EFTA00284175

certain book, which he would soon bring to her since he bad planned to be 
in her neighborhood. Joan thanked him and ended the call. Soon Charles 
arrived and gave her the book. 
Following are a few of the understandings an adult reader would have after hearing the story. 
• Joan heard a ring. She recognizes it as a telephone bell and feels the need to respond quickly. She 
knows how to use the telephone. 
• She picked up the phone. She is subsequently holding the phone to her ear. 
• Charles was answering her question. Charles and Joan are not in the same room. Charles also knows 
how to use the telephone. 
• He suggested she read a certain book. Joan probably now feels some relief, since she knows where 
to find the knowledge she needs. 
• He had planned to be in her neighborhood. Joan will not be surprised when he arrives, because she 
will remember that he said he would come. 
• lie gave her the book. Will she have to give it back? The story does not tell us that. 
These conclusions are based on reasoning and representations in many realms, as follow. 
The physical realm. In this realm, give might mean the motion of the book through space. This could 
be represented as a transframe that starts with Charles's hand holding the book and ends with Joan's hand 
carrying it. One must know a lot about physical things and how they behave in space and time. 
The social realm. In this realm, give may signify social acts that can alter the relationships of the 
actors. What were Charles's motives or his attitudes? Clearly, he was not returning a loan. Was he hoping to 
ingratiate himself? Or was he just being generous? How will Joan feel about Charles after he gives her the 
book? One must know a lot about what people are, and a certain amount about how people work. 
The dominion realm. Given Charles gave Joan the book, one infers not only that Joan is holding the 
book, but also that, at least for a time, she possesses the right to use it. 
The conversational realm. How do conversations work? Consider how many elaborate skills are 
involved in a typical verbal exchange. One has to keep track of what is being discussed, what one has 
previously told the listener, and what the listener knows. Thus conversations are partly based on knowledge 
of how human memories work and what is commonly known in one's culture. One has to make sure the 
listener has understood what was said and why it was said. One certainly needs to know how to speak and 
to understand some of what one may hear. 
The procedural realm. How does one make a telephone call? One must first find a phone and dial a 
number. Then once the connection has been established, one says hello, talks a bit, and eventually leads 
into why one called. At the end, one says goodbye and hangs up the phone. Generally, such scripts have 
certain steps that are specified, while other steps provide for more mom to improvise. 
The sensory and motor realms. Each of the above steps raises questions. For example, it takes only 
one second or so for one's ann to reach out in order to pick up the phone. How can one do that so quickly? 
The kinesthetic, tactile, and haptic realms. Using a telephone or any other physical object engages a 
great base of body-related knowledge and skills. One anticipates how the phone will feel against one's ear 
or sandwiched between shoulder and cheek. One expects certain haptic sensations such as the feel of the 
phone's weight One strengthens one's grip when the phone starts to slip. 
The temporal realms. People have elaborate models of time where events are located in futures and 
pasts that are represented in relation to other times and events or in anecdotal stories. 
The economic realm. People know and reason about the costs incurred by each action or transaction in 
terms of money, energy, space, or time. 
EFTA00284255

