Self-explaining computation is an approach to program execution in which every value comes with an explanation of how it was computed. The explanation can be used to reverse the computation and to slice the original program relative to any part of the output of interest. As a result, self-explaining computation is a suitable foundation for o ine dynamic program analyses such as taint analysis a...

In April of 2001, I sat on the roof of an office building in Bangalore listening to Metallica covers sung by a band made up of IT (Information Technology) professionals in their twenties. My new friends regaled me with stories of their success, boasting of their enormous salaries and summer homes under construction in the countryside. To them, this rooftop party represented the end of a long In...

When we interact with artifacts we are closely coupled at many temporal levels, both cognitively and physically. We think on paper in diagrams or words, we play with toys, we work with tools, and we live our lives largely within structured collections of artifacts. Artifacts often act like prostheses. After a day of working with nails and screws it must seem to a carpenter that his hands are ha...

Recently Haas Schubert and Reiter have developed an al ternative approach to the frame problem which is based on the idea of using explanation closure axioms The claim is that there is a mono tonic solution for characterizing nonchange in serial worlds with fully speci ed actions where one can have both a succinct representation of frame axioms and an e ective proof theory for the characterizat...

Why do fertility rates vary so much across countries? Why are European fertility rates so much lower than American fertility rates? To answer these questions we extend the Becker-Barro framework to incorporate the decision to accumulate human capital (that determines earnings) and health capital (that determines life expectancy). We find that crosscountry differences in productivity and taxes c...

There has recently been considerable progress in the area of using computers as a tool for theorem proving. In this paper we focus on one facet of human-computer interaction in such systems: generating natural language explanations from proofs. We first discuss the X proof system a tactic style theorem proving system for firstorder logic with a collection of inference rules corresponding to hum...

We propose an O(n) propagation-based procedure for explaining the ATMOSTSEQCARD constraint. We evaluate it against pure CP models for solving car-sequencing benchmarks. The experimental evaluation emphasizes the importance of combining CP with SAT for solving this problem.

Variational approximations facilitate approximate inference for the parameters in complex statistical models and provide fast, deterministic alternatives to Monte Carlo methods. However, much of the contemporary literature on variational approximations is in Computer Science rather than Statistics, and uses terminology, notation, and examples from the former field. In this article we explain va...

This paper is an overview of part of the contents of my ongoing book Ethnic and Political Cleansing. I have backed away from my original intention of giving an overview of the entire book and its conclusions , since such a paper would appear absurdly over-generalized, with space for hardly any empirical content. I have focussed upon the macro structures and processes which bring dangerous possi...

Knowledge representation systems, including ones based on Description Logics (DLs), use explanation facilities to, among others, debug knowledge bases. Until now, such facilities were not available for expressive DLs, whose reasoning is an un-natural refutation-based tableau. We offer a solution based on a sequent calculus that is closely related to the tableau implementation, exploiting its op...