Latest additions to Unnamed http://cisnet.mit.edu/ Latest additions to Unnamed Tue, 10 Apr 2012 03:12:58 EDT Tizra Publisher <![CDATA[Interfaces on Trial 2.0]]> http://cisnet.mit.edu/Interfaces-on-Trial-2/ We live in an interoperable world. Computer hardware and software products from different manufacturers can exchange data within local networks and around the world using the Internet. The competition enabled by this compatibility between devices has led to fast-paced innovation and prices low enough to allow ordinary users to command extraordinary computing capacity.

In Interfaces on Trial 2.0, Jonathan Band and Masanobu Katoh investigate an often overlooked factor in the development of today’s interoperabilty: the evolution of copyright law. Because software is copyrightable, copyright law determines the rules for competition in the information technology industry. This book—a follow-up to Band and Katoh’s successful 1995 book Interfaces on Trial—examines the debates surrounding the use of copyright law to prevent competition and interoperability in the global software industry in the last fifteen years.

Band and Katoh are longtime advocates for interoperable devices but present a reasoned view of contentious issues related to interoperability issues in the United States, the European Union, and the Pacific Rim. They discuss such topics as the protectability of interface specifications, the permissibility of reverse engineering (and legislative and executive endorsement of pro-interoperability case law), the interoperability exception to the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act and the interoperability cases decided under it, the enforceability of contractural restrictions on reverse engineering; and recent legal developments affecting the future of interoperability, including those related to open source-software and software patents.

]]> Tue, 10 Apr 2012 00:00:00 EDT http://cisnet.mit.edu/Interfaces-on-Trial-2/ <![CDATA[Everyday Information]]> http://cisnet.mit.edu/Everyday-Information/ All day, every day, Americans seek information. We research major purchases. We check news and sports. We visit government Web sites for public information and turn to friends for advice about our everyday lives. Although the Internet influences our information-seeking behavior, we gather information from many sources: family and friends, television and radio, books and magazines, experts and community leaders. Patterns of information seeking have evolved throughout American history and are shaped by a number of forces, including war, modern media, the state of the economy, and government regulation. This book examines the evolution of information seeking in nine areas of everyday American life.

Chapters offer an information perspective on car buying, from the days of the Model T to the present; philanthropic and charitable activities; airline travel and the complex layers of information available to passengers; genealogy, from the family Bible to Ancestry.com; sports statistics, as well as fantasy sports leagues and their fans’ obsession with them; the multimedia universe of gourmet cooking; governmental and publicly available information; reading, sharing, and creating comics; and text messaging among young people as a way to exchange information and manage relationships. Taken together, these case studies provide a fascinating window on the importance of information in the past century of American life.

]]> Tue, 10 Apr 2012 00:00:00 EDT http://cisnet.mit.edu/Everyday-Information/ <![CDATA[Social Modeling for Requirements Engineering]]> http://cisnet.mit.edu/Social-Modeling-for-Requirements-Engineering/ Much of the difficulty in creating information technology systems that truly meet people's needs lies in the problem of pinning down system requirements. This book offers a new approach to the requirements challenge, based on modeling and analyzing the relationships among stakeholders. Although the importance of the system-environment relationship has long been recognized in the requirements engineering field, most requirements modeling techniques express the relationship in mechanistic and behavioral terms. This book describes a modeling approach (called the i* framework) that conceives of software-based information systems as being situated in environments in which social actors relate to each other in terms of goals to be achieved, tasks to be performed, and resources to be furnished.

Social perspectives on computing have provided much insight for many years. The i* framework aims to offer a modeling approach to the relationships embedded in computer systems that is part of an engineering method that offers systematic techniques and tools providing smooth linkages to the rest of the system development process, including system design and implementation. The book includes Eric Yu's original proposal for the i* framework as well as research that applies, adapts, extends, or evaluates the social modeling concepts and approach.

]]> Tue, 03 Jan 2012 00:00:00 EST http://cisnet.mit.edu/Social-Modeling-for-Requirements-Engineering/ <![CDATA[America Identified]]> http://cisnet.mit.edu/America-Identified/ The use of biometric technology for identification has gone from Orwellian fantasy to everyday reality. This technology, which verifies or recognizes a person's identity based on physiological, anatomical, or behavioral patterns (including fingerprints, retina, handwriting, and keystrokes) has been deployed for such purposes as combating welfare fraud, screening airplane passengers, and identifying terrorists. The accompanying controversy has pitted those who praise the technology's accuracy and efficiency against advocates for privacy and civil liberties. In America Identified, Lisa Nelson investigates the complex public responses to biometric technology. She uses societal perceptions of this particular identification technology to explore the values, beliefs, and ideologies that influence public acceptance of technology.

Drawing on her own extensive research with focus groups and a national survey, Nelson finds that considerations of privacy, anonymity, trust and confidence in institutions, and the legitimacy of paternalistic government interventions are extremely important to users and potential users of the technology. She examines the long history of government systems of identification and the controversies they have inspired; the effect of the information technology revolution and the events of September 11, 2001; the normative value of privacy (as opposed to its merely legal definition); the place of surveillance technologies in a civil society; trust in government and distrust in the expanded role of government; and the balance between the need for government to act to prevent harm and the possible threat to liberty in government's actions.

]]> Tue, 03 Jan 2012 00:00:00 EST http://cisnet.mit.edu/America-Identified/ <![CDATA[Wirelessness]]> http://cisnet.mit.edu/Wirelessness/ How has wirelessness—being connected to objects and infrastructures without knowing exactly how or where—become a key form of contemporary experience? Stretching across routers, smart phones, netbooks, cities, towers, Guangzhou workshops, service agreements, toys, and states, wireless technologies have brought with them sensations of change, proximity, movement, and divergence. In Wirelessness, Adrian Mackenzie draws on philosophical techniques from a century ago to make sense of this most contemporary postnetwork condition. The radical empiricism associated with the pragmatist philosopher William James, Mackenzie argues, offers fresh ways for matching the disordered flow of wireless networks, meshes, patches, and connections with felt sensations.

For Mackenzie, entanglements with things, gadgets, infrastructures, and services—tendencies, fleeting nuances, and peripheral shades of often barely registered feeling that cannot be easily codified, symbolized, or quantified—mark the experience of wirelessness, and this links directly to James's expanded conception of experience. "Wirelessness" designates a tendency to make network connections in different times and places using these devices and services. Equally, it embodies a sensibility attuned to the proliferation of devices and services that carry information through radio signals. Above all, it means heightened awareness of ongoing change and movement associated with networks, infrastructures, location, and information.

The experience of wirelessness spans several strands of media-technological change, and Mackenzie moves from wireless cities through signals, devices, networks, maps, and products, to the global belief in the expansion of wireless worlds.

]]> Tue, 03 Jan 2012 00:00:00 EST http://cisnet.mit.edu/Wirelessness/ <![CDATA[Korea's Online Gaming Empire]]> http://cisnet.mit.edu/Koreas-Online-Gaming-Empire/ In South Korea, online gaming is a cultural phenomenon. Games are broadcast on television, professional gamers are celebrities, and youth culture is often identified with online gaming. Uniquely in the online games market, Korea not only dominates the local market but has also made its mark globally. In Korea's Online Gaming Empire, Dal Yong Jin examines the rapid growth of this industry from a political economy perspective, discussing it in social, cultural, and economic terms.

Korea has the largest percentage of broadband subscribers of any country in the world, and Koreans spend increasing amounts of time and money on Internet-based games. Online gaming has become a mode of socializing—a channel for human relationships. The Korean online game industry has been a pioneer in software development and eSports (electronic sports and leagues). Jin discusses the policies of the Korean government that encouraged the development of online gaming both as a cutting-edge business and as a cultural touchstone; the impact of economic globalization; the relationship between online games and Korean society; and the future of the industry. He examines the rise of Korean online games in the global marketplace, the emergence of eSport as a youth culture phenomenon, the working conditions of professional gamers, the role of game fans as consumers, how Korea's local online game industry has become global, and whether these emerging firms have challenged the West's dominance in global markets.

