title: Holyoke, Massachusetts

text: Holyoke's industrial development in the late 19th and early 20th centuries led to a massive demand for new housing as the population grew by more than 1000% from the years from 1850 to 1890. Initially this demand was filled by company housing, including such examples as the Hadley Falls Company Housing District, whose structures were built in 1847–1848. Gradually the Holyoke Water Power Company began building housing on its land holdings to sell to working families, and by the end of the 19th century more private developments had begun to appear. Holyoke's architecture can be characterized by a mixture of Italianate, Gothic Revival, Queen Anne and Second Empire, with some Tudor revival examples throughout its neighborhoods. The city is also home to at least two examples of works by national architects, the Holyoke City Hall designed in the Gothic Revival style by Charles B. Atwood, and the now-defunct Connecticut River Railroad Station designed by eminent architect H. H. Richardson. Philadelphia rowhouses are also a common feature among residential streets in downtown area.


title: Holyoke, Massachusetts

text: Throughout its history Holyoke has been home to a number of architects who shaped its unique urban landscape. The most prominent included George P. B. Alderman, who designed industrial buildings as well as the Holyoke Post Office, apartment blocks, and many of the city's iconic Victorian estates. Alderman started his independent practice after being an apprentice to James A. Clough of Clough & Reid, who is best known as the architect of the former iconic Mount Tom Summit Houses as well as the Holyoke Public Library. Architect Oscar Beauchemin's work shaped both the Main Street landscape of Springdale and many large multi-colored brick tenements built in mixed density housing can be attributed to him, often with Renaissance Revival architectural motifs.


title: Holyoke, Massachusetts

text: Holyoke's own millwright engineers and architects David and Ashley Tower, doing business as D. H. & A. B. Tower, would go on to design more than 100 mills in the latter half of the 19th century, and in many respects made Holyoke synonymous with its present-day handle "The Paper City". Holyoke's paper mills from this period were largely the work of the brothers, who designed mills on five continents and among the first of Kimberly-Clark and Crane Currency. In sum they would design 16 factories and mills in Holyoke and, including minor design roles, performed engineering work in some capacity on 25 of the city's in total.


title: Holyoke, Massachusetts

text: As one of the first planned industrial communities in the United States, downtown Holyoke features rectilinear street grids—a novelty in New England. This street hierarchy was seen as an economic development tool as it lends well to high-rise buildings, and the surrounding canals could be landscaped for recreation. Whereas New York's Commissioner's Plan of 1811 lays out a system of numbered streets and avenues, engineer Philander Anderson laid out the names of routes in Holyoke's grid system alternating between tree species for North to South streets (Sycamore, Locust, Linden, Oak, Beech, Pine, Walnut, Elm, Chestnut, Maple), and the names of the Hadley Falls Company founders (Lyman, Dwight, Appleton, Cabot, Sargeant, Jackson), as well as several Massachusetts counties (Hampden, Suffolk, Essex, Hampshire, Franklin) for thoroughfares running east to west. The city's advantageous location on the Connecticut River—the largest river in New England—beside Hadley Falls, the river's steepest drop (60 feet), attracted the Boston Associates, who had successfully developed Lowell, Massachusetts' textile industry. From the late 19th century until the mid-20th century, Holyoke was the world's biggest paper manufacturer. The elaborate Holyoke Canal System, built to power paper and textile mills, distinguishes it from other Connecticut River cities. A series of railways running parallel to these canals also provided easy access to freight, a number of which remain operational today under the Pioneer Valley Railroad.


title: Holyoke, Massachusetts

text: As of the census of 2020, there were 38,238 people in 15,504 households. There were 16,874 housing units in the city.


title: Holyoke, Massachusetts

text: The racial makeup in 2017 was 84.9% white (33.0% non-Hispanic white), 21.8% black, 0.4% Native American, 1.6% Asian (0.4% Cambodian, 0.4% Indian, 0.3% Chinese, 0.3% Korean, 0.1% Pakistani), 0.1% Pacific Islander, 6.6% some other race, and 4.6% from mixed race. Hispanics and Latinos of any race were 51.2% of the population (40.7% Puerto Rican, 7.3% Dominican, 1.8% Mexican, 1.5% Colombian, 1.9% Cuban, 6.4% Venezuelan, 0.3% Salvadoran, 0.2% Argentine, 0.1% Honduran, 0.1% Guatemalan). The ten largest ancestry groups in the city were Irish (13.4%), Polish (8.3%), French (7.2%), German (4.4%), Italian (3.8%), English (3.6%), French-Canadian (3.3%), American (2.8%), Scottish (1.0%), and sub-Saharan African (0.9%). Immigrants accounted for 28.8% of the population. The ten most common countries of origin for immigrants in the city were the Dominican Republic, Poland, Germany, China, El Salvador, the United Kingdom, Colombia, Kenya, and Mexico.


title: Holyoke, Massachusetts

text: There were 15,361 households in 2010, out of which 34.9% had children under the age of 18 living with them, 30.5% were headed by married couples living together, 24.9% had a female householder with no husband present, and 39.3% were non-families. Of all households, 32.0% were made up of individuals, and 12.3% were someone living alone who was 65 years of age or older. The average household size was 2.51, and the average family size was 3.16.


title: Holyoke, Massachusetts

text: In the city, 26.4% of the population were under the age of 18, 10.2% were from 18 to 24, 25.5% were from 25 to 44, 23.8% were from 45 to 64, and 14.2% were 65 years of age or older. The median age was 35.0 years. For every 100 females, there were 88.3 males. For every 100 females age 18 and over, there were 83.4 males.


title: Holyoke, Massachusetts

text: The city reached a peak rank as the 82nd largest city in the United States by 1900, comparable to the standing of Buffalo (83rd) or Scottsdale (85th) among cities in 2018. Holyoke reached its peak population before the end of the First World War with an estimated 62,300 residents according reported in 1913 by the school superintendent at that time, and 65,286 reported for 1916 by the World Book. Following a period of de-industrialization after the war and into the end of the 20th century, the population briefly stabilized during the first decade of the 21st century before continuing to decline during the 2010s.


title: Holyoke, Massachusetts

text: For the period 2013–2017, the estimated median annual income for a household in the city was $37,954, and the median income for a family was $46,940. Male full-time workers had a median income of $46,888 versus $41,406 for females. The per capita income for the city was $22,625. About 24.7% of families and 28.6% of the population were below the poverty line, including 45.6% of those under age 18 and 19.8% of those age 65 or over.


title: Holyoke, Massachusetts

text: As of 2017, the city had the most recipients of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance per capita of any in Massachusetts, with 37% of residents receiving such benefits. Of all ZIP codes in the Commonwealth, including those of Boston, Holyoke had the third highest total households receiving such assistance, with the highest per capita of any of the state's 351 municipalities, representing 54% of all households. A 2020 study by the Urban Institute found Holyoke to be the least socio-economically inclusive city in New England for minorities, despite them representing the largest group demographically. The report found between 2010 and 2015 the racial educational attainment gap narrowed by 30%, however homeownership declined slightly, and the proportion of working poor marginally increased.


