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12 Nov Context Powers Backward Chaining Logic

Forward Chaining Rules

A popular success strategies book suggests that if we “Begin with the End in Mind” we are likely to get where we’re going more consistently. We wander less if we think about what we want at the end from the very first steps of our journeys. Context helps us do that. Human behaviorists and philosophers have […]

18 Sep Context is King Indeed

Knowledge Coordination Layer

There are many important innovations adding context to business processes and data to make information access, collaboration and analysis more effective. I just read another great perspective on context in collaboration showing how taxonomies add value to teams of knowledge workers. Adding context is especially needed in moving toward the knowledge enterprise. I contend that […]

20 Aug Two Rights and a Village: Social Communication

Dialog Chalice

To Win a Point When we communicate, we often use persuasive language and/or logic to win a point. This happens all the time in political campaigns. As an example, the conservative presidential campaign recently took umbrage when the liberal incumbent stated that successful entrepreneurs need a community of people to succeed. The conservatives felt that […]

13 Aug MIPUS the Robot Assistant

MIPUS Graphical Study Aid I’d like to introduce you to a friend of mine: His name is MIPUS. The main intent of the Understanding Context blog is to investigate mechanical models of cognition. What do robots have to do with language understanding (my main focus), you may ask. As you can see in the illustration, […]

03 Aug Exformation vs. Subtext

gutenberg press

Many of us humans like to congregate and communicate. Much of our communication, including this blog, is intended to be shared widely and to persist beyond the moment, whether we are attempting to share the thought of the moment, or change the course of human history.  When we congregate, whether for a TED talk, a […]

01 Aug Section 6 Intro – Language and Dialog

Speak 2 U 3

Dialog: Is this something limited to humans – to sentient beings? Natural Language, its components, acquisition, and use are the subjects of this sixth section of the Understanding Context blog. Here, you will find theories about communication and cognition, along with descriptions of computational approaches to analyzing and automatically generating human language and dialog using computers. […]

14 Jul Understanding Subtext

If human interaction were simple and straightforward, computers would have been able to do a credible job of imitating it years ago. Examples of simple interaction machines, including the Rogerian Psycho-therapist named Eliza and the question answerer named Watson, show that computer algorithms can do pretty well at some interaction tasks. If all human interactions […]

12 Jul [Wysocki 1997]

11 Jul [Hilbert 2011]

30 Jun Gamification – The Future

Rewards

Ain’t no Passin’ Thing… Were you one of the brilliant prognosticators that said that the mouse (pointing device) was a fad and would never catch on, or that iPads wouldn’t catch on, or that the world would max out at, say, five computers? Some may scoff at the value of gamification of computer software – but they must […]