]]> Tue, 03 Jan 2012 00:00:00 EST http://cisnet.mit.edu/Koreas-Online-Gaming-Empire/ <![CDATA[Artificial Intelligence and Learning Environments]]> http://cisnet.mit.edu/Artificial-Intelligence-Learning-Environments/ New perspectives and techniques are shaping the field of computer-aided instruction. These essays explore cognitively oriented empirical trials that use AI programming as a modeling methodology and that can provide valuable insight into a variety of learning problems. Drawing on work in cognitive theory, plan-based program recognition, qualitative reasoning, and cognitive models of learning and teaching, this exciting research covers a wide range of alternatives to tutoring dialogues.

William J. Clancey is Senior Research Scientist at the Institute for Research on Learning, Palo Alto. Elliot Soloway is Associate Professor at the University of Michigan.

Contents: Artificial Intelligence and Learning Environments, William J. Clancey, Elliot Soloway. Cognitive Modeling and Intelligence Tutoring, John R. Anderson, C. Franklin Boyle, Albert T. Corbett, Matthew W. Lewis. Understanding and Debugging Novice Programs, W. Lewis Johnson. Causal Model Progressions as a Foundation for Intelligent Learning Environments, Barbara Y. White and John R. Frederiksen.

]]> Tue, 03 Jan 2012 00:00:00 EST http://cisnet.mit.edu/Artificial-Intelligence-Learning-Environments/ <![CDATA[Good Faith Collaboration]]> http://cisnet.mit.edu/Good-Faith-Collaboration/ Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, is built by a community—a community of Wikipedians who are expected to "assume good faith" when interacting with one another. In Good Faith Collaboration, Joseph Reagle examines this unique collaborative culture.

Wikipedia, says Reagle, is not the first effort to create a freely shared, universal encyclopedia; its early twentieth-century ancestors include Paul Otlet's Universal Repository and H. G. Wells's proposal for a World Brain. Both these projects, like Wikipedia, were fuelled by new technology—which at the time included index cards and microfilm. What distinguishes Wikipedia from these and other more recent ventures is Wikipedia's good-faith collaborative culture, as seen not only in the writing and editing of articles but also in their discussion pages and edit histories. Keeping an open perspective on both knowledge claims and other contributors, Reagle argues, creates an extraordinary collaborative potential.

Wikipedia is famously an encyclopedia "anyone can edit," and Reagle examines Wikipedia's openness and several challenges to it: technical features that limit vandalism to articles; private actions to mitigate potential legal problems; and Wikipedia's own internal bureaucratization. He explores Wikipedia's process of consensus (reviewing a dispute over naming articles on television shows) and examines the way leadership and authority work in an open-content community.

Wikipedia's style of collaborative production has been imitated, analyzed, and satirized. Despite the social unease over its implications for individual autonomy, institutional authority, and the character (and quality) of cultural products, Wikipedia's good-faith collaborative culture has brought us closer than ever to a realization of the century-old pursuit of a universal encyclopedia.

]]> Thu, 03 Nov 2011 00:00:00 EDT http://cisnet.mit.edu/Good-Faith-Collaboration/ <![CDATA[The Comingled Code]]> http://cisnet.mit.edu/Comingled-Code/ Discussions of the economic impact of open source software often generate more heat than light. Advocates passionately assert the benefits of open source while critics decry its effects. Missing from the debate is rigorous economic analysis and systematic economic evidence of the impact of open source on consumers, firms, and economic development in general. This book fills that gap. In The Comingled Code, Josh Lerner and Mark Schankerman, drawing on a new, large-scale database, show that open source and proprietary software interact in sometimes unexpected ways, and discuss the policy implications of these findings.

The new data (from a range of countries in varying stages of development) documents the mixing of open source and proprietary software: firms sell proprietary software while contributing to open source, and users extensively mix and match the two. Lerner and Schankerman examine the ways in which software differs from other technologies in promoting economic development, what motivates individuals and firms to contribute to open source projects, how developers and users view the trade-offs between the two kinds of software, and how government policies can ensure that open source competes effectively with proprietary software and contributes to economic development.

]]> Thu, 03 Nov 2011 00:00:00 EDT http://cisnet.mit.edu/Comingled-Code/ <![CDATA[Networks and States]]> http://cisnet.mit.edu/Networks-and-States/ When the prevailing system of governing divides the planet into mutually exclusive territorial monopolies of force, what institutions can govern the Internet, with its transnational scope, boundless scale, and distributed control? Given filtering-censorship by states and concerns over national cyber-security, it is often assumed that the Internet will inevitably be subordinated to the traditional system of nation-states. In Networks and States, Milton Mueller counters this, showing how Internet governance poses novel and fascinating governance issues that give rise to a global politics and new transnational institutions. Drawing on theories of networked governance, Mueller provides a broad overview of Internet governance from the formation of ICANN to the clash at the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), the formation of the Internet Governance Forum, the global assault on peer-to-peer file sharing and the rise of national-level Internet control and security concerns.

Mueller identifies four areas of conflict and coordination that are generating a global politics of Internet governance: intellectual property, cyber-security, content regulation, and the control of critical Internet resources (domain names and IP addresses). He investigates how recent theories about networked governance and peer production can be applied to the Internet, offers case studies that illustrate the Internet's unique governance problems, and charts the historical evolution of global Internet governance institutions, including the formation of a transnational policy network around the WSIS.

Internet governance has become a source of conflict in international relations. Networks and States explores the important role that emerging transnational institutions could play in fostering global governance of communication-information policy.

]]> Thu, 03 Nov 2011 00:00:00 EDT http://cisnet.mit.edu/Networks-and-States/ <![CDATA[Makers of the Microchip]]> http://cisnet.mit.edu/Makers-of-the-Microchip/ In the first three and a half years of its existence, Fairchild Semiconductor developed, produced, and marketed the device that would become the fundamental building block of the digital world: the microchip. Founded in 1957 by eight former employees of the Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory, Fairchild created the model for a successful Silicon Valley start-up: intense activity with a common goal, close collaboration, and a quick path to the market (Fairchild's first device hit the market just ten months after the company's founding). Fairchild Semiconductor was one of the first companies financed by venture capital, and its success inspired the establishment of venture capital firms in the San Francisco Bay area. These firms would finance the explosive growth of Silicon Valley over the next several decades.

This history of the early years of Fairchild Semiconductor examines the technological, business, and social dynamics behind its innovative products. The centerpiece of the book is a collection of documents, reproduced in facsimile, including the company's first prospectus; ideas, sketches, and plans for the company's products; and a notebook kept by cofounder Jay Last that records problems, schedules, and tasks discussed at weekly meetings. A historical overview, interpretive essays, and an introduction to semiconductor technology in the period accompany these primary documents.

]]> Thu, 03 Nov 2011 00:00:00 EDT http://cisnet.mit.edu/Makers-of-the-Microchip/ <![CDATA[Health Informatics]]> http://cisnet.mit.edu/Health-Informatics/ The healthcare industry has been slow to join the information technology revolution; handwritten records are still the primary means of organizing patient care. Concerns about patient privacy, the difficulty of developing appropriate computing tools and information technology, high costs, and the resistance of some physicians and nurses have hampered the use of technology in health care. In 2009, the U.S. government committed billions of dollars to health care technology. Many questions remain, however, about how to deploy these resources. In Health Informatics, experts in technology, joined by clinicians, use diabetes—a costly, complex, and widespread disease that involves nearly every facet of the health care system—to examine the challenges of using the tools of information technology to improve patient care.

Unlike other books on medical informatics that discuss such topics as computerized order entry and digital medical records, Health Informatics focuses on the patient, charting the information problems patients encounter in different stages of the disease. Chapters discuss ubiquitous computing as a tool to move diabetes care out of the doctor's office, technology and chronic disease management, educational gaming as a way to help patients understand their disease, patient access to information, and methodological and theoretical concerns.

We need both technologists and providers at the drawing board in order to design and deploy effective digital tools for health care. This book examines and exemplifies this necessary collaboration.

]]> Tue, 01 Nov 2011 00:00:00 EDT http://cisnet.mit.edu/Health-Informatics/ <![CDATA[Texture]]> http://cisnet.mit.edu/Texture/ Our workdays are so filled with emails, instant messaging, and RSS feeds that we complain that there’s not enough time to get our actual work done. At home, we are besieged by telephone calls on landlines and cell phones, the beeps that signal text messages, and work emails on our BlackBerrys. It’s too much, we cry (or type) as we update our Facebook pages, compose a blog post, or check to see what Shaquille O’Neal has to say on Twitter. In Texture, Richard Harper asks why we seek out new ways of communicating even as we complain about communication overload.