title: Holyoke, Massachusetts

text: Throughout its history Holyoke has undergone fluctuations in different foreign-born demographics. In the 1890 census, Holyoke had the third most foreign-born residents, per capita, of any city in the United States, with 47% of residents born in another country; this was exceeded only by Fall River, Massachusetts and Duluth, Minnesota. Later waves of immigration led to significant growth and cultural influence of communities of Germans, Italians, Jews, Poles, and Scots into the first half of the 20th century, and Puerto Ricans, Greeks, Colombians, and Dominicans in the subsequent decades.


title: Holyoke, Massachusetts

text: Historically, a city of working-class immigrants, the first wave of millworkers was predominantly Irish. Irish immigrants began settling in the region before the construction of the dam and industrialization that followed, granting the area the name "Ireland" or "Ireland Parish." While colonists had claimed lands by 1655, it wasn't until the following decade homesteads would appear. Traditional accounts refer to John Riley as the first permanent settler of Holyoke, but while Riley owned 28 acres along "Riley's Brook" (Tannery Brook in modern-day Ingleside), his daughters Mary and Margaret, and their Irish Protestant husbands, Joseph Ely and William MacCranny, first resided there beginning in 1667. By the time West Springfield was partitioned in 1707, a number of Irish families had moved to the Parish. With the emergence of Holyoke's industrial base, a new wave of Irish Catholic immigration occurred and by 1855 a third of residents were of Irish heritage. Holyoke's Irish roots are celebrated today in its annual St. Patrick's Day Parade.


title: Holyoke, Massachusetts

text: In the 1850s, mill owners began to recruit French-Canadians, regarded as docile and less likely to create labor unions due to their agrarian backgrounds and anti-unionism promoted by Québecois clergy at that time. Many Québecois workers were first recruited by Nicholas Proulx (anglicized as Prew) who hailed from Saint-Ours, Quebec and arrived in Holyoke in 1856. He and his sons would import a number of line workers for Lyman Mills, including his son John J. Prew, who founded Springdale and became the first French member of the city council, then the board of aldermen. By 1900, 1 in 3 residents were French or French Canadian descent, and when the city reached its peak population of 62,300 in 1913, this number had become 1 in 4, while the city contained the 7th largest French or French Canadian immigrant population in the country, exceeding Chicago's at that time. By 1980, reflecting economic and cultural changes, this population comprised 10% of the population, a similar figure to those who identified as French or French Canadian in the 2010 census.


title: Holyoke, Massachusetts

text: Beginning at the end of World War II, an influx of Puerto Ricans and other Latino groups began to migrate to the Northeast United States, driven largely by the Farm Labor Program initiated by the US Department of Labor. Not unlike the Bracero program, in the following decades the agency recruited Puerto Rican laborers to work on agricultural land in the continental United States; in the case of Holyoke, many worked on valley tobacco farms, and arrived in the city in search of better job opportunities at the mills as previous generations had. The first permanent Puerto Rican resident was said to have been Domingo Perez; a landlord who later became among the first to be appointed in city government, he was reported to have arrived in Holyoke around 1955. By 1970 the number of Puerto Rican residents numbered around 5,000, however by that time, many faced a city economy in free fall. Holyoke's mills had closed due to the changing economic landscape of early globalization and deindustrialization; from 1955 to 1970, 1 for every 2 industrial jobs vanished. Despite economic and social difficulties the population grew significantly during the 1980s, and from 1990 to 2016, the buying power of the Latino community at-large increased by nearly 300%. Today Latinos form the city's largest minority group, with the largest Puerto Rican population per capita of any American city outside Puerto Rico proper, at 44.7%. The entire Latino population of Holyoke, as of the 2010 census, was 19,313, or 48.4% of the city's population of 39,880.


title: Holyoke, Massachusetts

text: Holyoke is home to houses of worship for numerous denominations of Christianity and Judaism. One of the city's oldest monikers was Baptist Village as the first congregation established there was the First Baptist Church of Holyoke, which first erected a meetinghouse in 1792, traces its origins to five baptisms on the shores of the Connecticut in 1725, and continues as a congregation today.


title: Holyoke, Massachusetts

text: As of 2010 an estimated 60% of Holyoke is religious, with the largest demographic being Christians, more specifically Roman Catholics, who comprise 49% of the city's population. In 2011, two Catholic parishes, Holy Cross and Mater Dolorosa were merged into Our Lady of the Cross Parish. A number of other Catholic parishes, including Our Lady of Guadalupe, St. Jerome's, Blessed Sacrament and Immaculate Conception Parish also reside in the city.


title: Holyoke, Massachusetts

text: In addition to its parishes, the city has a number of convents of sisters including the Sisters of Providence of Holyoke in Ingleside, the Sisters of St. Joseph of Springfield who maintain group homes there, and the Sisters of St. Francis of Assisi in Highland Park.


title: Holyoke, Massachusetts

text: Protestant congregations have played a significant role in Holyoke's civic life since its founding, including the First Congregational Church of Holyoke, founded in 1850, the First Lutheran Church of Holyoke, founded in 1867, and the United Methodist Church of Holyoke, South Hadley, and Granby, which meets in South Hadley, which was founded in 1810.


title: Holyoke, Massachusetts

text: A Greek Orthodox church, Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox Church, has also existed in the city since its founding in 1917.


title: Holyoke, Massachusetts

text: Holyoke is also home to a significant Jewish population. As one of 35 municipalities in Massachusetts with more than 100 Jewish residents, Holyoke is home to an estimated 1,300 residents observing the faith and two synagogues, Congregation Sons of Zion, a Conservative congregation, and Congregation Rodphey Sholom, practicing Orthodoxy. Both congregations originated in the 19th century, with Rodphey Sholom founded in 1903 but tracing its heritage to the Paper City Lodge of the Order Brith Abraham, founded in 1899, and Sons of Zion being founded in 1901. Today both congregations hold joint services during certain holidays.


title: Holyoke, Massachusetts

text: Known by its moniker, the "Paper City", Holyoke's economic base was developed almost entirely around the paper industry for the better part of the late 19th and early 20th century; at one time the city was reportedly the largest producer of stationery, writing, and archival goods in the world. While writing paper production has left the city, Holyoke is still home to a number of specialty paper manufacturers and converters, including companies like Eureka Lab Book, Hampden Paper, Hazen Paper, United Paper Box, and University Products. Several international companies also maintain manufacturing facilities in the area, including a power transmission factory for U.S. Tsubaki in Springdale, and a Sonoco cardboard recycling plant in South Holyoke. Some former mills have in the past been used as incubators for new manufacturing businesses as well; from 1973 until 1983, when it relocated to a newly constructed factory in Deerfield, Yankee Candle's first factory was located in one such building in the canal district.


title: Holyoke, Massachusetts

text: Today the City of Holyoke has one of three foreign-trade zones in the Commonwealth, the other two being the Port of New Bedford and the Massachusetts Port Authority of Boston. Though the number of service-based jobs overtook Holyoke manufacturing jobs in 1972, the city is still home to an array of manufacturing concerns outside of the paper and textile industries, including several producing industrial machinery and components. Until 2017, its oldest manufacturer was the Holyoke Machine Company which, incorporated in 1863, served large mills and factories with specialty roll parts and service; the firm manufactured a number of different products. At one time the company produced the "Holyoke Hercules" model of water turbine which served the city's industries on the canal system, and previously their shops cast bronze doors for the U.S. Capitol Building. Today the city is still home to a number of firms specializing in such equipment as medical devices, industrial vacuums, solid waste containers, plastics and rubber manufacturing, bookbinding agents and archival supplies.