The reflective realm. People know about themselves. One knows to some degree what one can or 
cannot do, what kinds of problems one can solve, how one's thinking and memory works, and what sorts of 
things one is able to team. 
Along with these positive kinds of knowledge, one also has negative knowledge about what might go 
wrong when using a phone. One must know what to do if one gets a wrong number, if there is no answer, 
or if a modem or intercept recording is reached. 
Example system with architecture of diversity. Thus far, the Sloman and Minsky architectures are 
theoretical constructs and have not yet been implemented. However, there are examples of working 
systems that capture the spirit of such architectures. One such example is the M system depicted in Figure 
4. (29) M integrates multiple reasoning processes and representations to serve as an assistant to a user 
collaborating with other workers within a virtual meeting room that hosts multimedia desktop 
conferencing. M serves to recognize and classify the actions performed by the participants as well as the 
objects upon which the actions are applied; example actions and objects are brainstorming on a whiteboard, 
coauthoring a document, and creating and working with other artifacts. 
[FIGURE 4 OM11 
Next steps 
The two recent meetings held in March 2002 at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center and in 
April 2002 on St. Thomas indicate that there is a dedicated group of recognized researchers interested in 
working together on a project to develop a solution to commonsense reasoning. We are now planning to 
undertake some of the next steps in a plan for such a project. The inspiration for this work comes from 
Minsky's past and forthcoming work. We close with his thoughts on how such a project might be realized, 
as follows. 
Our goal is to aim toward a critical "change of phase" that will come when we cross a threshold at 
which our systems know how to improve themselves. This is something that all young children can do, but 
we do not know enough about how they do it; so one goal of the project must be to develop better models 
of how normal people think. 
We will start by trying to implement some of the architectures proposed over the past decade. There 
already exist many useful schemes for representing and using knowledge mostly of a factual nature for use 
on what we call the deliberative level. However, there has not been enough work on the higher reflective 
and self-reflective levels that humans use, as they learn to improve their thinking itself. Any such system, 
we claim, will need additional kinds of meta-resources, which will include systems that manage, criticize, 
and modify the already operating pans of the structure. 
In the field of Al we already have many resources related to this, for example, neural networks, formal 
logic, relational databases, genetic programs, statistical methods, and of course the heuristic search, 
planning, and case-based reasoning schemes of earlier years. However, our goal is not to discuss which 
method is best. Instead we will try to develop a plan of how to incorporate into one system the virtues of 
many different approaches. Of course, each such scheme has deficiencies and our hope is that our system 
can escape from these by using higher-level, more reflective schemes that understand what each of those 
other schemes can do and in what context they are most effective. 
Table 1 Early reader corpus: top 10 domains of common 
sense 
Domain 
Number 
Percentage 
of Stories of Stories 
space--location 
14 
93.3 
space--motion 
11 
73.3 
EFTA00284256

math—counting 
attitude--positive 
speech act 
space—size 
10 
9 
9 
8 
66.6 
60.0 
60.0 
53.3 
space--grasping 
7 
46.6 
sound—speech 
7 
46.6 
logic--universal 
7 
46.6 
quantification 
space—housing 
6 
40.0 
Table 2 Diverse schemes for story understanding 
domains 
Domain 
Representation/Reasoning 
Schemes 
space 
frame, generalized cylinder model, 
interval ►ogic, occupancy grid 
time, action effects 
causal model, event calculus, 
situation calculus, transframe 
reactivity 
neural net, production system, 
subsumption architecture 
schemas, scripts 
finite automaton, frame, frame-
Array, generalized Petri net 
subgoaling 
first-order logic, K-line, marker 
passing, semantic net 
emotions, attitudes 
microneme, neural net, temporal 
modal logic 
•• Trademark or registered trademark of Cycorp, Inc. 
Cited references and notes 
(1.) M. Minsky, The Emotion Machine, Pantheon, New York (forthcoming). Several chapters are on 
line at http://web.media.mitechil minsky. 
(2.) The use of reading comprehension tests as a metric for evaluating story understanding systems 
was previously proposed in L. Hirschman, M. Light, E. I3reck, and J. Burger, "Deep Read: A Reading 
Comprehension System," Proceedings of the 37th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational 
Linguistics, College Park, MD, June 1999, Association for Computational Linguistics (1999). 
(3.)1. McCarthy, "Programs with Common Sense," Proceedings of the Symposium on Mechanisation 
of Thought Processes, Her Majesty's Stationery Office, London (1958), pp. 77-84. 
EFTA00284257

