This quotation from John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman concludes Ray’s 1980 paper, “A Logic for Default Reasoning,” one of the most influential and widely cited papers in all AI. The quotation captures what was special about Ray: He had an adventurer’s desire to go beyond the boundaries of our current understanding, together with a mathematician’s insistence on precision. Ray the adven...

Shapes play an important role in at least three domains. Drawn shapes are used to represent ideas, concepts, and possible physical worlds. Perceived shapes are the way we begin to understand the world our visual sense brings to us (Marr, 1982). Computer generated shapes play a critical role in computer-aided design systems and in many areas of artificial intelligence generally. Drawn shapes spe...

In her new book, Carol Gould, the author of the highly regarded and successful Rethinking Democracy, addresses the fundamental challenge of democratizing globalization, that is, of finding ways to open transnational institutions and communities to democratic participation by those widely affected by their decisions. The book develops a framework for expanding such participation in crossborder c...