The essentials of communication for professionals, educators, students, and entrepreneurs, from organizing your thoughts to inspiring your audience.Do you give presentations at meetings? Do you ever have to explain a complicated subject to audiences unfamiliar with your field? Do you make pitches for ideas or products? Do you want to interest a lecture hall of restless students in subjects that you find fascinating? Then you need this book. Make It Clear explains how to communicate--how to speak and write to get your ideas across. Written by an MIT professor who taught his students these techniques for more than forty years, the book starts with the basics--finding your voice, organizing your ideas, making sure what you say is remembered, and receiving critiques ("do not ask for brutal honesty")--and goes on to cover such specifics as preparing slides, writing and rewriting, and even choosing a type family. The book explains why you should start with an empowerment promise and conclude by noting you delivered on that promise. It describes how a well-crafted, explicitly identified slogan, symbol, salient idea, surprise, and story combine to make you and your work memorable. The book lays out the VSN-C (Vision, Steps, News-Contributions) framework as an organizing structure and then describes how to create organize your ideas with a "broken-glass" outline, how to write to be understood, how to inspire, how to defeat writer's block--and much more. Learning how to speak and write well will empower you and make you smarter. Effective communication can be life-changing--making use of just one principle in this book can get you the job, make the sale, convince your boss, inspire a student, or even start a revolution.

What is the bottom line on Artificial Intelligence? The AI Business offers a comprehensive summary of the commercial picture, present and future, for Artificial Intelligence in the computer industry, medicine, the oil industry, and electronic design. AI's brightest and best-financiers, researchers, and users-analyze current projects, speculate on trends in factory automation, compare research in Japan and the U.S., and note the pros and cons of investment opportunities. ContentsExpert Systems * Amplifying Expertise with Expert Systems, Randall Davis (MIT) * XCON: An Expert Configuration System at Digital Equipment Corporation, Arnold Kraft (DEC) * DIPMETER ADVISOR: An Expert Logo Analysis System at Schlumberger, James D. Baker (Schlumberger) * CADUCEUS: An Experimental Expert System for Medical Diagnosis, Harry E. Pople, Jr. (University of Pittsburgh) * The Low Road, the Middle Road, and the High Road, John Seely Brown (Xerox) * Work and Play. Inventing the Future, Alan Kay (Atari) * The Engineer's Apprentice, Aryeh Finegold (Daisy Systems Corporation) * The Programmer's Apprentice, Charles Rich (MIT) * Intelligent Advisory Systems, Roger Schank (Cognitive Systems, Inc. and Yale University) * Natural Language Front Ends, Larry R. Harris (Artificial Intelligence Corporation) * Robotics. Intelligent Robots: Connecting Perception to Action, Michael Brady (MIT) * Intelligent Robots: Moving toward Megassembly, Philippe Villers (Automatix, Inc.) * Intelligent Robots: Myth or Reality, Paul M. Russo (GE) * Today and Tomorrow. The Problems and the Promise, Marvin Minsky (MIT) * An Investment Opportunity? Frederick R. Adler (Adler & Company) * Financing the Future, William H. Janeway (F. Eberstadt & Co., Inc.) * From the Blocks World to the Business World, Patrick H. Winston and Karen A. Prendergast (MIT) * How to Learn More

The broad range of material included in these volumes suggests to the newcomer the nature of the field of artificial intelligence, while those with some background in AI will appreciate the detailed coverage of the work being done at MIT. The results presented are related to the underlying methodology. Each chapter is introduced by a short note outlining the scope of the problem begin taken up or placing it in its historical context.

Contents, Volume II: Understanding Vision: Representing and Computing Visual Information; Visual Detection of Light Sources; Representing and Analyzing Surface Orientation; Registering Real Images Using Synthetic Images; Analyzing Curved Surfaces Using Reflectance Map Techniques; Analysis of Scenes from a Moving Viewpoint; Manipulation and Productivity Technology: Force Feedback in Precise Assembly Tasks; A Language for Automatic Mechanical Assembly; Kinematics, Statics, and Dynamics of Two-Dimensional Manipulators; Understanding Manipulator Control by Synthesizing Human Handwriting; Computer Design and Symbol Manipulation: The LISP Machine; Shallow Binding in LISP 1.5; Optimizing Allocation and Garbage Collection of Spaces; Compiler Optimization Based on Viewing LAMBDA as RENAME Plus GOTO; Control Structure as Patterns of Passing Messages.

The broad range of material included in these volumes suggests to the newcomer the nature of the field of artificial intelligence, while those with some background in AI will appreciate the detailed coverage of the work being done at MIT. The results presented are related to the underlying methodology. Each chapter is introduced by a short note outlining the scope of the problem begin taken up or placing it in its historical context. Contents, Volume I Expert Problem Solving: Qualitative and Quantitative Reasoning in Classical Mechanics * Problem Solving About Electrical Circuits * Explicit Control of Reasoning * A Glimpse of Truth Maintenance * Design of a Programmer's Apprentice * Natural Language Understanding and Intelligent Computer Coaches: A Theory of Syntactic Recognition for Natural Language * Disambiguating References and Interpreting Sentence Purpose in Discourse * Using Frames in Scheduling * Developing Support Systems for Information Analysis * Planning and Debugging in Elementary Programming * Representation and Learning: Learning by Creating and Justifying Transfer Frames * Descriptions and the Specialization of Concept * The Society Theory of Thinking * Representing and Using Real-World Knowledge