Harper explores the interplay between technological innovation and socially creative ways of exploiting technology, between our delight in using new forms of communication and our vexation at the burdens this places on us, and connects these to what it means to be human—alive, connected, expressive—today. He describes the mistaken assumptions of developers that “more” is always better—that videophones, for example, are better than handhelds—and argues that users prefer simpler technologies that allow them to create social bonds. Communication is not just the exchange of information. There is a texture to our communicative practices, manifest in the different means we choose to communicate (quick or slow, permanent or ephemeral). The goal, Harper says, should not be to make communication more efficient, but to supplement and enrich the expressive vocabulary of human experience.

]]> Tue, 01 Nov 2011 00:00:00 EDT http://cisnet.mit.edu/Texture/ <![CDATA[Constraint-Based Reasoning]]> http://cisnet.mit.edu/Constraint-Based-Reasoning/ Constraint-based reasoning is an important area of automated reasoning in artificial intelligence, with many applications. These include configuration and design problems, planning and scheduling, temporal and spatial reasoning, defeasible and causal reasoning, machine vision and language understanding, qualitative and diagnostic reasoning, and expert systems. Constraint-Based Reasoning presents current work in the field at several levels: theory, algorithms, languages, applications, and hardware.

Constraint-based reasoning has connections to a wide variety of fields, including formal logic, graph theory, relational databases, combinatorial algorithms, operations research, neural networks, truth maintenance, and logic programming. The ideal of describing a problem domain in natural, declarative terms and then letting general deductive mechanisms synthesize individual solutions has to some extent been realized, and even embodied, in programming languages.
 

A Bradford Book

]]> Tue, 01 Nov 2011 00:00:00 EDT http://cisnet.mit.edu/Constraint-Based-Reasoning/ <![CDATA[Instruction and Technology]]> http://cisnet.mit.edu/Instruction-and-Technology/ The perpetual connectivity made possible by twenty-first-century technology has profoundly affected instruction and learning. Emerging technologies that upend traditional notions of communication and community also influence the ways we design and evaluate instruction and how we understand learning and learning environments. In Instruction and Technology, Brad Mehlenbacher offers a detailed, multidisciplinary analysis of the dynamic relationship between technology and learning. Mehlenbacher describes how today’s ubiquitous technology conflates our once separated learning worlds—work, leisure, and higher-educational spaces. He reviews the ongoing cross-disciplinary conversation about learning with technology and distance education and examines a dozen models of instruction and learning with technology drawn from peer-reviewed research. Taking an integrative perspective toward design, Mehlenbacher offers a framework for everyday instructional situations, describing five interdependent dimensions: learner background and knowledge, learner tasks and activities, social dynamics, instructor activities, and learning environment and artifacts.

The technologies that distribute today's classroom across time and space call for a new discussion about what we value in the traditional classroom. Rather than simply offering recipes for creating online instruction, with Instruction and Technology Brad Mehlenbacher lays the groundwork for the long-term multidisciplinary investigation that will be required as researchers and practitioners shape and extend the boundaries of this emerging field.

]]> Thu, 18 Aug 2011 00:00:00 EDT http://cisnet.mit.edu/Instruction-and-Technology/ <![CDATA[The Atlas of New Librarianship]]> http://cisnet.mit.edu/Atlas-of-New-Librarianship/ Libraries have existed for millennia, but today the library field is searching for solid footing in an increasingly fragmented (and increasingly digital) information environment. What is librarianship when it is unmoored from cataloging, books, buildings, and committees? In The Atlas of New Librarianship, R. David Lankes offers a guide to this new landscape for practitioners. He describes a new librarianship based not on books and artifacts but on knowledge and learning; and he suggests a new mission for librarians: to improve society through facilitating knowledge creation in their communities.

The vision for a new librarianship must go beyond finding library-related uses for information technology and the Internet; it must provide a durable foundation for the field. Lankes recasts librarianship and library practice using the fundamental concept that knowledge is created though conversation. New librarians approach their work as facilitators of conversation; they seek to enrich, capture, store, and disseminate the conversations of their communities.

To help librarians navigate this new terrain, Lankes offers a map, a visual representation of the field that can guide explorations of it; more than 140 Agreements, statements about librarianship that range from relevant theories to examples of practice; and Threads, arrangements of Agreements to explain key ideas, covering such topics as conceptual foundations and skills and values. Agreement Supplements at the end of the book offer expanded discussions. Although it touches on theory as well as practice, the Atlas is meant to be a tool: textbook, conversation guide, platform for social networking, and call to action.

Copublished with the Association of College & Research Libraries

The companion website to the Atlas, which includes the complete map, may be found here.

]]> Fri, 29 Jul 2011 00:00:00 EDT http://cisnet.mit.edu/Atlas-of-New-Librarianship/ <![CDATA[The Configuration Space Method for Kinematic Design of Mechanisms]]> http://cisnet.mit.edu/Configuration-Space-Method-for-Kinematic-Design-of-Mechanisms/ This book presents the configuration space method for computer-aided design of mechanisms with changing part contacts. Configuration space is a complete and compact geometric representation of part motions and part interactions that supports the core mechanism design tasks of analysis, synthesis, and tolerancing. It is the first general algorithmic treatment of the kinematics of higher pairs with changing contacts. It will help designers detect and correct design flaws and unexpected kinematic behaviors, as demonstrated in the book's four case studies taken from industry.

After presenting the configuration space framework and algorithms for mechanism kinematics, the authors describe algorithms for kinematic analysis, tolerancing, and synthesis based on configuration spaces. The case studies follow, illustrating the application of the configuration space method to the analysis and design of automotive, micro-mechanical, and optical mechanisms. Appendixes offer a catalog of higher-pair mechanisms and a description of HIPAIR, an open source C++ mechanical design system that implements some of the configuration space methods described in the book, including configuration space visualization and kinematic simulation. HIPAIR comes with an interactive graphical user interface and many sample mechanism input files.

The Configuration Space Method for Kinematic Design of Mechanisms will be a valuable resource for students, researchers, and engineers in mechanical engineering, computer science, and robotics.

]]> Fri, 15 Jul 2011 00:00:00 EDT http://cisnet.mit.edu/Configuration-Space-Method-for-Kinematic-Design-of-Mechanisms/ <![CDATA[Internet Architecture and Innovation]]> http://cisnet.mit.edu/Internet-Architecture-and-Innovation/ The Internet's remarkable growth has been fueled by innovation. New applications continually enable new ways of using the Internet, and new physical networking technologies increase the range of networks over which the Internet can run. Questions about the relationship between innovation and the Internet's architecture have shaped the debates over open access to broadband networks, network neutrality, nondiscriminatory network management, and future Internet architecture. In Internet Architecture and Innovation, Barbara van Schewick explores the economic consequences of Internet architecture, offering a detailed analysis of how it affects the economic environment for innovation.

Van Schewick describes the design principles on which the Internet's original architecture was based—modularity, layering, and the end-to-end arguments—and shows how they shaped the original architecture. She analyzes in detail how the original architecture affected innovation—in particular, the development of new applications—and how changing the architecture would affect this kind of innovation.

Van Schewick concludes that the original architecture of the Internet fostered application innovation. Current changes that deviate from the Internet's original design principles reduce the amount and quality of application innovation, limit users' ability to use the Internet as they see fit, and threaten the Internet's ability to realize its economic, social, cultural, and political potential. If left to themselves, network providers will continue to change the internal structure of the Internet in ways that are good for them but not necessarily for the rest of us. Government intervention may be needed to save the social benefits associated with the Internet's original design principles.

]]> Fri, 15 Jul 2011 00:00:00 EDT http://cisnet.mit.edu/Internet-Architecture-and-Innovation/ <![CDATA[Logic Programming: The 12th International Conference]]> http://cisnet.mit.edu/Logic-Programming-12th-International-Conference/ 13-16 June 1995, Tokyo, Japan

ICLP, which is sponsored by the Association for Logic Programming, is one of two major annual international conferences reporting recent research results in logic programming. Logic programming originates from the discovery that a subset of predicate logic could be given a procedural interpretation which was first embodied in the programming language, Prolog. The unique features of logic programming make it appealing for numerous applications in artificial intelligence, computer-aided design and verification, databases, and operations research, and for exploring parallel and concurrent computing. The last two decades have witnessed substantial developments in this field from its foundation to implementation, applications, and the exploration of new language designs.

