MIT Media Lab Course Syllabus - MAS 761

Common Sense for Interactive Applications
Henry Lieberman

Fall semester 2008
(Syllabus subject to change)

9 September 2008: Introduction to Common Sense for Interactive Applications

Readings

H Lieberman, H Liu, P Singh, B Barry: 2004, Beating common sense into interactive applications, AI Magazine 25(4): 63-76. AAAI Press.

and also choose at least one (1) from below:

M Minsky: 2000, Commonsense-based interfaces, Communications of the ACM 43(8): 67-73. ACM Press.

P Singh, M. Minsky, I. Eslick, Computing Commonsense, BT Technical Journal, 2004.

 

Readings

H Lieberman, H Liu: 2002, Adaptive linking between text and photos using common sense reasoning, Conference on Adaptive Hypermedia and Adaptive Web Systems. LNCS 2347, Springer.

and also choose at least one (1) from below:

T Stocky, A Faaborg, H Lieberman: 2004, A commonsense approach to predictive text entry, Proceedings of Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI-04). ACM Press, pp. 1163-1166.

Dustin Smith, Henry Lieberman , Collecting and Using Knowledge About Goals for Personal Event Management,.submitted to the 2008 International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces.

Alexander Faaborg, Waseem Daher, Henry Lieberman and José Espinosa, How to Wreck a Nice Beach You Sing Calm Incense. . International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces, IUI 2005, January 9-12 2005, San Diego.

 

23 September: Commonsense Tools: Open Mind Commons, ConceptNet, Montylingua/Langutils, Analogy Space

Readings

AnalogySpace: Reducing the Dimensionality of Commonsense Knowledge, Robert Speer, Catherine Havasi and Henry Lieberman, Conference of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-08), Chicago, July 2008.

[Download]

and also choose at least one (1) from below:

Catherine Havasi, Rob Speer, Jason Alonso, ConceptNet 3: A Flexible, Multilingual Semantic Network for Common Sense Knowledge, Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing, Borovets, Bulgaria, September 2007.

H Liu, P Singh: 2004, ConceptNet: a practical commonsense reasoning toolkit, BT Technology Journal 22(4). Kluwer Academic Publishers. [Download/Website]

Ian Eslick, Hugo Liu, LangUtils, A Fast Natural Language Toolkit for Common Lisp, International Lisp Conference, Stanford, CA, 2005. MontyLingua: python/java natural language parser. [Download/Website]

30 September: Related Work (Cyc, ThoughtTreasure, Semantic Web, Conventional KR, etc.)

Readings

DB Lenat: 1995, Cyc: a large-scale investment in knowledge infrastructure. Communications of the ACM 38(11).

and also choose at least one (1) from below:

ET Mueller: 1998, ThoughtTreasure: a natural language/commonsense platform. Accessed from http://www.signiform.com/tt/htm/overview.htm.

E Mueller 2006, Commonsense Reasoning, Morgan Kaufmann, San Francisco.

R Davis, H Shrobe, P Szolovits: 1993, What is a knowledge representation? AI Magazine, 14(1):17-33.

GA Miller et al.: Five papers on WordNet. Princeton University.

T Berners-Lee, J Hendler, O Lassila: 2001, The semantic web. Scientific American 284(5), pp. 28-37. May, 2001.

7 October: Application survey: Recommendation

Readings

What Am I Gonna Wear: Scenario-Oriented Recommendation, Edward Shen, Henry Lieberman, and Francis Lam, submitted to ACM International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI-07), Honolulu, January 2007.

and also choose at least one (1) from below:

Common Consensus: A Web-based Game for Collecting Commonsense Goals, Henry Lieberman, Dustin Smith, Alea Teeters, submitted to ACM International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI-07), Honolulu, January 2007.

Intelligent Profiling by Example, Henry Lieberman and Sybil Shearin, ACM Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces, Santa Fe, NM, January 2001.

14 October: Applications survey: Inferring user goals (Goose, Roadie, Creo/Miro/Adeo, etc.)

Readings

J Espinosa, H Lieberman: 2005, A Goal-Oriented Interface to Consumer Electronics using Planning and Commonsense Reasoning, September 2005.

and also choose at least one (1) from below:

Bo Morgan, Learning perception lattices to compare generative explanations of human-language activity stories, to appear.

A Faaborg, H Lieberman: 2005, A Goal-oriented Web browser. CHI 06, Montréal.

H Liu, H Lieberman, T Selker: 2002, Goose: a goal-oriented search engine with commonsense, Conference on Adaptive Hypermedia and Adaptive Web-Based Systems, LNCS 2347 Springer, pp. 253-263.

H Lieberman, A Kumar: 2005,Providing expert advice by analogy for on-line help, ACM/IEEE Conference on Web Intelligence & Intelligent Agent Technology, Compiègne, France.

