Our mouth waters when we think of our favourite food, and so does that of a dog. But can we know what a dog is thinking about? An experimental entry to a dog's mind was achieved by Pavlov through a rather convoluted chain of studies performed at the beginning of the century that is now coming to an end. His approach is now common knowledge. If presentation of food is preceded every time by a be...

Billions of people rely on correct and efficient execution of large systems, such as the distributed systems that power Google and Facebook. Yet these systems are enormously complex and are challenging to build and understand. My research aims to improve the design, implementation, and operation of large systems by using techniques from the areas of systems and software engineering. I design, i...

Ivan Sag died on September 10, 2013, after a long illness. He is survived by his wife, Stanford sociolinguistics professor Penny Eckert. In a career spanning four decades, he published over 100 articles and 10 books, centered on the theme of developing precise, implementable, testable, psychologically plausible, and scalable models of natural language, especially syntax and semantics. Sag earne...

Almost 30 years have passed since the initial publication of Ivan Illich’s Limits to Medicine. Medical Nemesis: The Expropriation of Health. A medieval historian who has been described as one of the world’s great thinkers, Illich introduced his iconoclastic work with the indictment, “the medical establishment has become a major threat to health.” The book makes a passing reference to radiology ...

In the context of multicriteria decision making whose aggregation process is based on the Choquet integral, bi-capacities can be regarded as a natural extension of capacities when the underlying evaluation scale is bipolar. The notion of entropy, recently generalized to capacities to measure their uniformity, is now extended to bi-capacities. We show that the resulting entropy measure has a ver...

This paper describes IVAN (Integrated Virtual Agent Network), a project that proposes to improve online marketplaces, specifically those that involve the trading of nontangible goods and services. IVAN is an intermediary architecture intended as a generalized platform for the specification and brokering of heterogeneous goods and services. IVAN makes it possible for both buyers and sellers alik...

It is possible to argue that the concept is somehow in a latent state, under other names, in works that concern its clinical and theoretical area of interest or related matters. The sense in which I employ the term here is to designate a set of problems which are both clinical and theoretical, not the name for a supposed metapsychological agency whose theoretical necessity would be questionable...