Topics covered: Theoretical Foundations. Higher-Order Logics. Non-Monotonic Reasoning. Programming Methodology. Programming Environments. Extensions to Logic Programming. Constraint Satisfaction. Meta-Programming. Language Design and Constructs. Implementation of Logic Programming Languages. Compilation Techniques. Architectures. Parallelism. Reasoning about Programs. Deductive Databases. Applications.

Logic Programming series, Research Reports and Notes

]]> Sun, 23 Jan 2011 00:00:00 EST http://cisnet.mit.edu/Logic-Programming-12th-International-Conference/ <![CDATA[Scholarship in the Digital Age]]> http://cisnet.mit.edu/Scholarship-in-Digital-Age/ Scholars in all fields now have access to an unprecedented wealth of online information, tools, and services. The Internet lies at the core of an information infrastructure for distributed, data-intensive, and collaborative research. Although much attention has been paid to the new technologies making this possible, from digitized books to sensor networks, it is the underlying social and policy changes that will have the most lasting effect on the scholarly enterprise. In Scholarship in the Digital Age, Christine Borgman explores the technical, social, legal, and economic aspects of the kind of infrastructure that we should be building for scholarly research in the twenty-first century.

Borgman describes the roles that information technology plays at every stage in the life cycle of a research project and contrasts these new capabilities with the relatively stable system of scholarly communication, which remains based on publishing in journals, books, and conference proceedings. No framework for the impending "data deluge" exists comparable to that for publishing. Analyzing scholarly practices in the sciences, social sciences, and humanities, Borgman compares each discipline's approach to infrastructure issues. In the process, she challenges the many stakeholders in the scholarly infrastructure—scholars, publishers, libraries, funding agencies, and others—to look beyond their own domains to address the interaction of technical, legal, economic, social, political, and disciplinary concerns. Scholarship in the Digital Age will provoke a stimulating conversation among all who depend on a rich and robust scholarly environment.

]]> Sat, 22 Jan 2011 00:00:00 EST http://cisnet.mit.edu/Scholarship-in-Digital-Age/ <![CDATA[Human Rights in the Global Information Society]]> http://cisnet.mit.edu/Human-Rights-in-Global-Information-Society/ International organizations, governments, academia, industry, and the media have all begun to grapple with the information society as a global policy issue. The first United Nations World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), held in December 2003, recognized the connections between information technology and human rights with a Declaration of Principles—in effect, the first "constitution" for cyberspace—that called for the development of the information society to conform to recognized standards of human rights. Critical issues in the policy debates around WSIS have been the so-called digital divide, which reflects a knowledge divide, a social divide, and an economic divide; and the need for a nondiscriminatory information society to provide universal access to information technology in local languages throughout the developing world. Other crucial issues include the regulatory frameworks for information access and ownership and such basic freedoms as the right to privacy. The contributors to this timely volume examine the links between information technology and human rights from a range of disciplinary perspectives. Scholars, human rights activists, and practitioners discuss such topics as freedom of expression, access to information, privacy, discrimination, gender equality, intellectual property, political participation, and freedom of assembly in the context of the revolution in information and communication technology, exploring the ways in which the information society can either advance human rights around the world or threaten them. An afterword reports on the November 2005 WSIS, held in Tunis, and its reaffirmation of the fundamental role of human rights in the global information society.

Contributors:
David Banisar, William Drake, Ran Greenstein, Anriette Esterhuysen, Robin Gross, Gus Hosein, Heike Jensen, Rikke Frank Jørgensen, Hans Klein, Charley Lewis, Meryem Marzouki, Birgitte Kofod Olsen, Kay Raseroka, Adama Samassékou, Mandana Zarrehparvar

]]> Sat, 22 Jan 2011 00:00:00 EST http://cisnet.mit.edu/Human-Rights-in-Global-Information-Society/ <![CDATA[The Human Semantic Potential]]> http://cisnet.mit.edu/Human-Semantic-Potential/ Drawing on ideas from cognitive linguistics, connectionism, and perception, The Human Semantic Potential describes a connectionist model that learns perceptually grounded semantics for natural language in spatial terms. Languages differ in the ways in which they structure space, and Regier's aim is to have the model perform its learning task for terms from any natural language. The system has so far succeeded in learning spatial terms from English, German, Russian, Japanese, and Mixtec.

The model views simple movies of two-dimensional objects moving relative to one another and learns to classify them linguistically in accordance with the spatial system of some natural language. The overall goal is to determine which sorts of spatial configurations and events are learnable as the semantics for spatial terms and which are not. Ultimately, the model and its theoretical underpinnings are a step in the direction of articulating biologically based constraints on the nature of human semantic systems.

Along the way Regier takes up such substantial issues as the attraction and the liabilities of PDP and structured connectionist modeling, the problem of learning without direct negative evidence, and the area of linguistic universals, which is addressed in the model itself. Trained on spatial terms from different languages, the model permits observations about the possible bases of linguistic universals and interlanguage variation.

Neural Network Modeling and Connectionism series

]]> Sat, 22 Jan 2011 00:00:00 EST http://cisnet.mit.edu/Human-Semantic-Potential/ <![CDATA[Imitation in Animals and Artifacts]]> http://cisnet.mit.edu/Imitation-in-Animals-and-Artifacts/ The effort to explain the imitative abilities of humans and other animals draws on fields as diverse as animal behavior, artificial intelligence, computer science, comparative psychology, neuroscience, primatology, and linguistics. This volume represents a first step toward integrating research from those studying imitation in humans and other animals, and those studying imitation through the construction of computer software and robots.

Imitation is of particular importance in enabling robotic or software agents to share skills without the intervention of a programmer and in the more general context of interaction and collaboration between software agents and humans. Imitation provides a way for the agent—whether biological or artificial—to establish a "social relationship" and learn about the demonstrator's actions, in order to include them in its own behavioral repertoire. Building robots and software agents that can imitate other artificial or human agents in an appropriate way involves complex problems of perception, experience, context, and action, solved in nature in various ways by animals that imitate.

Complex Adaptive Systems

A Bradford Book

]]> Sat, 22 Jan 2011 00:00:00 EST http://cisnet.mit.edu/Imitation-in-Animals-and-Artifacts/ <![CDATA[Imitation of Life]]> http://cisnet.mit.edu/Imitation-of-Life/ As computers and the tasks they perform become increasingly complex, researchers are looking to nature—as model and as metaphor—for inspiration. The organization and behavior of biological organisms present scientists with an invitation to reinvent computing for the complex tasks of the future. In Imitation of Life, Nancy Forbes surveys the emerging field of biologically inspired computing, looking at some of the most impressive and influential examples of this fertile synergy.

Forbes points out that the influence of biology on computing goes back to the early days of computer science—John von Neumann, the architect of the first digital computer, used the human brain as the model for his design. Inspired by von Neumann and other early visionaries, as well as by her work on the "Ultrascale Computing" project at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Forbes describes the exciting potential of these revolutionary new technologies. She identifies three strains of biologically inspired computing: the use of biology as a metaphor or inspiration for the development of algorithms; the construction of information processing systems that use biological materials or are modeled on biological processes, or both; and the effort to understand how biological organisms "compute," or process information.

Forbes then shows us how current researchers are using these approaches. In successive chapters, she looks at artificial neural networks; evolutionary and genetic algorithms, which search for the "fittest" among a generation of solutions; cellular automata; artificial life—not just a simulation, but "alive" in the internal ecosystem of the computer; DNA computation, which uses the encoding capability of DNA to devise algorithms; self-assembly and its potential use in nanotechnology; amorphous computing, modeled on the kind of cooperation seen in a colony of cells or a swarm of bees; computer immune systems; bio-hardware and how bioelectronics compares to silicon; and the "computational" properties of cells.

