Editing Commonsense Computing (section)

== Introduction ==

Intuitively commonsense computing aims to solve the problems that are easy for people but very difficult for non-human computers.  We aim to build systems that can autonomously solve underspecified problems without getting stuck.

=== What is commonsense? ===

The ambition behind commonsense computing covers all of the meanings that the vernacular connotation of "commonsense" implies.  Useful definitions will invariably exclude key components.   With this in mind, here are some approximate definitions, each from different ''perspectives'':
* ''Communication:'' Between two people, commonsense is the knowledge one person believes both people share.
* ''Goals:'' Commonsense is the world-knowledge used to build plans to solve problems, spanning semantic, procedural and episodic knowledge.
* ''Debugging'':  Commonsense reasoning requires identifying problems in problem-solving and knowledge, and reacting in the right way to maximize the learning from a single failure.
* ''Perception'': Commonsense is the learned reactions used to categorize and construct mental representations from multi-modal sensory streams.
* ''Mental Realms'': Commonsense is organized into context specific sparsely connected mental realms.  We must not only learn the connections between ways of thinking but also the disconnections between ways of thinking.

=== Table of Contents ===

To address the barrage of problems above, we have focused on designing and implementing architectures for commonsense reasoning.  Our group approachs the problem by integrating research from many academic disciplines and practices the philosophy that the best way to understand powerful minds is by building them.

This document contains these parts:

1. [#Architectures Architectures for commonsense computing] that specify the interaction between mental resources.
2. [#RepresentingCommonsense Knowledge-based applications] that use, learn or collect commonsense knowledge to augument common reasoning problems.