title: Holyoke, Massachusetts

text: In recent years the city has also seen a handful of food manufacturing firms, due to its proximity to large metropolitan areas like New York City and Boston. In 1996 the Paper City Brewing Company opened out of one of the former Farr Alpaca Company's facilities, following a period of financial difficulties in 2017, the brewery closed temporarily, with plans in place to reopen in the future. Another notable firm, Dan's Power Plant, produces nut-based cheese substitutes known as "Fauxmaggio", as a vegan alternative, selling many of their products in upscale markets in New York, Connecticut, and Massachusetts.


title: Holyoke, Massachusetts

text: In recent years there have been successful efforts to attract high-tech jobs to Holyoke and diversify its economic base. For example, a coalition of universities and tech companies have built the Massachusetts Green High Performance Computing Center, an energy-efficient, high-performance computing center, in Holyoke which opened in 2012. Partners in this project include Cisco Systems, Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT,) the University of Massachusetts, Boston University, Northeastern University, EMC Corporation, and Accenture PLC. The data center has been built in Holyoke in part due to hydropower accessibility as well as the city's extensive fiber network. In 2015, the editors of Popular Mechanics ranked Holyoke as 6th on a list of 14 cities they considered to be best for startups in the United States, citing these factors. ISO New England, one of the United States' eight electricity regional transmission organizations, is based in Holyoke, utilizing the city's central location for easy access to metropolitan areas in New England and New York.


title: Holyoke, Massachusetts

text: The retail sector has been a major employer since the construction of the Holyoke Mall, the second largest shopping mall in New England, in 1979. Retail has provided the city with a large and steady tax base, contributing over $7 million in taxes annually.


title: Holyoke, Massachusetts

text: The city also features the corporate headquarters of PeoplesBank, the largest bank in Western Massachusetts, as well as the local Holyoke Credit Union which was originally started as a credit union for the students of a former parochial school.


title: Holyoke, Massachusetts

text: Despite a reputation as an industrial city, agriculture has played a continuing role in the Holyoke's livelihood throughout its history. On July 24, 1917, it became the first city in Western Massachusetts to open a modern farmers market, a novelty at the time, bringing producers directly to consumers. The current farmers market, which began in 1979, is regularly held outside city hall on Thursdays from 10 to 2 from May to October. As late as the 1950s, the city maintained a poor farm while, in contrast, during the late 19th century a number of wealthy manufacturers raised thoroughbred Jersey cattle. This trend began in 1881, when the city went from a population of zero to fifty head of registered Jerseys, the largest herd in the Connecticut Valley being that of William Whiting. This prize-winning herd, then 75 head, was lost however to an incendiary fire that destroyed Whiting Farm's stock barn in 1919. Conventional dairy and cattle farming remained extant through most of the 20th century, with the last conventional livestock farm closing in 1982.


title: Holyoke, Massachusetts

text: Nevertheless smaller market agriculture operations, which began in the 20th century, endure today. Among Holyoke's most notable contemporary agricultural organizations is Nuestras Raices. Established in 1992 by members of the La Finquita community garden of South Holyoke, the nonprofit organization has worked with state and federal agencies to help new farmers build skills and expertise, particularly in the Puerto Rican community, through microloans, direct marketing, and land leasing.


title: Holyoke, Massachusetts

text: Holyoke also has a prominent example of ecosystem garden permaculture—the Holyoke Edible Food Forest Garden, established in 2004 by Eric Toensmeier and Jonathan Bates. In the following decade the two designed and developed their tenth of an acre backyard into a year-round food producing garden, with over 100 perennial plant species which sustain limited wildlife populations, and have remediated soil on the site. Their permaculture garden has been featured in "The New York Times", as well as lectures at Harvard and Yale University. A detailed account of the design and management of this space and the principles behind it can be found in the book by the two, "Paradise Lot", released in 2013 by Chelsea Green Publishing.


title: Holyoke, Massachusetts

text: Soon after medical marijuana was legalized in Massachusetts, Mayor Alex Morse began promoting the city as a growth and distribution center for the new industry, due to its low energy costs and proximity to several metropolitan markets. Since the legalization of recreational weed in Massachusetts in 2016, the city has been approached by several cultivation businesses hoping to establish themselves in former mills. In 2018, the first cannabis cultivation operation, a $10 million investment, opened in the city, with plans to open a dispensary in the future.


title: Holyoke, Massachusetts

text: The city's educational needs are served by Holyoke Public Schools, including Holyoke High School, and a number of private institutions. The school system is currently in receivership and managed by Dr. Stephen Zrike, a receiver appointed by the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education; as superintendent, the receiver presides over school curriculum and practices. The city's private schools include First Lutheran School and Mater Dolorosa Catholic School.


title: Holyoke, Massachusetts

text: The city is also home to Holyoke Community College, the first community college in the state, which was initially created by the city's school board. Today the 2-year college selectively allows high school seniors to enroll in its coursework for transferable college credit, and has the highest percentage of student graduates completing associate degrees and certificate programs among the state's community colleges. With the aid of state and federal education grants the college opened the HCC MGM Culinary Arts Institute in cooperation with MGM Springfield in April 2018.


title: Holyoke, Massachusetts

text: In 2016, Bard College established the first of its microcolleges in Holyoke, its other being based out of Brooklyn. Bard Microcollege Holyoke operates in partnership with local nonprofit The Care Center, which provides educational and career opportunities to pregnant and parenting teens. Associates of Arts degrees are granted to a small class of young mothers who have completed The Care Center's own educational programs in addition to those by Bard.


title: Holyoke, Massachusetts

text: Holyoke Public Library, found at 335 Maple Street, is one of the very few examples of neoclassical architecture in the city of Holyoke, designed by prominent local architect James A. Clough. It sits on Library Park, which was donated by the Holyoke Water Power Company in 1887. The library established in 1870 was originally a room in the old Appleton Street School, and by 1876 moved to a central room on the main floor of City Hall. It remained there until its collections had outgrown this space and a modern facility was required. Holyoke's citizens were charged to raise money to construct the library building and provide additional books. Under the leadership of Henry Chase, $95,000 was raised. William Whiting and William Skinner, each gave $10,000. Clough, the architect who designed the building, gave his services gratis because his daughter was a faithful patron of the library. It opened officially in 1902.


title: Holyoke, Massachusetts

text: At the dedication ceremony William Whiting, library president at the time, referred to the library as the "people's college" and added that: "A library is as much a part of the intellectual life of a community as its schools, and should be supported generously as part of our educational system. Within these walls you will find authors devoted to literature, arts and science, and they are free to any who will ask. We can say to the citizens of Holyoke you have only to ask her and you will find knowledge to make your life useful and happy."


title: Holyoke, Massachusetts

text: A number of artists have been associated with the city since its founding, including Irish-American sculptor Jerome Connor, who moved to the city at the age of 14, and became best known for his sculptures in Washington, D.C. including Nuns of the Battlefield, one of only two such memorials in the capital to honor the role of women in the American Civil War.