]]> Sat, 22 Jan 2011 00:00:00 EST http://cisnet.mit.edu/Imitation-of-Life/ <![CDATA[Independent Component Analysis]]> http://cisnet.mit.edu/Independent-Component-Analysis/ Independent component analysis (ICA) is becoming an increasingly important tool for analyzing large data sets. In essence, ICA separates an observed set of signal mixtures into a set of statistically independent component signals, or source signals. In so doing, this powerful method can extract the relatively small amount of useful information typically found in large data sets. The applications for ICA range from speech processing, brain imaging, and electrical brain signals to telecommunications and stock predictions.

In Independent Component Analysis, Jim Stone presents the essentials of ICA and related techniques (projection pursuit and complexity pursuit) in a tutorial style, using intuitive examples described in simple geometric terms. The treatment fills the need for a basic primer on ICA that can be used by readers of varying levels of mathematical sophistication, including engineers, cognitive scientists, and neuroscientists who need to know the essentials of this evolving method.

An overview establishes the strategy implicit in ICA in terms of its essentially physical underpinnings and describes how ICA is based on the key observations that different physical processes generate outputs that are statistically independent of each other. The book then describes what Stone calls "the mathematical nuts and bolts" of how ICA works. Presenting only essential mathematical proofs, Stone guides the reader through an exploration of the fundamental characteristics of ICA.

Topics covered include the geometry of mixing and unmixing; methods for blind source separation; and applications of ICA, including voice mixtures, EEG, fMRI, and fetal heart monitoring. The appendixes provide a vector matrix tutorial, plus basic demonstration computer code that allows the reader to see how each mathematical method described in the text translates into working Matlab computer code.

]]> Sat, 22 Jan 2011 00:00:00 EST http://cisnet.mit.edu/Independent-Component-Analysis/ <![CDATA[Analog VLSI]]> http://cisnet.mit.edu/Analog-VLSI/ Neuromorphic engineers work to improve the performance of artificial systems through the development of chips and systems that process information collectively using primarily analog circuits. This book presents the central concepts required for the creative and successful design of analog VLSI circuits. The discussion is weighted toward novel circuits that emulate natural signal processing. Unlike most circuits in commercial or industrial applications, these circuits operate mainly in the subthreshold or weak inversion region. Moreover, their functionality is not limited to linear operations, but also encompasses many interesting nonlinear operations similar to those occurring in natural systems. Topics include device physics, linear and nonlinear circuit forms, translinear circuits, photodetectors, floating-gate devices, noise analysis, and process technology.

]]> Sat, 22 Jan 2011 00:00:00 EST http://cisnet.mit.edu/Analog-VLSI/ <![CDATA[In-Depth Understanding]]> http://cisnet.mit.edu/In-Depth-Understanding/ This book describes a theory of memory representation, organization, and processing for understanding complex narrative texts. The theory is implemented as a computer program called BORIS which reads and answers questions about divorce, legal disputes, personal favors, and the like. The system is unique in attempting to understand stories involving emotions and in being able to deduce adages and morals, in addition to answering fact and event based questions about the narratives it has read. BORIS also manages the interaction of many different knowledge sources such as goals, plans, scripts, physical objects, settings, interpersonal relationships, social roles, emotional reactions, and empathetic responses.

The book makes several original technical contributions as well. In particular, it develops a class of knowledge constructs called Thematic Abstraction Units (TAUs) which share similarities with other representational systems such as Schank's Thematic Organization Packets and Lehnert's Plot Units. TAUs allow BORIS to represent situations which are more abstract than those captured by scripts, plans, and goals. They contain processing knowledge useful in dealing with the kinds of planning and expectation failures that characters often experience in narratives; and, they often serve as episodic memory structures, organizing events which involve similar kinds of planning failures and divergent domains.

An appendix contains a detailed description of a demon-based parser, a kernel of the BORIS system, as well as the actual LISP code of a microversion of this parser and a number of exercises for expanding it into a full-fledged story-understander.

Artificial Intelligence Series

]]> Sat, 22 Jan 2011 00:00:00 EST http://cisnet.mit.edu/In-Depth-Understanding/ <![CDATA[Information, Mechanism, and Meaning]]> http://cisnet.mit.edu/Information-Mechanism-and-Meaning/ A collection of selected papers written by the information theorist and "brain physicist," most of which were presented to various scientific conferences in the 1950s and 1960s. Most of this collection concerns MacKay's abiding preoccupation with information as represented and utilized in the brain and exchanged between human beings, rather than as formalized in logical patterns of elementary propositions.

]]> Sat, 22 Jan 2011 00:00:00 EST http://cisnet.mit.edu/Information-Mechanism-and-Meaning/ <![CDATA[Building IBM]]> http://cisnet.mit.edu/Building-IBM/ No company of the twentieth century achieved greater success and engendered more admiration, respect, envy, fear, and hatred than IBM. Building IBM tells the story of that company—how it was formed, how it grew, and how it shaped and dominated the information processing industry. Emerson Pugh presents substantial new material about the company in the period before 1945 as well as a new interpretation of the postwar era.

Granted unrestricted access to IBM's archival records and with no constraints on the way he chose to treat the information they contained, Pugh dispels many widely held myths about IBM and its leaders and provides new insights on the origins and development of the computer industry.

Pugh begins the story with Herman Hollerith's invention of punched-card machines used for tabulating the U.S. Census of 1890, showing how Hollerith's inventions and the business he established provided the primary basis for IBM. He tells why Hollerith merged his company in 1911 with two other companies to create the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company, which changed its name in 1924 to International Business Machines. Thomas J. Watson, who was hired in 1914 to manage the merged companies, exhibited remarkable technological insight and leadership—in addition to his widely heralded salesmanship—to build Hollerith's business into a virtual monopoly of the rapidly growing punched-card equipment business.

The fascinating inside story of the transfer of authority from the senior Watson to his older son, Thomas J. Watson Jr., and the company's rapid domination of the computer industry occupy the latter half of the book. In two final chapters, Pugh examines conditions and events of the 1970s and 1980s and identifies the underlying causes of the severe probems IBM experienced in the 1990s.

]]> Sat, 22 Jan 2011 00:00:00 EST http://cisnet.mit.edu/Building-IBM/ <![CDATA[Information Politics on the Web]]> http://cisnet.mit.edu/Information-Politics-on-Web/ Winner of the 2005 Best Information Science Book of the Year Award presented by the American society for Information Science and Technology (ASIST).

Does the information on the Web offer many alternative accounts of reality, or does it subtly align with an official version? In Information Politics on the Web, Richard Rogers identifies the cultures, techniques, and devices that rank and recommend information on the Web, analyzing not only the political content of Web sites but the politics built into the Web's infrastructure. Addressing the larger question of what the Web is for, Rogers argues that the Web is still the best arena for unsettling the official and challenging the familiar.

Rogers describes the politics at work on the Web as either back-end—the politics of search engine technology—or front-end—the diversity, inclusivity, and relative prominence of sites publicly accessible on the Web. To analyze this, he developed four "political instruments," or software tools that gather information about the Web by capturing dynamic linking practices, attention cycles for issues, and changing political party commitments. On the basis of his findings on how information politics works, Rogers argues that the Web should be, and can be, a "collision space" for official and unofficial accounts of reality. (One chapter, "The Viagra Files" offers an entertaining analysis of official and unofficial claims for the health benefits of Viagra.) The distinctiveness of the Web as a medium lies partly in the peculiar practices that grant different statuses to information sources. The tools developed by Rogers capture these practices and contribute to the development of a new information politics that takes into account and draws from the competition between the official, the non-governmental, and the underground.

]]> Sat, 22 Jan 2011 00:00:00 EST http://cisnet.mit.edu/Information-Politics-on-Web/ <![CDATA[The Sciences of the Artificial, 3rd Edition]]> http://cisnet.mit.edu/Sciences-of-Artificial-3rd-Edition/ Continuing his exploration of the organization of complexity and the science of design, this new edition of Herbert Simon's classic work on artificial intelligence adds a chapter that sorts out the current themes and tools—chaos, adaptive systems, genetic algorithms—for analyzing complexity and complex systems.

There are updates throughout the book as well. These take into account important advances in cognitive psychology and the science of design while confirming and extending the book's basic thesis: that a physical symbol system has the necessary and sufficient means for intelligent action. The chapter "Economic Reality" has also been revised to reflect a change in emphasis in Simon's thinking about the respective roles of organizations and markets in economic systems.

