In its present incarnation, OSCAR is a fully implemented programmable architecture for a rational agent. This architecture is described in detail in a forthcoming book entitled Cognitive Carpentry. It is an important characteristic of OSCAR that most practical reasoning is reduced to epistemic reasoning, through a process I call "doxastification’. In particular, most (but not quite all) of the ...

We suggest a working definition of texture: Texture is stuff that is more compactly represented by its statistics than by specifying the configuration of its parts. This definition suggests that to fmd texture we look for outliers to the local statistics, and label as texture the regions with no outliers. We present a method, based upon this idea, for labeling points in natural scenes as belong...

Two trends are evident in the recent evolution of the field of information extraction: a preference for simple, often corpus-driven techniques over linguistically sophisticated ones; and a broadening of the central problem definition to include many non-traditional text domains. This development calls for information extraction systems which are as retctrgetable and general as possible. Here, w...

Graphics processing units (GPUs) are powerful devices capable of rapid parallel computation, but using them for general computing tasks can be a difficult and tedious endeavor. We have created a graphical language called Chestnut that simplifies the process of programming on the GPU. The graphical environment is supported by a readable backend language that can be translated into GPU-ready code...

With the price of computer hardware decreasing steadily and the scope of data processing applications ever rising, the problem of upgrading a computer system is omnipresent. The myriad of potential pitfalls includes losing an investment in purchased hardware and software, reprogramming applications, reformatting data files, retraining personnel, operating two different systems in parallel durin...