We present a sound and complete, tractable inference method for reasoning with localized closed world assumptions (LCWA's) which can be used in applications where a reasoning or planning agent can not assume complete information about planning or reasoning states. This Open World Assumption is generally necessary in most realistic robotics applications. The inference procedure subsumes that des...

In this issue of the Journal, Etzioni et al. (1) suggest a novel approach to estimating overdiagnosis in breast cancer. However, there is a key assumption in their method regarding the nature of overdiagnosis that is unlikely to hold and leads to an underestimate of the overdiagnosis rate. To understand this assumption, we need to go back to basic definitions. Lead time is the time from detecti...

Aiming at addressing the ethical aspects concerning nurses' managerial activities, the authors of this work referred to Etzioni and adopted a hospital classification as a reference of organization in which consent is based on the internalization of rules accepted as legitimate. Regarding patients, their need to adapt to medical behavior and hospital rules through internalization is considered t...

The Internet and especially the World Wide Web are growing at a tremendous rate. More and more information is becoming directly available for human consumption. But humans have a limited information processing capacity and are often not able to find and process the relevant information. Automation, in the form of processing agents that provide a powerful extension to human capabilities, is requ...

The ‘‘first generation’’ (Lammers, 1978, p. 486) of comparative analysis of organizations in sociology (e.g., Blau, 1965; Stinchcombe, 1959) focused on the ‘‘nuts and bolts’’ of organizational structure as the key criterion with which to derive organizational typologies (Perrow, 1967; Pugh, Hickson, & Hinings, 1969). This initial cohort of analysts saw the intrinsic features – or ‘‘organization...

Many modern natural language-processing applications utilize search engines to locate large numbers of Web documents or to compute statistics over the Web corpus. Yet Web search engines are designed and optimized for simple human queries—they are not well suited to support such applications. As a result, these applications are forced to issue millions of successive queries resulting in unnecess...

We present a sound and complete, tractable inference method for reasoning with localized closed world assumptions (LCWA’s) which can be used in applications where a reasoning or planning agent can not assume complete information about planning or reasoning states. This Open World Assumption is generally necessary in most realistic robotics applications. The inference procedure subsumes that des...

Predictions for the future among intellectuals have swung in the recent past from an optimistic view of man's capabilities and a continuing abundance of material goods to a fatalistic pessimism regarding man's inability to respond adequately to current and imminent crises-the population explosion, limited food and resource supplies, and environmental pollution, to name a few. Among the various ...

We present a new partial order planner called PSIPOP, which builds on SNLP. We drop the closed world assumption, add sensing actions, add a class of propositions about the agent’s knowledge, and add a class of universally quantified propositions. This latter class of propositions, which we call C-forms, distinguishes this research. C-forms represent partially closed worlds, such as "Block A is ...

Rapid commercialization of the Internet and development of the National Information Infrastructure are likely to change the nature of retailing and commerce in profound ways. These changes pose both challenges and opportunites for AI, such as how to design intelligent assistants that help humans cope with the increasing complexities of electronic commerce. In this paper, we present the rst step...