Committees of models are frequently employed to improve accuracy and decrease the variance of individual models. Each model has an equal right to vote (democratic procedure), despite obvious differences in model competence in different regions of the feature space. Adding competence factors to different models before calculation of the committee decision (undemocratic procedure) improves the qu...

The emergence of expert system methodology as the cutting edge of the application of artificial intelligence techniques has tended to refocus the issues of the nature of intelligence. Expert systems are clearly not intelligent in the meaning espoused by early workers in AI. Indeed, they are intended to be transparent in operation to the user. However, they are competent in their domain of appli...

Social work involves working with people in distress and difficulties, people who have perhaps been traumatised by abuse or other life experience, people who have encountered major loss, suffering and pain. In addition there can be immense feelings of alienation and disaffection rooted in social inequalities and the discrimination and oppression associated with them. It would therefore be extre...

Why use natural language (NL) to communicate with computer systems? I have always thought the answer was obvious. Since NL is the most natural communication language for people to use [1], it would make computer systems easiest to use if they understood and spoke NL. I often get resistance to this opinion, but the resistance almost always takes the form of comparing current GUIs to current NL i...

A competent system need not be perfect. It should not try to solve unsolvable problems. Rather it should simplify and decompose overcomplex problems, complement missing information, weight the quality of a solution against the cost of achieving it, approximate solutions if time is sparse, etc. To make a knowledge-based system more competent, we propose to enhance it by suitable competence speci...