title: Holyoke, Massachusetts

text: On May 2, 1885, Clark W. Bryan, a publisher and stakeholder in "The Republican", launched "Good Housekeeping" magazine, originally described as "not to be a bi-monthly cookbook" but "a family journal conducted in the interests of the higher life of the household". The magazine was subsequently published in Springfield after March 1887, and moved to New York following its acquisition in 1911 by the Hearst Corporation. In literature, Holyoke was the hometown of John Clellon Holmes, whose novel Go is considered to be the first published novel depicting the Beat Generation, predating works of his contemporaries Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. Though not as well known as Holmes, the critically acclaimed novelist Raymond Kennedy set a number of his works in a fictional Holyoke, referred to as "Ireland Parish". Several acclaimed photographers originate from Holyoke, including Ray D'Addario, chief photographer of the Nuremberg trials, William Wegman, known nationally for his compositions of costumed weimaraners, and Mitch Epstein, whose photo essay "Family Business" received the United Kingdom's Kraszna-Krausz Photography Book Award in 2004. The 2003 book covered the final days of his father's furniture and real estate businesses in the city, mirroring its deindustrialization and decline. Similarly the city's struggles with race, inequity, and deindustrialization were chronicled in Pulitzer Prize winner Tracy Kidder's 1989 book, "Among Schoolchildren", after Kidder spent a year following a fifth-grade class at Marcella Kelly Elementary.


title: Holyoke, Massachusetts

text: During the height of its industrial prowess Holyoke was a regular stop on Vaudeville circuits, with its most famous actress, Eva Tanguay, known as "The Girl Who Made Vaudeville Famous". Tanguay moved to Holyoke at a young age, spending her childhood in the city where she began performing songs at an amateur show at the local Parsons Hall in the 1880s. Tanguay was soon discovered by a Pennsylvania touring company, and went on to become the first American popular musician to achieve mass-media celebrity. During her career her name was known from coast-to-coast and she would out-earn such celebrities as Enrico Caruso and Harry Houdini. Edward Bernays, the "father of public relations" went on to describe her celebrity as "our first symbol of emergence from the Victorian age". Tanguay's was just one of many acts associated with the city's history, it was in Holyoke that vaudevillian Sophie Tucker was found by the Theatrical Syndicate's Marc Klaw who introduced her to Broadway's Ziegfeld Follies in 1909.


title: Holyoke, Massachusetts

text: Even as Vaudeville declined in the 1920s, the city remained a regular stop for actors and musicians alike. Among other acts, Bing Crosby and The Marx Brothers were known to have played shows in the city at its Victory Theater. Performers from the B. F. Keith Circuit would regularly tour Mountain Park's own playhouse which also hosted the Valley Players, with whom actor Hal Holbrook most famously launched his career. Perhaps the most prominent venue after the 1920s, the Valley Arena Gardens hosted a wide variety of musical acts including the likes of Count Basie, Duke Ellington, The Dorsey Brothers, The Glenn Miller Orchestra, Frances Langford, Cab Calloway, and Sarah Vaughn among many others still known in American popular culture today. Holyoke City Hall during this period also regularly served as a venue for notable music acts as well, including several by the New York Philharmonic Orchestra annually from 1912–1925 under the direction Josef Stránský and subsequently Willem Mengelberg, and at least one performance by the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1926. These concerts were organized by the Chamber of Commerce, Holyoke Music Club, and Mount Holyoke College, which also brought a number of internationally-renowned artists to Holyoke High School as well, including violinist Efrem Zimbalist, baritone Reinald Werrenrath, Berlin State Opera contralto Margarethe Arndt-Ober, and pianist-composers Ethel Leginska and Percy Grainger.


title: Holyoke, Massachusetts

text: Of venues that once defined Holyoke's stage history, few remain; for the last decade an effort has been underway to restore the Victory Theater by the Massachusetts International Festival of the Arts. These efforts have included introduction of the Victory Players in 2018, an international music residency program which plays contemporary classical music to support the funding of future theater programming. Today Holyoke's venues include Gateway City Arts, a converted paper factory now serving as a regular music venue, as well as the site of the former Mountain Park, now used for some large outdoor concerts, and the Holyoke Turner Hall, which features smaller shows. The city has its own symphony as well; the Holyoke Civic Symphony, originally a project of the Holyoke Community College, has been playing popular and classical works since 1967, and is based out of the college's Leslie Phillips Theater.


title: Holyoke, Massachusetts

text: In addition to the Volleyball Hall of Fame the city is also home to Wistariahurst. Named for the flowered vines which adorn its gardens, the estate was home to the Skinner Family which produced sewing silk and satins, becoming the largest producer of the latter in the world. The museum is home to a wide variety of contemporary and historic gallery events and contains numerous archival collections for research. Though no longer in the museum collections, Wistariahurst was once home to the eminent Belle Skinner Collection of Musical Instruments, curated by its namesake Belle Skinner. Several decades after her death, the collection became a substantial part of the Yale University Collection of Musical Instruments.


title: Holyoke, Massachusetts

text: The Children's Museum at Holyoke, started by the Junior League of Holyoke in 1984, features a number of hands-on exhibits, including a water table, Lite-Brite wall, and a variety of displays including 2,000 collector Pez dispensers.


title: Holyoke, Massachusetts

text: Holyoke is home to the second-largest St. Patrick's Day parade in the United States, surpassed only by the New York City parade. Held annually since 1952 on the Sunday following St. Patrick's Day, the parade draws hundreds of thousands of people from across New England and the Eastern seaboard of United States. In recent years the Holyoke Saint Patrick's Day Parade typically attracts 350,000 to 450,000 people each year. Featured in the parade every year since the first in 1952 is the Holyoke Caledonian Pipe Band, founded in 1910, it is the oldest pipe band continuously operating in the United States.


title: Holyoke, Massachusetts

text: Since 1962, the city has held an annual Shad Derby every year in May with rare exception. The contest, begun under the Holyoke Water Power Company, is now ran by the municipal energy department Holyoke Gas & Electric. Though not weighed in time to enter Derby records, the section of the Connecticut south of the Holyoke Dam at Hadley Falls holds the world record for the largest American shad caught, which weighed 11 pounds, 4 ounces when it was hooked in 1986. Thanks to conservation measures, the river is known for a thriving American shad population, which has fluctuated between 226,000 and 778,000 fish since 2000.


title: Holyoke, Massachusetts

text: Every June since it was first introduced by mayor and LGBT activist Alex Morse in 2012, the city has held a rainbow flag-raising ceremony in recognition of Gay Pride Month with the event often featuring speakers, music, and a moment of silence for victims of discrimination and persecution.


title: Holyoke, Massachusetts

text: The Puerto Rican community of Holyoke holds an annual Puerto Rican Day parade on the third weekend of July as part of an Annual Hispanic Family Festival held by La Familia Hispana, inc. Every year the parade grows in popularity, attracting Puerto Ricans from across the northeast.


title: Holyoke, Massachusetts

text: In the last week of August, the city hosts "Celebrate Holyoke" at Holyoke Heritage State Park. Launched in 1986 to celebrate the opening of the then-new state park, it features live music, food, and open house events for businesses in the downtown and canal district. In its first year alone the event featured a laser show, and had as many as 60 thousand attendants over the course of four days; financial difficulties however led to its cancellation in 1995. The event was revived in 2015, and has continued as a two-day event since.


title: Holyoke, Massachusetts

text: Since 2016, every September the neighborhood association of South Holyoke has hosted "El Sabor de South Holyoke" (Taste of South Holyoke) a festival featuring local Puerto Rican cuisine, live music, and other events, including honoring local organizations for their contributions to the community.


