Out of context - how to know whether Tweety can fly

In the excellent whitepaper titled "Out of context: Computer systems that adapt to, and learn from, context", there's a section nearing the end titled:  "The view of context from other fields" - containing the following subsections: 

   Mathematical and formal approaches to AI.
   Context in the human-computer interface field
   Context in sociology and behavioral studies

Taken from the section on the mathematical approach the document uses the following example to highlight the problems about making contextual assumptions:

Several areas of mathematics, and formal approaches to artificial intelligence (AI), have tried to address context in reasoning. When formal axiomatizations of commonsense knowledge were first used as tools for reasoning in AI systems, it quickly became clear that they could not be used blindly. Simple inferences: “If Tweety is a bird, then conclude that Tweety can fly” seemed plausible until the possibility that Tweety might be a penguin or an ostrich, a stuffed bird, an injured bird, a dead bird, etc., was considered.

While having a better understanding of context seems to be the next major landmark in building better software, we've already seen that making poor assumptions can lead to even greater user dissatisfaction.


"Out of context: Computer systems that adapt to, and learn from, context":
http://www.research.ibm.com/journal/sj/393/part1/lieberman.html

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