This book grew out of my reflections on the future of the Net. The book is about social, legal, and technological challenges for a networked world. It has the following chapters:

• Chapter 1. The Internet Edge. Change and Connections..

• Chapter 2. The Portable Network. Away from the Desktop and Into the World.

• Chapter 3. The Digital Wallet and the Copyright Box. The Coming Arms Race in Trusted Systems.

• Chapter 4. The Bit and the Pendulum.Balancing the Interests of Stakeholders in Digital Publishing.

• Chapter 5. Focusing the Light. Making Sense in the Information Explosion.

• Chapter 6. The Next Knowledge Medium. Networks and Knowledge Ecologies.

• Chapter 7. The Edge of Chaos. Coping with Rapid Change.

• Chapter 8. The Digital Keyhole. Privacy Rights and Trusted Systems.

• Chapter 9. Strangers in the Net. Access, Diversity and Boundaries.

• Chapter 10. Indistinguishabale from Magic. The Real, the Magic, and the Virtual.

Preliminary versions of the book are available in my office.

 

This is an edited book containing many of my favorite essays by dreamers and creators of the Net.  I have organized these writings according to four main metaphors: The Digital Library, Electronic Mail, The Electronic Marketplace, and Digital Worlds. The book explores the meanings, the possibilities, and the limitations inherent in each of these ways of looking at what the Net may become.  Contributors to the book include: John Browning, John Seely Brown, Vannevar Bush, Vint Cerf, Harry Collins, Scott Cook, Pavel Curtis, Julian Dibbell, Samer Faraj, Laura Fillmore, Robert E. Kahn, Joshua Lederberg, J.C.R. Licklider, Ranjit Makkuni, Tom Malone, Vicky Reich, Lee Sproull, Mark Stefik, Barbara Viglizzo, Mark Weiser, and William Wulf.

 

 

Mark Stefik (Ed.) Internet Dreams: Archetipi Miti E Metafore.UTET Liberia s.r.l. 1997. 

(Italian translation)

I developed this textbook over five years while teaching a course at Stanford University on Knowledge Systems.  The course was taken by graduate and advanced undergraduate students. It is about the principles and practice of building knowledge systems. The book is organized as follows: Part I. Foundations (Symbol systems, search and problem solving, knowledge and software engineering). Part 2. The Symbol Level (Reasoning about time, Reasoning about space, Reasoning about uncertainty and vagueness). Part 3. The Knowledge Level (Classification, Configuration, Diagnosis and Troubleshooting). (second printing).

 

 

 

 

This is an edited book based on published book reviews from my column with Stephen Smoliar over several years. We picked some of the more controversial books being published in artificial intelligence and invited reviews often from people from several different disciplines. Bill Clancey approached us with a book proposal in 1994, observing that many people were using the reviews in AI courses.  The book is organized in four sections: symbolic models of mind, situated action, architectures of interaction, and memory and consciousness. It includes reviews of  illuminating and controversial books from the 1980's and 1990's by Daniel Dennett, Gerald Edelman, Bernardo Huberman, Marvin Minsky, Robert Ornstein, Allen Newell, Donald Norman, Steven Pinker, Z.W. Pylyshyn, Israel Rosenfield, William Seager, Lucy Suchman, Herb Simon, and Terry Winograd. The reviews themselves are drawn from leaders in the AI and cognitive science communities, often published with a response by the authors.  Clancey, Smoliar and I provide interstitial essays to relate the reviews in each section to  major themes in artificial intelligence.