title: Holyoke, Massachusetts

text: Every November, the International Volleyball Hall of Fame presents awards to its next class of inductees, as the best players of that year are named. The Hall presents three additional awards annually: the Court of Honor Award for contributions of teams or organizations to volleyball, the William G. Morgan Award for outstanding support or promotion of the sport, and Mintonette Medallion of Merit Award in recognition of significant individual achievement, including coaches, referees, scorekeepers and other notable contributors to the sport.


title: Holyoke, Massachusetts

text: On February 9, 1895, William G. Morgan invented volleyball, originally known as "mintonette" for its similarity to badminton, at the Holyoke YMCA. Though the original YMCA building in which the sport was first played was lost to fire in 1943, the Greater Holyoke YMCA remains an active chapter. Today the Volleyball Hall of Fame resides at Holyoke Heritage State Park and inducts a new class of athletes, coaches, and contributors every October. The city's legacy in the creation of the sport is also honored by two volleyball clubs in the Netherlands, which borrow its name—, of Belfeld, and of Enter.


title: Holyoke, Massachusetts

text: The Valley Blue Sox, a member of the New England Collegiate Baseball League, play their home games at Mackenzie Stadium. Previously the Concord Quarry Dogs from 2001 until 2006, the collegiate summer baseball franchise moved to Holyoke in 2007, winning their first NECBL Championship in 2017.


title: Holyoke, Massachusetts

text: Holyoke has been home to a handful of minor league and collegiate baseball teams, among the first was the Holyoke Paperweights of the Connecticut League from 1903 to 1911. The Holyoke Millers, a Double-A team, moved to the city following a single season in Pittsfield as the Berkshire Brewers. Early planning proved difficult for the team as they often had to coordinate with the athletic departments of Holyoke High School and Holyoke Catholic High School for use of the field at that time. The Millers would leave for New Hampshire after their 1982 season, when the franchise changed its affiliation from the Milwaukee Brewers to the California Angels; that franchise is now the Harrisburg Senators.


title: Holyoke, Massachusetts

text: While unsuccessful attempts were made to attract a new team in the years that followed, Holyoke would not host another until 2004. Following their departure from Middletown, Connecticut, the Holyoke Giants, a Futures Collegiate Baseball League team, made Mackenzie Stadium their home until 2007, subsequently becoming the North Shore Navigators of Lynn.


title: Holyoke, Massachusetts

text: Holyoke has a rich history in the world of boxing. It was in Holyoke that bantamweight Sixto Escobar, the first Puerto Rican to become a world champion, fought and won his first match in the United States, on May 7, 1934, against bantamweight contender and Canadian flyweight champion Bobby Leitham. Most notably, Rocky Marciano's professional debut took place at the Valley Arena Gardens on St. Patrick's Day, March 17, 1947; the venue also served as the ring for many other well-known fighters including Beau Jack, Fritzie Zivic, and Tony DeMarco. Prior to his professional career, one of Mike Tyson's earliest fights was at the Holyoke Boys and Girls Club on February 12, 1983. As the 8th ranked amateur super-heavyweight in the country at the age of 16, Tyson won the fight handily with a knock-out, and gained the Western Massachusetts Golden Gloves title. The Golden Gloves tournament was held in Holyoke from 1958 until 2005, when it was relocated to Vernon, Connecticut. Following an 8-year departure, it returned briefly to the city, and is held in Springfield today. Though other materials would be used following their bankruptcy, in the early 20th century Skinner's Silk manufactured the satins for Everlast's iconic boxing trunks.


title: Holyoke, Massachusetts

text: Holyoke has two private golf courses in Smith's Ferry, on opposite sides of Mount Tom, the 9-hole Holyoke Country Club and the 18-hole Wyckoff Country Club, the latter of which was originally designed by noted golf course architect Donald Ross. With the construction of Interstate 91 in the 1960s, the course required a redesign. From 1966 to 1967 much of the landscape was reshaped by golf architect Al Zikorus; today five holes and seven greens remain of Ross's original designs.


title: Holyoke, Massachusetts

text: The Wyckoff course opened in 1899 as the Mount Tom Golf Club, and was described as rocky and unrefined in its early years. In 1910, Joseph L. Wyckoff, partner of stationery maker White & Wyckoff, and the club's eventual namesake, was playing a round with then-president of the Boston Athletic Association Edward E. Babb. Wyckoff remarked the course at the time was "an apology for a [golf] course" and that he wished to find a man who "really knew about the laying out a golf course". Babb, a member of Oakley Country Club, said he knew such a person, introducing Wyckoff to Ross later that year. Wyckoff brought Ross back to the course, where he suggested key changes, but was unable to prepare plans as he had just signed a two-year contract as professional for the Essex Golf & Country Club. Upon completion of this contract he returned to Holyoke in 1914 where he was put up in a house built for him by Wyckoff, who was a member of the executive committee of the Massachusetts Golf Association, and saw himself as a patron of Ross, offering him financial backing to pursue a broader career in golf course architecture. It is unknown what duration Ross lived in the city as he had summer homes and travelled often, though a "Boston Herald" article places him there in 1919. He would work with the club for many years, completing a full redesign of the course by 1922, which remained unchanged until the construction of I-91 in 1965.


title: Holyoke, Massachusetts

text: Holyoke is home to a wide array of municipal, state, and private land trust parks, including several designed by the Olmsted Brothers. The largest of these is Springdale Park, designed by the brothers in 1905–1906, and today the site of the annual Western Massachusetts Puerto Rican Parade and Festival. The park is one of three of the city's flagship parks, the other two being Pulaski Park, also an Olmsted design, and the Roberts Sports Complex, former site of Elmwood Park, which abuts Mackenzie Stadium. In total the city department of parks and recreation maintains 47 listed municipal facilities comprising nearly 250 acres, and including several baseball diamonds, playgrounds, a skatepark, basketball courts, tennis courts, a municipal pool, and a dog park. The Holyoke Water Works also maintains land holdings for the preservation of its watershed, some of which are open to the public, including Ashley Reservoir and Whiting Street Reservoir, which allow hiking but bar certain activities such as fishing, dog walking, and swimming. This same area, which transects the Metacomet Ridge, also contains a portion of the New England National Scenic Trail, managed by the National Park Service.


title: Holyoke, Massachusetts

text: There are two state parks in Holyoke maintained by the Commonwealth's Department of Conservation and Recreation, the largest being the Mount Tom State Reservation, as well as the urban Holyoke Heritage State Park which was built on the site of the former Skinner Silk Mill, adjacent to City Hall.


title: Holyoke, Massachusetts

text: The Trustees of Reservations maintain a number of parks in the city, including the Dinosaur Footprints Reservation, Land of Providence, and Little Tom Mountain. The latter, once part of the Mount Tom Ski Area, has remained closed since the ski resort shuttered in 1998, and was subsequently purchased in part by the Trustees, along with the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, Holyoke Boys & Girls Club. In recent years there has been discussion of reopening the property as a nature camp, or potentially as a special permit skiing area, not unlike Mount Snow, however while some have still used the remaining ski slopes in recent years, the area has been subject to vandalism and remains closed with no plans for reopening agreed by its landholders.