]]> Sat, 22 Jan 2011 00:00:00 EST http://cisnet.mit.edu/Sciences-of-Artificial-3rd-Edition/ <![CDATA[Information Technology and People]]> http://cisnet.mit.edu/Information-Technology-and-People/ Today's rapid growth in information technology has occurred without a full understanding of the human consequences of its use—on individuals, on organizations, and on society as a whole. As a result, initial expectations have frequently not been met, and a backlash has developed. Clearly a more realistic approach to information technology is needed, and applied psychology can offer great help in this effort.

This book takes a problem-centered approach to questions of usability, applicability, and acceptability, giving an overview of current research on information technology at work, at home, in education, and in medicine, and where possible, making recommendations for the future. Chapters cover psychology and information technology; management, workers, and the new technologies; factory automation; ergonomics and the new technologies; office systems; expert systems in the health field; health care; the disabled; computers in education; attitudes toward the new technologies; information technology and home-based services; and information technology in the home.

Distributed for The British Psychological Society.

]]> Sat, 22 Jan 2011 00:00:00 EST http://cisnet.mit.edu/Information-Technology-and-People/ <![CDATA[Foundations of Robotics]]> http://cisnet.mit.edu/Foundations-of-Robotics/ Foundations of Robotics presents the fundamental concepts and methodologies for the analysis, design, and control of robot manipulators. It explains the physical meaning of the concepts and equations used, and it provides, in an intuitively clear way, the necessary background in kinetics, linear algebra, and control theory. Illustrative examples appear throughout.

The author begins by discussing typical robot manipulator mechanisms and their controllers. He then devotes three chapters to the analysis of robot manipulator mechanisms. He covers the kinematics of robot manipulators, describing the motion of manipulator links and objects related to manipulation. A chapter on dynamics includes the derivation of the dynamic equations of motion, their use for control and simulation and the identification of inertial parameters. The final chapter develops the concept of manipulability.

The second half focuses on the control of robot manipulators. Various position-control algorithms that guide the manipulator's end effector along a desired trajectory are described Two typical methods used to control the contact force between the end effector and its environments are detailed For manipulators with redundant degrees of freedom, a technique to develop control algorithms for active utilization of the redundancy is described. Appendixes give compact reviews of the function atan2, pseudo inverses, singular-value decomposition, and Lyapunov stability theory.

]]> Sat, 22 Jan 2011 00:00:00 EST http://cisnet.mit.edu/Foundations-of-Robotics/ <![CDATA[Trust and Risk in Internet Commerce]]> http://cisnet.mit.edu/Trust-and-Risk-in-Internet-Commerce/ As Internet-based commerce becomes commonplace, it is important that we examine the systems used for these financial transactions. Underlying each system is a set of assumptions, particularly about trust and risk. To evaluate systems, and thus to determine one's own risks, requires an understanding of the dimensions of trust: security, privacy, and reliability.

In this book Jean Camp focuses on two major yet frequently overlooked issues in the design of Internet commerce systems—trust and risk. Trust and risk are closely linked. The level of risk can be determined by looking at who trusts whom in Internet commerce transactions. Who will pay, in terms of money and data, if trust is misplaced? When the inevitable early failures occur, who will be at risk? Who is "liable" when there is a trusted third party? Why is it necessary to trust this party? What exactly is this party trusted to do? To answer such questions requires an understanding of security, record-keeping, privacy, and reliability.

The author's goal is twofold: first, to provide information on trust and risk to businesses that are developing electronic commerce systems; and second, to help consumers understand the risks in using the Internet for purchases and show them how to protect themselves. Rather than propose a single model of an Internet commerce system, the author provides the information and insights needed by merchants and consumers as they develop the Internet for commerce.

]]> Sat, 22 Jan 2011 00:00:00 EST http://cisnet.mit.edu/Trust-and-Risk-in-Internet-Commerce/ <![CDATA[The Inner History of Devices]]> http://cisnet.mit.edu/Inner-History-of-Devices/ For more than two decades, in such landmark studies as The Second Self and Life on the Screen, Sherry Turkle has challenged our collective imagination with her insights about how technology enters our private worlds. In The Inner History of Devices, she describes her process, an approach that reveals how what we make is woven into our ways of seeing ourselves. She brings together three traditions of listening—that of the memoirist, the clinician, and the ethnographer. Each informs the others to compose an inner history of devices. We read about objects ranging from cell phones and video poker to prosthetic eyes, from Web sites and television to dialysis machines.

In an introductory essay, Turkle makes the case for an "intimate ethnography" that challenges conventional wisdom. One personal computer owner tells Turkle: "This computer means everything to me. It's where I put my hope." Turkle explains that she began that conversation thinking she would learn how people put computers to work. By its end, her question has changed: "What was there about personal computers that offered such deep connection? What did a computer have that offered hope?" The Inner History of Devices teaches us to listen for the answer.

In the memoirs, ethnographies, and clinical cases collected in this volume, we read about an American student who comes to terms with her conflicting identities as she contemplates a cell phone she used in Japan ("Tokyo sat trapped inside it"); a troubled patient who uses email both to criticize her therapist and to be reassured by her; a compulsive gambler who does not want to win steadily at video poker because a pattern of losing and winning keeps her more connected to the body of the machine. In these writings, we hear untold stories. We learn that received wisdom never goes far enough.

]]> Sat, 22 Jan 2011 00:00:00 EST http://cisnet.mit.edu/Inner-History-of-Devices/ <![CDATA[Scientific Collaboration on the Internet]]> http://cisnet.mit.edu/Scientific-Collaboration-on-Internet/ foreword by William Wulf

Modern science is increasingly collaborative, as signaled by rising numbers of coauthored papers, papers with international coauthors, and multi-investigator grants. Historically, scientific collaborations were carried out by scientists in the same physical location—the Manhattan Project of the 1940s, for example, involved thousands of scientists gathered on a remote plateau in Los Alamos, New Mexico. Today, information and communication technologies allow cooperation among scientists from far-flung institutions and different disciplines. Scientific Collaboration on the Internet provides both broad and in-depth views of how new technology is enabling novel kinds of science and engineering collaboration. The book offers commentary from notable experts in the field along with case studies of large-scale collaborative projects, past and ongoing.

The projects described range from the development of a national virtual observatory for astronomical research to a National Institutes of Health funding program for major multilaboratory medical research; from the deployment of a cyberinfrastructure to connect experts in earthquake engineering to partnerships between developed and developing countries in AIDS research. The chapter authors speak frankly about the problems these projects encountered as well as the successes they achieved. The book strikes a useful balance between presenting the real stories of collaborations and developing a scientific approach to conceiving, designing, implementing, and evaluating such projects. It points to a future of scientific collaborations that build successfully on aspects from multiple disciplines.

Contributors: Mark S. Ackerman, Paul Avery, Matthew Bietz, Jeremy P. Birnholtz, Nathan Bos, Geoffrey C. Bowker, Randal Butler, David Conz, Eric Cook, Daniel Cooney, Jonathon N. Cummings, Erik Dahl, Mark Ellisman, Ixchel Faniel, Thomas A. Finholt, Ian Foster, Jeffrey S. Grethe, Edward J. Hackett, Robert J. Hanisch, Libby Hemphill, Tony Hey, Erik C. Hofer, Mark James, Carl Kesselman, Sara Kiesler, Timothy L. Killeen, Airong Luo, Kelly L. Maglaughlin, Doru Marcusiu, Shawn McKee, William K. Michener, James D. Myers, Marsha Naidoo, Michael Nentwich, Gary M. Olson, Judith S. Olson, James Onken, Andrew Parker, John N. Parker, Mary Puetz, David Ribes, Kathleen Ricker, Diana Rhoten, Michael E. Rogers, Titus Schleyer, Diane H. Sonnenwald, B. F. Spencer, Jr., Stephanie D. Teasley, Anne Trefethen, Robert B. Waide, Mary C. Whitton, William Wulf, Jason Yerkie, Jude Yew, Ann Zimmerman.