(4.) J. McCarthy, "From Here to Human-Level Intelligence," Proceedings of the Fifth International 
Conference on Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (KR'96), Cambridge, MA, 
November 1996, Morgan Kaufmann, San Mateo, CA (1996), pp. 640-646. 
(5.) L Morgenstern, "A Formal Theory of Multiple Agent Non-monotonic Reasoning," Proceedings 
of the Eighth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, AAAI Press, Menlo Park, CA (1990), pp. 538-
544. 
(6.) E Davis, The Naive Physics Perplex," AI Magazine 19, No. 4, 51-79 (1998). 
(7.) D. Lenat, "Cyc: A Large-Scale Investment in Knowledge Infrastructure," Communications of the 
ACM 38, No. 11, 32-38 (1995). 
(8.) More details can be found in E. T. Mueller, "Story Understanding," to appear in Encyclopedia of 
Cognitive Science, Nature Publishing Group, London (2002). 
(9.) E Charniak, Toward a Model of Children's Story Comprehension, Technical Report AITR-266, 
Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA (1972). 
(10.) R. C. Schank and R. P. Abelson, Scripts, Plans, Goals, and Understanding, L Erlbaum 
Associates, Hillsdale, NJ (1977). 
(11.) R. E. Cullingford, Script Application: Computer Understanding of Newspaper Stories, Technical 
Report YALE/DCS/tr116, Computer Science Department, Yale University, New Haven, CT (1978). 
(12.) R. WilanIcy, Understanding Goal-Based Stories, Technical Report YALFJDCS/tr140, Computer 
Science Department, Yale University, New Haven, CT (1978). 
(13.) M.G. Dyer, in-Depth Understanding, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA (1983). 
(14.) A. Ram, Question-Driven Understanding: An Integrated Theory of Story Understanding, 
Memory, and Learning, Technical Report YALVDCS4710, Computer Science Department, Yale 
University, New Haven, CT (1989). 
(15.) C. Dolan, Tensor Manipulation Networks: Connectionist and Symbolic Approaches to 
Comprehension, Learning, and Planning, Technical Report 890030, Computer Science Department, 
University of California, Los Angeles, CA (1989). 
(16.) E.T. Mueller, Natural Language Processing with ThoughtTreasure, Signiform, New York 
(1998), full text of book available on line at http://www.signiform.comMboolc/. 
(17.) L. G. Alexander, Longman English Grammar, Longman, London (1988). 
(18.) E. Davis, Representations of Commonsense Knowledge, Morgan Kauffman, San Mateo, CA 
(1990). 
(19.) S. E Fahhnan, NEIL: A System for Representing and Using Real-World Knowledge, MIT 
Press, Cambridge, MA (1979). 
(20.) M. Shanahan, Solving the Frame Problem, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA (1997). 
(21.) D.A. RandeU, Z. Cui, and A. G. Cohn, "A Spatial Logic Based on Regions and Connection," 
Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Knowledge Representation and Reasoning, Morgan 
Kaufmann, San Mateo, CA (1992), pp. 165-176. 
(22.) B. Kuipas, "The Spatial Semantic Hierarchy," Artificial Intelligence 119, 191-233 (2000). 
(23.) P. Singh, "The Public Acquisition of Commonsense Knowledge," Proceedings of the AAAI 
Spring Symposium on Acquiring (and Using) Linguistic (and World) Knowledge for information Access, 
Palo Alto, CA, March 2002, American Association for Artificial Intelligence (2002). 
(24.) M. Minsky, The Society of Mind, Simon & Schuster, New York (1985). 
(25.) A. Sloan, "Beyond Shallow Models of Emotion," Cognitive Processing I, No. 1 (2001). 
EFTA00284258

(26.) A. Sloman, "Architectural Requirements for Human-Like Agents both Natural and Artificial," K. 
Dautenhahn, Editor, Human Cognition and Social Agent Technology, John Benjamins, Amsterdam (2000), 
pp. 163-195. 
(27.) M. Minsky, "Common Sense-Based Interfaces," Communications of the ACM 43, No. 8, 67-73 
(2001). 
(28.) M. Minsky, "A Framework for Representing Knowledge," Al Laboratory Memo 306, Artificial 
Intelligence Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1974), reprinted in The Psychology of 
Computer Vision, Patrick Winston, Editor, McGraw-Hill, New York (1975). 
(29.) D. Riecken, "An Architecture of Integrated Agents," Communications of the ACM 37, No. 7, 
107-116 (1994). 
Accepted for publication May 17, 2002. 
J. McCarthy 
Stanford University 
Stanford, California 
M. Minsky 
Massachusetts Institute of Technology 
Cambridge, Massachusetts 
A. Sloman 
University of Birmingham 
Birmingham, UK 
L. Gong 
IBM Research Division 
Hawthorne, New York 
T. Lau 
IBM Research Division 
Hawthorne, New York 
L. Morgenstern 
IBM Research Division 
Hawthorne, New York 
R T. Mueller 
IBM Research Division 
Ilawthome, New York 
EFTA00284259