title: Holyoke, Massachusetts

text: Holyoke has a strong mayor – council government where the executive historically has broad powers to directly appoint officials or commissions which perform the same function, as well as present an initial budget before the city council. Taken into consideration with the authority of the city council, the office however has been described by the Massachusetts state government as having limited executive powers. For example, the mayor retains appointment of the chief of police directly, including terms of their contract, as well as the three members of the fire commission, without council approval. The fire commission however has exclusive authority to appoint or suspend the chief and other officers. Other municipal positions such as treasurer or city clerk are elected directly, unless said officeholder is appointed by the mayor in an acting capacity. In 2015 voters passed a resolution raising mayoral terms from two to four years. In 2021, Joshua A. Garcia was elected, and assumed the remainder of the term of Terence Murphy on November 15, 2021, who had assumed the office in an acting capacity.


title: Holyoke, Massachusetts

text: Holyoke's legislative body is its City Council, which features seven ward representatives and six councilors at large. Historic records refer to the city council as the "Board of Aldermen" until its name changed in 1992, however the title also reflected a separate body. From 1874 until 1896, the City Council was bicameral; the Board of Aldermen consisted of seven at-large members, and a Common Council of 21 presided with 3 representatives per ward. From the ratification of the 1896 charter until the 1950s, the common council was eliminated and the Board comprised 21 members with 14 at-large, subsequently changed to 8 at-large and 7 ward members. In 2015 the city voted to reduce the number of councilors from 15 to 13, removing two at-large seats and creating a majority of ward-based seats. The City Council passes the city's final budget, holds hearings, creates departments and commissions, and amends zoning laws.


title: Holyoke, Massachusetts

text: The city government comprises 33 offices, departments, and agencies, including utilities which are municipally owned and operated, Holyoke Gas and Electric and the Holyoke Water Works.


title: Holyoke, Massachusetts

text: In the Massachusetts House of Representatives, Holyoke is represented by Patricia Duffy of the 5th Hampden District, which is conterminous with the city's boundaries. The city's state senator is John Velis, of the 2nd Hampshire and Hampden District. In the United States Congress the city is represented by Richard Neal of the state's 1st district, and senators Elizabeth Warren and Edward Markey.


title: Holyoke, Massachusetts

text: Politically, the city's largest block of voters are those belonging to no political party, however in recent years the city has largely supported candidates from the Democratic Party by a wide margin. In the 2012 elections, voters supported President Barack Obama over Mitt Romney by a margin of 76–22%, and Elizabeth Warren over incumbent Senator Scott Brown 70–30%. Holyoke elected an openly gay mayor, Alex Morse, in the 2011 municipal election.


title: Holyoke, Massachusetts

text: Following the collapse of its industrial base in the 1970s, the city began to see civil unrest which gained notoriety both in state and national coverage; a wave of crime set in and the population declined nearly 20% from 1970 through 1990. Since that time, crime has gradually declined, with an increased state police presence, and greater state socio-economic support programs. Since 2011, state and federal authorities have worked with the Holyoke Police Department in a Safe Neighborhood Initiative, attempting to suppress gang violence and creating greater after-school programming and opportunities for at-risk youth. This demographic has been described by Massachusetts' Shannon Community Safety Initiative as those most affected by violent crime in the city. In 2016, the HPD estimated 3 out of 4 violent crimes were committed by an estimated 589 gang members between Holyoke and Chicopee, often with members being offenders and victims in turf battles over narcotics trafficking.


title: Holyoke, Massachusetts

text: Between 2010 and 2018, the violent crime rate for Holyoke decreased by approximately 14.6%, whereas the property crime rate declined by 26.5%; both rates remain more than twice their respective state averages, as of 2018.


title: Holyoke, Massachusetts

text: "The Republican", based in Springfield, and the "Daily Hampshire Gazette" of Northampton are the two daily newspapers regularly covering the city. Holyoke's own newspaper of record, the "Holyoke Transcript-Telegram", which had been connected with the city since its founding under several variations of that name, ceased publication in 1993. Since this time Holyoke has not had its own daily news source but has been served by the weekly "Holyoke Sun", managed by Turley Publications, which began publication in 1995. On September 16, 2019, the "Daily Hampshire Gazette" announced that it was expanding its coverage to Holyoke full-time, opening a bureau there.


title: Holyoke, Massachusetts

text: Since 2004 the area has also been covered by the bilingual monthly "El Sol Latino"; published independently out of Amherst, it covers the news of the Pioneer Valley's Puerto Rican community, with considerable coverage given to Holyoke. The Republican also publishes a free Spanish-language weekly known as El Pueblo Latino, with distribution mainly in Springfield and Holyoke. Historically Holyoke has had numerous non-English news publications. Between 1874 and 1910 more than twelve French newspapers were published. Many of these were printed for only a matter of weeks, while the best documented, the weekly "La Justice", was published from 1909 to 1964, being biweekly in its last six years. Another prominent example was the Polish language "Gwiazda", or "Polish Weekly-Star", among the best documented of at least four such publications.


title: Holyoke, Massachusetts

text: Holyoke is served by , including its own WCCH, Holyoke Community College's radio station, Mount Holyoke College's WMHC of South Hadley, and WMUA of UMass Amherst. A Christian radio station WREA also broadcasts Spanish-language religious programming from a studio in downtown Holyoke.


title: Holyoke, Massachusetts

text: In addition to television stations serving the Springfield market, the city is also home to Holyoke Media, a public-access media non-profit.


title: Holyoke, Massachusetts

text: In its history many smaller productions have been filmed in Holyoke, as well a handful of notable pictures including the neo-noir film "Malice" (1993) and mystery horror drama "The Reincarnation of Peter Proud" (1975). The city served as a filming location for the 1977 bodybuilding documentary "Pumping Iron", as Mountain Park then held bodybuilding championships at its Clambake Pavilion. The Holyoke Merry-Go-Round was also the setting of a music video sequence in the 2007 British documentary "Young@Heart", chronicling a New England chorus of elders from Northampton who cover classic and contemporary rock songs.


title: Holyoke, Massachusetts

text: The Holyoke Medical Center offers comprehensive health services, was named a top hospital by The Leapfrog Group in 2016, and in 2018 received multiple awards for its stroke care from the Paul Coverdell National Acute Stroke Program of the Massachusetts Department of Public Health, and the American Heart Association. The city's Providence Behavioral Health Hospital offers a number of programs for psychiatric health as well, with emphasis on new substance abuse treatment programs. It has been affiliated with the Sisters of Providence of Holyoke, who have operated medical facilities in the city since they first received their charter in 1892.


title: Holyoke, Massachusetts

text: The Soldiers' Home in Holyoke is one of two state-operated veterans healthcare facilities in the Commonwealth, offering longterm residential care as well as outpatient services to Massachusetts veterans. In 2018, the facility received high marks from the Department of Veterans Affairs, showing improved safety measures for elderly residents and no deficiencies in provided care.


title: Holyoke, Massachusetts

text: Since September 1997, the city's municipal utility, Holyoke Gas & Electric, has provided fiber optic high-speed internet service to municipal agencies, as well as commercial and industrial businesses. This network would also play a decisive role in the location of the Massachusetts Green High Performance Computing Center in the city, due to its 1gbps service offered to commercial customers, and a dedicated link exceeding 10gbps for the facility's educational affiliates, on specialized networks such as Internet2.