21 October: Common Sense in Languages and Cultures

Readings

Junia Anacleto, Henry Lieberman, Marie Tsutsumi, Vânia Neris, Aparecido Carvalho, Jose Espinosa and Silvia Zem-Mascarenhas, Can Common Sense Uncover Cultural Differences in Computer Applications?, IFIP World Computer Conference, Santiago, Chile, August 2006.

and also choose at least one (1) from below:

Hyemin Chung, GlobalMind - Bridging the Gap Between Different Cultures and Languages with Common-sense Computing, MS Thesis, August 2006.

R Musa, M Scheidegger, A Kulas, Y Anguilet: 2003, Globuddy, a dynamic broad context phrase book, Proceedings of CONTEXT 2003. LNCS 2680, pp. 467-474

J Chung, R Kern, H Lieberman: 2004, Topic spotting common sense translation assistant, Proceedings of CHI 2005. ACM Press. pp. 1280-1283

Henry Lieberman, Alexander Faaborg, José Espinosa, and Tom Stocky, Common Sense on the Go: Giving Mobile Applications an Understanding of Everyday Life, British Telecom Technology Journal, Vol. 22, Number 4, October 2004.

28 October: No Meeting - Media Lab "Hell Week"

4 November: Educational Applications

 

Readings

Anacleto, JC; Carvalho, AFP; Neris, VPA; Zem-Mascarenhas, SH; Talarico Neto, A. How Can Common Sense Support Instructors with Distance Education? In Brazilian Siposium of Informatics on Education. Brasilia, Oct/2006. / to be published/

and also choose at least one (1) from below:

Marcus, A. Culture Class vs. Culture Clash. Proc. Interactions 2002 (June, 2002), 25 p.

Matocha, J., T. Camp, and R. Hooper. Extended analogy: an alternative lecture method. In Proceedings of the twenty-ninth SIGCSE technical symposium on Computer Science Education, pages 262-266. ACM Press, 1998.

Stamm, S. Mixed nuts: Atypical Classroom Thecniques for Computer Science Courses. Crossroads, vol 10, Issue 4 (august 2004), p 3, ACM
Press, NY, USA.

 

11 November: Logical Inference and Common Sense Inference

Readings

E Davis, L Morgenstern: 2004, Progress in formal commonsense reasoning, Introduction to the Special Issue on Formalization of Common Sense. Artificial Intelligence Journal 153(1–2): 1–12.

and also choose at least one (1) from below:

J McCarthy: 1958, Programs with common sense, Teddington Conference on the Mechanization of Thought Processes, December 1958.

J McCarthy: 1986, Applications of circumscription to formalizing common sense knowledge, Artificial Intelligence.

D Lenat: The dimensions of context space, CyCorp.

W Cohen: 1988, WHIRL: a word-based information representation language, Artificial Intelligence Journal.

P Singh,W Williams: 2003, LifeNet: a propositional model of ordinary human activity. Proceedings of the Workshop on Distributed and Collaborative Knowledge Capture at K-CAP 2003. [Download/Website]

18 November: Improving knowledge collection and knowledge quality

Readings

T Chklovski, Y Gil: 2005, Improving the design of intelligent acquisition interfaces for collecting world knowledge from web contributors. Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Knowledge Capture (K-CAP 2005). October 2-5, 2005, Banff, Canada.

and also choose at least one (1) from below:

C Matuszek, M Witbrock, R Kahlert, J Cabral, D Schneider, P Shah, D Lenat: 2005, Searching for common sense: populating Cyc from the web. Proceedings of the Twentieth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence.

Lv Ahn and L Dabbish: 2004, Labeling images with a computer game, ACM Conference on Computers and Human Interaction (CHI-2004).

SD Richardson, WB Dolan, L Vanderwende: 1998, MindNet: acquiring and structuring semantic information from text, ACL'98: 36th Annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and 17th International conference on computational linguistics, ACL, 1998, CONF 17, Vol. 2, pp. 1098-1102.

L Vanderwende: 2005, Volunteers created the web. Proceedings of the AAAI 2005 Spring Symposium Series, working notes of the symposium on Knowledge Collection from Volunteer Contributors. Stanford, CA.

25 November: No Meeting - Thanksgiving holiday

2 December: Applications survey: Affect, personality, viewpoints (Empathy Buddy, WWTT, Aesthetiscope, etc.)

Readings

H Liu, H Lieberman, T Selker: 2003, A model of textual affect sensing using real-world knowledge. Proceedings of Intelligent User Interfaces 2003, ACM Press, pp 125-132.

and also choose at least one (1) from below:

H Liu, P Maes: 2004, What would they think? A computational model of attitudes. Proceedings of Intelligent User Interfaces 2004, ACM Press, pp. 38-45

ET Mueller, MG Dyer: 1985, Towards a computational theory of human daydreaming. Proceedings of the Seventh Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, pp. 120-129

K Binsted, G Ritchie: 1994, An implemented model of punning riddles. Proceedings of the American Association of Artificial Intelligence, AAAI Press.

H Liu, P Maes: 2005, The aesthetiscope: visualizing aesthetic readings of text in color space. Proceedings of AI in Music and Art, FLAIRS 2005, AAAI Press, pp. 74-79

16 December: Final project presentations