Acting with Technology series

]]> Sat, 22 Jan 2011 00:00:00 EST http://cisnet.mit.edu/Scientific-Collaboration-on-Internet/ <![CDATA[The Second Self]]> http://cisnet.mit.edu/Second-Self/ In The Second Self, Sherry Turkle looks at the computer not as a "tool," but as part of our social and psychological lives; she looks beyond how we use computer games and spreadsheets to explore how the computer affects our awareness of ourselves, of one another, and of our relationship with the world. "Technology," she writes, "catalyzes changes not only in what we do but in how we think." First published in 1984, The Second Self is still essential reading as a primer in the psychology of computation. This twentieth anniversary edition allows us to reconsider two decades of computer culture—to (re)experience what was and is most novel in our new media culture and to view our own contemporary relationship with technology with fresh eyes. Turkle frames this classic work with a new introduction, a new epilogue, and extensive notes added to the original text.

Turkle talks to children, college students, engineers, AI scientists, hackers, and personal computer owners—people confronting machines that seem to think and at the same time suggest a new way for us to think—about human thought, emotion, memory, and understanding. Her interviews reveal that we experience computers as being on the border between inanimate and animate, as both an extension of the self and part of the external world. Their special place betwixt and between traditional categories is part of what makes them compelling and evocative. (In the introduction to this edition, Turkle quotes a PDA user as saying, "When my Palm crashed, it was like a death. I thought I had lost my mind.") Why we think of the workings of a machine in psychological terms—how this happens, and what it means for all of us—is the ever more timely subject of The Second Self.

]]> Sat, 22 Jan 2011 00:00:00 EST http://cisnet.mit.edu/Second-Self/ <![CDATA[Intentions in Communication]]> http://cisnet.mit.edu/Intentions-in-Communication/ Intentions in Communication brings together major theorists from artificial intelligence and computer science, linguistics, philosophy, and psychology whose work develops the foundations for an account of the role of intentions in a comprehensive theory of communication. It demonstrates, for the first time, the emerging cooperation among disciplines concerned with the fundamental role of intention in communication.

The fourteen contributions in this book address central questions about the nature of intention as it is understood in theories of communication, the crucial role of intention recognition in understanding utterances, the use of principles of rational interaction in interpreting speech acts, the contribution of intonation contours to intention recognition, and the need for more general models of intention that support a view of dialogue as a collaborative activity.

Contributors:
Michael E. Bratman, Philip R. Cohen, Hector J. Levesque, Martha E. Pollack, Henry Kautz, Andrew J. I. Jones, C. Raymond Perrault, Daniel Vanderveken, Janet Pierrehumbert, Julia Hirschberg, Richmond H. Thomason, Diane J Litman, James F. Allen, John R. Searle, Barbara J. Grosz, Candace L. Sidner, Herbert H. Clark and Deanna Wilkes-Gibbs. The book also includes commentaries by James F. Allen, W. A Woods, Jerry Morgan, Jerrold M. Sadock Jerry R. Hobbs, Kent Bach.

Intentions in Communication is included in the System Development Foundation Benchmark Series.

]]> Sat, 22 Jan 2011 00:00:00 EST http://cisnet.mit.edu/Intentions-in-Communication/ <![CDATA[Robotics]]> http://cisnet.mit.edu/Robotics-Science-and-Systems-IV/ Robotics: Science and Systems IV spans a wide spectrum of robotics, bringing together researchers working on the foundations of robotics, robotics applications, and the analysis of robotics systems. This volume presents the proceedings of the fourth annual Robotics: Science and Systems conference, held in 2008 at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. The papers presented cover a range of topics, including computer vision, mapping, terrain identification, distributed systems, localization, manipulation, collision avoidance, multibody dynamics, obstacle detection, microrobotic systems, pursuit-evasion, grasping and manipulation, tracking, spatial kinematics, machine learning, and sensor networks as well as such applications as autonomous driving and the design of manipulators for use in functional-MRI. The conference and its proceedings reflect not only the tremendous growth of robotics as a discipline but also the desire in the robotics community for a flagship event at which the best of the research in the field can be presented.

]]> Sat, 22 Jan 2011 00:00:00 EST http://cisnet.mit.edu/Robotics-Science-and-Systems-IV/ <![CDATA[Chess Metaphors]]> http://cisnet.mit.edu/Chess-Metaphors/ When we play the ancient and noble game of chess, we grapple with ideas about honesty, deceitfulness, bravery, fear, aggression, beauty, and creativity, which echo (or allow us to depart from) the attitudes we take in our daily lives. Chess is an activity in which we deploy almost all our available cognitive resources; therefore, it makes an ideal laboratory for investigation into the workings of the mind. Indeed, research into artificial intelligence (AI) has used chess as a model for intelligent behavior since the 1950s. In Chess Metaphors, Diego Rasskin-Gutman explores fundamental questions about memory, thought, emotion, consciousness, and other cognitive processes through the game of chess, using the moves of thirty-two pieces over sixty-four squares to map the structural and functional organization of the brain.

Rasskin-Gutman focuses on the cognitive task of problem solving, exploring it from the perspectives of both biology and AI. He examines concept after concept, move after move, delving into the varied mental mechanisms and the cognitive processes underlying the actions of playing chess. Bringing the game of chess into a larger framework, he analyzes its collateral influences that spread along the frontiers of games, art, and science. Finally, he investigates AI's effort to program a computer that could beat a flesh-and-blood grandmaster (and win a world chess championship) and how the results fall short when compared to the truly creative nature of the human mind.

]]> Sat, 22 Jan 2011 00:00:00 EST http://cisnet.mit.edu/Chess-Metaphors/ <![CDATA[Human Information Retrieval]]> http://cisnet.mit.edu/Human-Information-Retrieval/ Information retrieval in the age of Internet search engines has become part of ordinary discourse and everyday practice: "Google" is a verb in common usage. Thus far, more attention has been given to practical understanding of information retrieval than to a full theoretical account. In Human Information Retrieval, Julian Warner offers a transformative overview of information retrieval, synthesizing theories from different disciplines (information and computer science, librarianship and indexing, and information society discourse) and incorporating such disparate systems as WorldCat and Google into a single, robust theoretical framework. There is a need for such a theoretical treatment, he argues, one that reveals the structure and underlying patterns of this complex field while remaining congruent with everyday practice.

Warner presents a labor theoretic approach to information retrieval, building on his previously formulated distinction between semantic and syntactic mental labor, arguing that the description and search labor of information retrieval can be understood as both semantic and syntactic in character. Warner's information science approach is rooted in the humanities and the social sciences but informed by an understanding of information technology and information theory. The chapters offer a progressive exposition of the topic, with illustrative examples to explain the concepts presented. Neither narrowly practical nor largely speculative, Human Information Retrieval meets the contemporary need for a broader treatment of information and information systems.

History and Foundations of Information Science series

]]> Sat, 22 Jan 2011 00:00:00 EST http://cisnet.mit.edu/Human-Information-Retrieval/ <![CDATA[The Art of Agent-Oriented Modeling]]> http://cisnet.mit.edu/Art-of-Agent-Oriented-Modeling/ Today, when computing is pervasive and deployed over a range of devices by a multiplicity of users, we need to develop computer software to interact with both the ever-increasing complexity of the technical world and the growing fluidity of social organizations. The Art of Agent-Oriented Modeling presents a new conceptual model for developing software systems that are open, intelligent, and adaptive. It describes an approach for modeling complex systems that consist of people, devices, and software agents in a changing environment (sometimes known as distributed sociotechnical systems). The authors take an agent-oriented view, as opposed to the more common object-oriented approach. Thinking in terms of agents (which they define as the human and man-made components of a system), they argue, can change the way people think of software and the tasks it can perform.

The book offers an integrated and coherent set of concepts and models, presenting the models at three levels of abstraction corresponding to a motivation layer (where the purpose, goals, and requirements of the system are described), a design layer, and an implementation layer. It compares platforms by implementing the same models in four different languages; compares methodologies by using a common example; includes extensive case studies; and offers exercises suitable for either class use or independent study.

Intelligent Robotics and Autonomous Agents series

]]> Sat, 22 Jan 2011 00:00:00 EST http://cisnet.mit.edu/Art-of-Agent-Oriented-Modeling/ <![CDATA[Basic Category Theory for Computer Scientists]]> http://cisnet.mit.edu/Basic-Category-Theory-for-Computer-Scientists/ Category theory is a branch of pure mathematics that is becoming an increasingly important tool in theoretical computer science, especially in programming language semantics, domain theory, and concurrency, where it is already a standard language of discourse. Assuming a minimum of mathematical preparation, Basic Category Theory for Computer Scientists provides a straightforward presentation of the basic constructions and terminology of category theory, including limits, functors, natural transformations, adjoints, and cartesian closed categories. Four case studies illustrate applications of category theory to programming language design, semantics, and the solution of recursive domain equations. A brief literature survey offers suggestions for further study in more advanced texts.

