing artificial life forms. To paraphrase Chris Langton, the founder of the field, the goal of artificial life is to “model life as it could be so as ...

The Australian public seems to have a characteristic response to computer crime. It is worth giving some anecdotal evidence to support this statement. During fieldwork [1-5], respondents were quizzed regarding their reasoning for their responses to the ...

When computers are used to control potentially dangerous devices, new issues and concerns are raised for software engineering. Simply focusing on building software that matches its specifications is not enough. Accidents occur even when the individual ...