D. Riecken 
IBM Research Division 
Hawthorne, New York 
M. Singh 
IBM Research Division 
Hawthorne, New York 
P. Singh 
Massachusetts Institute of Technology 
Cambridge, Massachusetts 
LAC-CREATE-DATE: September 26, 2003 
LOAD-DATE: October 07, 2003 
EFTA00284260

Page 2 
581 of 1456 DOCUMENTS 
Copyright 2003 Associated Press 
All Rights Reserved 
The Associated Press State & Local Wire 
February 7, 2003, Friday, BC cycle 
SECTION: State and Regional 
LENGTH: 200 words 
HEADLINE: Financier pledges $30 million to support Harvard researcher 
DATELINE: CAMBRIDGE, Mass. 
BODY: 
Reclusive financier Jeffrey Epstein has pledged up to $30 million to Harvard University to support a 
newly recruited professor's research in the field of mathematical biology. 
A spokeswoman for Harvard president Lawrence H. Summers confirmed Friday that Epstein's 
contribution will support the research of Martin A. Nowak, who is scheduled to join the Harvard faculty on 
July 1. 
Epstein, who reportedly manages billions of dollars from his private island in the Caribbean, already 
made a donation and plans to eventually establish a $30 million endowment to support Nowak's research, 
spokeswoman Lucie McNeil said. She did not specify how much he has already given. 
Nowak, 36, currently a professor at Princeton's Institute of Advanced Study, uses advanced 
mathematics to model human behavior and to study evolutionary theory, viruses and cancers. He was 
recruited to Harvard as part of Summers' commitment to grant tenure to young professors and those who do 
interdisciplinary research. 
The self-educated Epstein is both a longtime Harvard contributor and a benefactor of Nowak, to whom 
he previously donated $500,000, the Harvard Crimson student newspaper reported. 
LOAD-DATE: February 8, 2003 
EFTA00284261

543 of 1456 DOCUMENTS 
Copyright 2003 The Financial Times Limited 
Financial Times (London,England) 
August 20, 2003 Wednesday 
London Edition 1 
SECTION: BACK PAGE - FIRST SECTION; Pg. 18 
LENGTH: 748 words 
HEADLINE: Wall Street spearheads push to secure academic freedom: A scheme that began in the 1930s, 
and helped physicist Felix Bloch and writer Thomas Mann, seeks a Dollars 10m revival. Gary Silverman 
reports 
BYLINE: By GARY SILVERMAN 
BODY: 
About a year and a half ago, a small circle of wealthy investors collected Dollars 2m (Pounds 1.2m) to 
conduct a novel experiment on the extent of global academic freedom. 
The group, which included George Soros, Henry Jarecki and Jeffrey Epstein, established a fund to 
help scholars escape threats in their home countries and find teaching work elsewhere. The donors made 
their offer in the spirit of the movie, Field of Dreams, which held that "if you build it, they will come". Still, 
they were stunned by the response. 
About 300 academics from 65 countries sought help from the Scholar Rescue Fund, which is being 
administered by the non-profit Institute of International Education. 
Many of the threats to scholars came from likely suspects - African warlords, Colombian drug 
traffickers, terrorists and religious fundamentalists. But the organisers were also struck by the heartbreaking 
singularity of so many of the cases. 
A marine biologist in a former republic of the Soviet Union angered government officials by studying 
local shellfish populations. An African academic was threatened after discovering that funds had been 
stolen from a university library. One western European government even sought help for a local scholar 
who was threatened by a separatist movement. 
"The overwhelming majority of cases involve people who haven't taken sides," said Allan Goodman, 
ILE president and chief executive. 
'They just happened to be scholars who are teaching in the wrong field, or they happened to be from 
the wrong ethnic group or, in one case, they have the same surname as the leader of a faction and they have 
been targeted? 
The extent of the problem led the organisers to a sad conclusion - their work needed to take a more 
permanent form. 
They are now trying to raise a Dollars 10m endowment for the Scholar Rescue Fund. They may also 
start an index of academic freedom that would spotlight abuses in particular countries. 
"The impact and need has been greater than we expected," says Mr Soros, comparing the effort to his 
work on behalf of central and eastern European dissidents in the 1980s. 
So far, the thud has helped 30 scholars from 19 countries escape persecution and find work at 
institutions ranging from Princeton University to the Geological Survey of Norway. The rescues 
themselves can be dangerous and the TIE often turns to human rights groups for logistical help. 
EFTA00284262