title: Holyoke, Massachusetts

text: The municipal fiber line network has also served as an internet service provider to other area towns, including commercial customers in Chicopee, Metro Center Springfield, and Greenfield (until 2017), as well as network operator to residential customers in Leverett. With renewed public interest in net neutrality, civic groups have rallied for the city to offer a limited or complete rollout of this fiber-to-the-home service in Holyoke and Chicopee, however despite orders by the council to further explore this measure, no immediate plan for residential service has been given by the municipal utility as of 2018. On November 6, 2019, city voters passed a nonbinding question calling for a feasibility study and cost estimate of a gradual rollout of residential service.


title: Holyoke, Massachusetts

text: Several buses from the Pioneer Valley Transit Authority operate in the city including the Paper City Express with a route across town as well as routes to South Hadley, Westfield, Northampton, Amherst, and Springfield, connecting with Peter Pan Buslines at the Holyoke Transportation Center.


title: Holyoke, Massachusetts

text: Passenger rail service returned to Holyoke in August 2015, after being absent since 1967. Amtrak's "Vermonter" stops at the Holyoke station once a day in each direction, and a New Haven–Springfield Shuttle pilot program will commence in Spring 2019 linking Holyoke to adjacent stations in Northampton and Springfield, as far north as Greenfield and south as New Haven, Connecticut, with two trains operating in the morning and the evening. The planned route will link provide service to commuters working in as far north as Greenfield and as far south as New Haven, Connecticut, with connections to New York City. The evaluation period of this pilot service will tentatively end in 2021 based on the results of the program.


title: Holyoke, Massachusetts

text: Freight rail service is provided to the city's industrial and warehouse railways in Springdale, South Holyoke, and The Flats by the Pioneer Valley Railroad, with connections to Pan Am Southern to Springfield and Greenfield, and a line to Westfield with connections to Southampton and the CSX system. The PVRR also provides annual fall foliage passenger rides from the Holyoke Heritage State Park to Westfield, and an annual Santa Train at the park.


title: Holyoke, Massachusetts

text: General aviation service is close by, at Westover Metropolitan Airport and Northampton Airport. The closest major domestic and limited international air service is available through Bradley International Airport (BDL) in Windsor Locks, Connecticut.


title: Holyoke, Massachusetts

text: Taken in its entirety, Holyoke has a moderate Walk Score of 55, though walkability is highly variable between neighborhoods. For example, whereas the rural neighborhood of Rock Valley is entirely car-dependent with a score of 3, the downtown area, with its grid central to stores, residences, and businesses, yields a Walk Score of 84.


title: Holyoke, Massachusetts

text: In an effort to make the mixed industrial and residential area around the canals more accessible, the city has in recent years constructed the eponymous Canalwalk, a series of walkways linking the downtown to The Flats and South Holyoke.


title: Holyoke, Massachusetts

text: Despite its industrial history, Holyoke contains no Superfund sites. One of the greatest producers of pollution in the area was the former Mount Tom Station, a coal plant in Smith's Ferry. Citizens cited higher rates of asthma, attributing them to the plant and after many years of discussion it was finally shuttered in December 2014. In October 2016 ground was broken at the site for the construction of a new solar farm.


title: Holyoke, Massachusetts

text: Due to a combination of MassWildlife's Natural Heritage & Endangered Species Program, as well as public health protections for the watershed of the Holyoke Water Works, much of the city's area west of Interstate 91 is designated for limited development and often requires additional permitting. Of the city's 14,605 acres, approximate 8,105 along the Metacomet Ridge and Mount Tom Range have been identified as core habitat for the more than 242 species of vertebrates extant in the city's boundaries, and of this area about 52% of its acreage is managed by municipal, state, and federal agencies, with sustainable development plans in place to encourage development within the city's dense grid to the east. Of the wildlife identified in Holyoke, there are 29 species of fish, 21 of amphibians, 18 of reptiles, at least 160 species of birds including ruby-throated hummingbirds and bald eagles, as well as 42 species of mammals such as black bears and moose. In recent years the area has seen a growing black bear population, with the occasional individual wandering into the downtown center.


title: Holyoke, Massachusetts

text: Less formal relationships, representing symbolic and technical exchanges have also been established with the following cities-


title: Hanuman temple, Salangpur

text: Hanumanji temple, Salangpur is a Hindu temple located in Salangpur, Gujarat and comes under the Vadtal Gadi of the Swaminarayan Sampraday. It is the only Swaminarayan Temple which does not have the Murtis of either Swaminarayan or Krishna as the Primary deity of worship. It is dedicated to Hanumanji in the form of "Kastbhanjan" (Crusher of sorrows). Hariprakash Dasji A.k.a. This Hanumanji temple is considered most holy and sacred. Hariprakash Swami is trustee at Present.


title: Hanuman temple, Salangpur

text: This temple is among the more prominent ones in the original Swaminarayan Sampraday. The idol of Hanuman was installed by Gopalanand Swami. According to author Raymond Williams, it is reported that when Sadguru Gopal Anand Swami installed the idol of Hanuman, he touched it with a rod and the idol came alive and moved. This story has become a charter for the healing ritual performed at this temple. The idol of Hanuman here is a stout figure with a handlebar moustache, crushing a female demon under his foot and baring his teeth, standing among sculpted foliage full of fruit bearing monkey attendants. In 1899, Kothari Gordhandas of Vadtal appointed Shastri Yagnapurushdas to manage the affairs of the mandir; during his tenure, Shastri Yagnapurushdas renovated the site, built the adjacent bungalow, and acquired more land for the complex to bring it to its current state. Yagnapurushdas then broke away in 1907 and created BAPS. Govardhandas then appointed a new mahant of the temple of Sarangpur. Since, then the Vadtal Gadi has constructed additional improvements and buildings to the temple.


title: Hanuman temple, Salangpur

text: The image of this temple is said to be so powerful that a mere look at it will drive the evil spirits out of the people affected by them. Saturday is the designated day for a special ritual (as Saturday is dedicated to Hanumanji) for those affected by mental illnesses and other disorders. They are brought to the temple to be touched by the rod used by Sadguru Gopalanand Swami during the installation ceremony of the image. This rod has now been covered in gold. The temple administration has hired a brahmin householder to act as a priest at the temple and conduct this ritual. After this, the person affected is instructed to circumambulate the shrine and repeat this after doing darshan a number of times. Some people take a special vow to do this a certain number of times or to chant the Swaminarayan Mahamantra while doing this.


title: Sreenivasan filmography

text: This article presents the filmography of Malayali Indian actor, screenwriter, film director,dubbing artist and film producer Sreenivasan.


title: Colin McFarlane

text: Colin Andrew Ignatius Peter McFarlane (born 15 September 1961) is a British actor, narrator and voice actor. He is best known for his role as Gillian B. Loeb in two films of Christopher Nolan's "The Dark Knight Trilogy", Ulysses in the STARZ television drama series "Outlander", the voice of Bulgy in the children's television series "Thomas & Friends", the voice of PC Malcolm Williams in the children's television series "Fireman Sam", and as the voice of "The Cube" on ITV.