Contents: Tutorial. Applications. Further Reading.

]]> Sat, 22 Jan 2011 00:00:00 EST http://cisnet.mit.edu/Basic-Category-Theory-for-Computer-Scientists/ <![CDATA[The Information Resources Policy Handbook]]> http://cisnet.mit.edu/Information-Resources-Policy-Handbook/ To understand the Information Age one must understand the concept of information as a resource. Like other basic resources such as energy and materials, information resources are building blocks of society. But unlike energy and materials, they are far more abundant and versatile. Information resources includes computers, telecommunications, the mass media, and financial services, all created or changed by the movement from analog to digital. This collection looks at the factors underlying digital technologies as well as the resulting public and strategic policy issues.

In a rapidly evolving discipline, certain judgments are likely to change. To strike a balance between the more abstract concepts of enduring value and writings focused on current examples, each part of the book opens with a timeless "evergreen" chapter, followed by one or more "contemporary" chapters.

Contributors: Daniel Bell, Anne Wells Branscomb, Benjamin M. Compaine, Derrick C. Huang, Martin C. Libicki, Patricia Hirl Longstaff, Robert Lucky, John F. McLaughlin, Lee McKnight, Vincent Mosco, W. Russell Neuman, Eli Noam, Anthony G. Oettinger, Ithiel deSola Pool, William H. Read, Jerome S. Rubin, Richard J. Solomon, Debra Spar, Ronald Alan Weiner, Janet Wikler.

]]> Sat, 22 Jan 2011 00:00:00 EST http://cisnet.mit.edu/Information-Resources-Policy-Handbook/ <![CDATA[Communication Complexity]]> http://cisnet.mit.edu/Communication-Complexity/ Communication Complexity describes a new intuitive model for studying circuit networks that captures the essence of circuit depth. Although the complexity of boolean functions has been studied for almost 4 decades, the main problems the inability to show a separation of any two classes, or to obtain nontrivial lower bounds remain unsolved. The communication complexity approach provides clues as to where to took for the heart of complexity and also sheds light on how to get around the difficulty of proving lower bounds.

Karchmer's approach looks at a computation device as one that separates the words of a language from the non-words. It views computation in a top down fashion, making explicit the idea that flow of information is a crucial term for understanding computation. Within this new setting, Communication Complexity gives simpler proofs to old results and demonstrates the usefulness of the approach by presenting a depth lower bound for st-connectivity. Karchmer concludes by proposing open problems which point toward proving a general depth lower bound.

ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award

]]> Fri, 10 Dec 2010 00:00:00 EST http://cisnet.mit.edu/Communication-Complexity/ <![CDATA[A Grammatical View of Logic Programming]]> http://cisnet.mit.edu/Grammatical-View-of-Logic-Programming/ Within the field of logic programming there have been numerous attempts to transform grammars into logic programs. This book describes a complementary approach that views logic programs as grammars and shows how this new presentation of the foundations of logic programming, based on the notion of proof trees, can enrich the field.

The authors' approach facilitates discussion of grammatical aspects of, and introduces new kinds of semantics for, definite programs. They survey relevant grammatical formalisms and provide a comprehensive introduction to the well-known attribute grammars and van Wijngaarden grammars. A formal comparison of definite programs to these grammars allows the authors to identify interesting grammatical concepts.

The book also includes a presentation of verification methods for definite programs derived from verification methods for attribute grammars, and an analysis of the occur-check problem as an example of how the grammatical view of logic programming can be applied.

Pierre Deransart is Research Director at INRIA-Rocquencourt, Le Chesnay Cedex, France. Jan Maluszynski is Professor in the Department of Computer and Information Science at Linköping University, Sweden.

Contents: Preliminaries. Foundations. Grammatical Extensions of Logic Programs. Attribute Grammars. Attribute Grammars and Logic Programming. Proof Methods. Study of Declarative Properties. The Occur-check Problem.

]]> Tue, 23 Nov 2010 00:00:00 EST http://cisnet.mit.edu/Grammatical-View-of-Logic-Programming/ <![CDATA[Logic Programming: The 10th International Conference]]> http://cisnet.mit.edu/Logic-Programming-10th-International-Conference/ The Tenth International Conference on Logic Programming, sponsored by the Association for Logic Programming, is a major forum for presentations of research, applications, and implementations in this important area of computer science. Logic programming is one of the most promising steps toward declarative programming and forms the theoretical basis of the programming language Prolog and it svarious extensions. Logic programming is also fundamental to work in artificial intelligence, where it has been used for nonmonotonic and commonsense reasoning, expert systems implementation, deductive databases, and applications such as computer-aided manufacturing.

Topics covered: Theory and Foundations. Programming Methodologies and Tools. Meta and Higher-order Programming. Parallelism. Concurrency. Deductive Databases. Implementations and Architectures. Applications. Artificial Intelligence. Constraints. Partial Deduction. Bottom-Up Evaluation. Compilation Techniques.

]]> Wed, 22 Sep 2010 00:00:00 EDT http://cisnet.mit.edu/Logic-Programming-10th-International-Conference/ <![CDATA[The Formal Semantics of Programming Languages]]> http://cisnet.mit.edu/Formal-Semantics-of-Programming-Languages/ The Formal Semantics of Programming Languages provides the basic mathematical techniques necessary for those who are beginning a study of the semantics and logics of programming languages. These techniques will allow students to invent, formalize, and justify rules with which to reason about a variety of programming languages. Although the treatment is elementary, several of the topics covered are drawn from recent research, including the vital area of concurency. The book contains many exercises ranging from simple to miniprojects.

Starting with basic set theory, structural operational semantics is introduced as a way to define the meaning of programming languages along with associated proof techniques. Denotational and axiomatic semantics are illustrated on a simple language of while-programs, and fall proofs are given of the equivalence of the operational and denotational semantics and soundness and relative completeness of the axiomatic semantics. A proof of Godel's incompleteness theorem, which emphasizes the impossibility of achieving a fully complete axiomatic semantics, is included. It is supported by an appendix providing an introduction to the theory of computability based on while-programs.

Following a presentation of domain theory, the semantics and methods of proof for several functional languages are treated. The simplest language is that of recursion equations with both call-by-value and call-by-name evaluation. This work is extended to lan guages with higher and recursive types, including a treatment of the eager and lazy lambda-calculi. Throughout, the relationship between denotational and operational semantics is stressed, and the proofs of the correspondence between the operation and denotational semantics are provided. The treatment of recursive types - one of the more advanced parts of the book - relies on the use of information systems to represent domains. The book concludes with a chapter on parallel programming languages, accompanied by a discussion of methods for specifying and verifying nondeterministic and parallel programs.

]]> Wed, 22 Sep 2010 00:00:00 EDT http://cisnet.mit.edu/Formal-Semantics-of-Programming-Languages/ <![CDATA[From animals to animats 8]]> http://cisnet.mit.edu/From-animals-to-animats-8/ The biannual International Conference on the Simulation of Adaptive Behavior brings together researchers from ethology, psychology, ecology, artificial intelligence, artificial life, robotics, engineering, and related fields to advance the understanding of behaviors and underlying mechanisms that allow natural and synthetic agents (animats) to adapt and survive in uncertain environments. The work presented focuses on well-defined models—robotic, computer simulation, and mathematical—that help to characterize and compare various organizational principles or architectures underlying adaptive behavior in both animals and animats. The proceedings of the eighth conference treat such topics as passive and active perception, navigation and mapping, collective and social behavior, and applied adaptive behavior.

]]> Wed, 22 Sep 2010 00:00:00 EDT http://cisnet.mit.edu/From-animals-to-animats-8/ <![CDATA[Portraits In Silicon]]> http://cisnet.mit.edu/Portraits-In-Silicon/ Who are the masterminds of today's electronic revolution and what motivated them? That's the question Time correspondent Robert Slater asked as he traveled to Silicon Valley to interview the designers, entrepreneurs, hardware engineers, and software writers who have given us the modern computer.

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