The fund arranges for the scholars to get teaching positions, providing annual stipends of up to Dollars 
20,000 to smooth the transition. 
The DE's role in helping intellectuals is not a new role as it started in the 1930a and was led by Edward 
Murrow, an HE assistant director and later a legendary CBS reporter. Among those it helped were Felix 
Bloch, the physicist, theologians Martin Buber and Paul 
Tillich, Thomas Mann, the novelist, and philosopher Herbert Marcuse. 
The latest effort to rescue scholars bears the imprint of Wall Street. Tom Russo, a Lehman Brothers 
,vice-chairman and an HE trustee, has been a prime mover in the project. He helped recruit the donors and 
define the rationale for the rescue work. For Mr Russo, academic freedom is like market transparency - a 
"source of light" that keeps society functioning smoothly. 
Deciding on which requests should receive help has been a job worthy of Solomon. The fund has heard 
from scholars who live in dangerous places but face no particular threat as individuals - a requirement for 
receiving help. Mr Goodman says this is often the case in places such as Israel's occupied territories, 
although the LIE has made one rescue there. 
Dr Jarecki, a psychiatrist who made a fortune in bullion dealing and other ventures, said the fund is 
also trying hard to avoid contributing to a "brain drain" of academic talent in developing countries. Many of 
the applicants face threats to their security, but others simply want to move for economic reasons. 
However, the organisers say they are trying to resist the temptation of being too cautious in their work. 
lie says he frequently brings up the example of a 1938 conference in Evian, France, that was held to 
discuss the resettlement of German and Austrian Jews. The Dominican Republic agreed to accept between 
50,000 and 100,000 Jews. But by the time the "proper" arrangements were made, a world war was raging 
and it was too late to do much good. 
In this case, Dr Jarecki says, the fund will work out how best to achieve its aims as it goes along. But, 
he adds: "I thought we should start by doing it: 
LOAD-DATE: August 19, 2003 
EFTA00284263

