1995 Papers

A small group of hand gestures made during conversation (interactive gestures) seem to function solely to assist the process of dialogue rather than to convey topical information. The rate of interactive gestures was significantly higher when 27 dyads talked in dialogue than in sequential monologues, whereas the rate of other (topical) gestures did not change; this difference supports the theory that interactive gestures are uniquely affected by the requirements of dialogue. A second, microanalytic study... Read more

The concept of an agent has become important in both Artificial Intelligence (AI) and mainstream computer science. Our aim in this paper is to point the reader at what we perceive to be the most important theoretical and practical issues associated with the design and construction of intelligent agents. For convenience, we divide these issues into three areas (though as the reader will see, the divisions are at times somewhat arbitrary). Agent theory is concerned... Read more

If Heidegger and Wittgenstein are right, human beings are much more holistic than neural nets. Intelligence has to be motivated by purposes in the organism and other goals picked up by the organism from an on-going culture. If the minimum unit of analysis is that of a whole organism geared into a whole cultural world, neural nets as well as symbolically programmed computers, still have a very long way to go. Read more

Of all the legacies of the era of the sixties, three colorful, not to say garrulous, "personalities" that emerged from the early days of artificial intelligence research are worth mentioning: -ELIZA, the Rogerian psychotherapist; -PARRY, the paranoid; and (as part of a younger generation) -RACTER, the "artificially insane" raconteur. All three of these "characters" are natural language processing systems that can "converse" with human beings (or with one another) in English. That is, when presented with sentences in English... Read more