461 of 1456 DOCUMENTS 
Copyright 2004 SOFTUNE INFORMATION, INC. 
Ethnic NewsWatch 
Forward 
April 23, 2004 
SECTION: Vol. CVII; No. 31; Pg. 6 
SLI-ACC-NO: 0604FWDM 104 000012 
LENGTH: 936 words 
HEADLINE: Fund Helps Persecuted Scholars Reach Safe Havens 
BYLINE: Popper, Nathaniel 
BODY: 
In a seemingly different life, Ahmed Subhy Mansour was a scholar at 
Cairo's venerated Al-Azhar University. He studied the history of dictatorship 
in Islam and the place of death and paradise in the Koran. But some aspect of 
his research did not go over well with the authorities, and in 1987 he was 
fired from his position and jailed for two months. 
Since then he has searched for a place to continue his work and his life, 
particularly after a number of newspapers accused him of upholding Zionism, a 
crime punishable by death in Egypt. After 15 years of wandering, last year he 
finally found a new home -- as a research fellow at Harvard University. 
The match was made through the Scholar Rescue Fund, started two years ago 
by the Institute of International Education. Since it was created, the rescue 
fund has enabled Mansour and 44 other scholars to escape persecution in their 
home countries, and -- just as importantly for many of them -- to continue 
their scholarly work with a position at an American university. At Harvard, for 
example, Mansour has pushed ahead with the creation of a center for studying 
and reforming the Wahabi influence on Islamic institutions in America. 
The rescue fund is not the first such project nun by the International 
Institute of Education, which also sponsors the Fulbright scholarship program. 
During the 1930s and 1940s, the institute's Emergency Committee in Aid of 
Displaced Foreign Scholars helped bring more than 330 scholars, most of them 
Jewish, from Nazi Germany to the United States, including such luminaries as 
philosopher Martin Huber, physicist Enrico Fermi and novelist Thomas Mann. 
Descendents of several of those earlier scholars, along with families of 
other Jewish refugees, gathered recently at the Park Avenue apartment of Jewish 
philanthropist Patti Kenner to raise money to help revive the rescue program. 
After cocktails, the crowd of about 100 guests retired to Kenner's warm living 
room to sit on plush couches among pastoral landscape paintings. Four recently 
rescued scholars had been brought in for the evening, and two of them told 
their respective tales of persecution in Iran and Pakistan, which seemed much 
more than a world away from the safety of the Upper East Side. 
"I've had such an easy life," Kenner said after hearing the scholars 
speak, with a tone of gratitude that was representative of her guests. "I've 
never experienced anything difficult. We're all so lucky." 
EFTA00284264

The fund is being revived at a time when many observers are talking about 
global antisemitism reaching its highest levels since the 1930s, when the last 
rescue program was in operation. In the program's current incarnation, though, 
none of the 45 scholars who have been rescued are Jewish. 
The one scholar so far whose work was connected to the Jewish community 
was a Palestinian scholar, who felt threatened by both Israeli and Palestinian 
officials for his work analyzing the policy of political assassinations. 
'He was advocating less violence on both sides, and it made him unpopular 
with a lot of people," according to Robert Quinn, director of the Scholar 
Rescue Fund. 
The rescue fund has little in the way of guaranteed funds to ensure its 
survival. The goal of the night was to raise I million for an endowed chair in 
the name of Ruth Gruber, a 93-year old photojournalist who was on hand to tell 
of her trip to Europe in 1944, when she helped rescue 1,000 Jewish refugees. 
The Gruber chair is part of a larger effort to create a 10 million 
endowment that is being led by refugee-turned-millionaire Henry Jarecki, along 
with fellow businessmen George Soros, Thomas Russo and Jeffrey Epstein 
While the roster of scholars who have been helped suggests that the 
Jewish funding for the program does not come out of a narrow ethnic 
self-interest, the scars of Jewish history were evident beneath the surface of 
the appeals for donations at Kenner's apartment. 
The guest speaker for the night was Hanna Holbom Gray, who came over 
with her parents through the I 930s rescue program and went on to become the 
first female president of the University of Chicago. 
"In the 1930s, the German academic world was seen as a model, and one saw 
how quickly that could vanish," Gray recalled. 
Almost all of the 45 scholars funded in the last two years have hailed 
from either African or Muslim-majority countries. Many of them -- including 
Mansour and an Iranian scientist who spoke at Kenner's home — have been 
punished for the pro-Western and pro-Israel slant in their work. 
The fund's directors, however, have been astonished at the diversity of 
the 450 scholars from 84 countries who have applied so far. Many of the 
applicants come from far beyond the traditional disciplines of the humanities 
in which dissidents might be expected to work. 
The threat of bodily harm was a constant for most of the applicants, and 
Jarecki ominously remembered that many of the more than 5000 applicants who 
were turned down by the institute during the 1930s perished a few years later. 
A scholar from the ivory Coast at Kainer's gathering described his own 
situation — being forced to hide in the countryside after teaching political 
science courses that were critical of the government — as a re-emergence of 
darker periods from the past. 
"This is the same old story," the African scholar said. "It is the 
history of the universe. The history of power corrupting people." 
Article copyright Forward Newspaper, L.L.C. 
JOURNAL-CODE: FW 
LOAD-DATE: September 30, 2004 
EFTA00284265