title: Colin McFarlane

text: He also appeared in "The Commuter" (2018), in which he played Conductor Sam, as Chancellor Riggs in the 2015 holiday television movie "Crown for Christmas" (2015), as General Pierce in the science fiction horror film "Patient Zero" (2018) and as Aloisius Dupree in three films of the Batzan Trilogy titled "The Invisible Guardian", "The Legacy of the Bones" and "Offering to the Storm" in 2017, 2019 & 2020, respectively.


title: Colin McFarlane

text: His voice roles in animation and video games include JJ in "Bob the Builder", Thadius Vent in "Oscar's Orchestra", Harrison in "Chuggington", Sparkie the Dragon in "Mike the Knight", Sergeant Slipper in "Dennis and Gnasher", Thunder in "Fable", Uzimushi in "", The Forgotten One in "", Avalon Centrifuge in "LittleBigPlanet 2", Heimdall in "Lego Marvel Super Heroes 2" and Bernard Goodwin in "Planet Zoo".


title: Colin McFarlane

text: McFarlane was born on 15 September 1961 in Upper Clapton, London, to Jamaican parents. His father, Sidney McFarlane MBE served in the RAF and his mother, Gwendolyn McFarlane worked in the NHS. His father was awarded the MBE in 1999 for voluntary service to the community and for service with the Ministry of Defence. The family subsequently moved several times before settling in Lincoln, where McFarlane grew up. He attended the Perse School, Cambridge, and later read drama at Loughborough University, graduating in 1983.


title: Colin McFarlane

text: Mcfarlane's first professional television role was in 1985 with a three episode guest stint, as Detective Sergeant Watson, in ITV's hit police procedural "Dempsey and Makepeace". From there, he would go on to feature in London Weekend Television's made-for-TV film "Dutch Girls", alongside Colin Firth and fellow "Outlander" alumni Bill Paterson. The next year he featured in an episode of London Weekend Television's maternity mini-series "To Have and To Hold", which focused on a surrogate mother carrying a child for her sister. In 1988, McFarlane guest starred in a season two episode of ITV's drama "Bust", which followed a man in the wake of bankruptcy.


title: Colin McFarlane

text: 1992 saw McFarlane appear in CITV's children's series "Tales From the Poop Deck", where he portrayed Lieutenant Parkinson of HMS Intrepid, and a guest appearance on several episodes of Channel 4's sitcom "Sean's Show". Later that year he would feature in an episode of mystery series "Virtual Murder", an episode of BBC's anthology series "Screen One" entitled "Black and Blue", and the made-for-TV film "Lenny Henry: In Dreams". In 1993 he would guest star in children's series "Runaway Bay" and ITV's comedy "Jeeves and Wooster", which focused on Hugh Laurie's Wooster and Stephen Fry's Jeeves. Two years later he would have guest appearances on ITV's "Class Act and" BBC's police procedural "Backup."


title: Colin McFarlane

text: McFarlane would go on, in 1996, to feature in an episode of BBC's Rowan Atkinson led police comedy "The Thin Blue Line", Channel 4's made-for-TV film "The Final Passage", and the finale of ITV's four part thriller series "Circles of Deceit".


title: Colin McFarlane

text: His numerous TV credits include "Judge John Deed", "Jonathan Creek", "Casualty", "Death in Paradise", "Father Brown" and "Holby City". He has also appeared in two of the UK's most-watched soap operas. He appeared in five episodes of "Coronation Street" from August to September 2010 as a consultant neurosurgeon, Mr Jordan, and played DCI Irving in an episode of "EastEnders" in April 2014 as part of the "Who Killed Lucy Beale?" storyline.


title: Colin McFarlane

text: He has also made regular appearances in British TV comedy, in the shows "The Fast Show", "Randall & Hopkirk", "Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps", "Harry and Paul" and "The Thin Blue Line". He played Inspector Norris in the "Black Books" episode "The Blackout", Inspector Terrence Brown in the first episode of "Dirk Gently" and voiced the Judge in the 2016 revival of the sitcom "Porridge".


title: Colin McFarlane

text: McFarlane's first film was 1996's short film "A Mulatto Song", which focused on the life of George Bridgetower, a virtuoso violinist from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The next year would see him feature in the direct-to-film film "I'd Like A Word With You", a corporate training video on how to deal with discipline interviews. He portrayed Police Commissioner Gillian B. Loeb in the critically acclaimed films "Batman Begins" (2005) and "The Dark Knight" (2008). He has also made numerous appearances in the "Doctor Who" franchise, voicing the Heavenly Host in the Christmas special "Voyage of the Damned" and playing Moran in the "Under the Lake" and "Before the Flood" episodes of the ninth series from 2015. In addition, he also appeared in the third series of "Torchwood", "", as the American military representative Colonel Pierce.


title: Colin McFarlane

text: He appears alongside Matt Smith and Natalie Dormer in the action horror film "Patient Zero" (2018). He then appeared as the governor in the 2019 thriller film "Crawl", featuring Kaya Scodelario and Barry Pepper.


title: Colin McFarlane

text: McFarlane's first voice role was in 1994 as Othello in S4C's Emmy Award winning animated series "", which adapted and condensed classic Shakespearean plays for children. The next year would see him voice the main villain in BBC's animated series "Oscar's Orchestra", which explored a future where music was banned. In 1996, McFarlane voiced two characters, God and Goliath, in the Emmy winning animated series Testament: The Bible in Animation. From there he would go on to voice the recurring role of Sergeant Slipper, from 1996 to 1998, in the animated Dennis the Menace cartoon "Dennis and Gnasher".


title: Colin McFarlane

text: His best-known voice roles include JJ and Skip in the original series of "Bob the Builder", and as the narrator on the ITV gameshow "The Cube". He has also voiced Jonah in the 1997 animated series "Captain Pugwash", Bulgy the Double Decker Bus and Beresford the Crane in "Thomas & Friends" and its 2017 feature film "". In addition, he played the part of Elvis the horse in "Iconicles", Sparky the dragon in "Mike the Knight", voiced several characters in the episode "The Sweater" of "The Amazing World of Gumball"., and as well as Police Constable Malcolm Williams in the twelfth series of "Fireman Sam" and its 2020 1-hour special, "Norman Price and the Mystery in the Sky".


title: Colin McFarlane

text: He played US General Trent Stone in the 2014 original audio drama "Osiris" by Everybodyelse Productions.


title: Colin McFarlane

text: McFarlane has lent his voice to numerous video games, the earliest being 1996's "". He would go on to voice characters in "G-Police", "Codename: Tenka", and "The City of Lost Children" in 1997. He also voiced Greg in the "Buzz!" quiz game series, the character Avalon Centrifuge in the 2011 game "LittleBigPlanet 2", and provided additional dialogue for "". He played "The Forgotten One", the central villain of the two downloadable content packs for "". Also lending his voice to Thunder, in the first Fable video game.


title: Colin McFarlane

text: In 2013, McFarlane appeared with Lenny Henry in a critically acclaimed revival of August Wilson's "Fences" at the Duchess Theatre in London's West End.


title: Colin McFarlane

text: On 12 July 1993, McFarlane married his wife, Kate, with whom he has one son, Josh. He divides his time between homes in Lincoln and North London.


title: Violence against women during the partition of India

text: During the Partition of India, violence against women was an extensive situation. It is estimated that during the partition between 75,000 and 100,000 women were kidnapped and raped. The rape of women by males during this period is well documented, with women also being complicit in these attacks.


text: Systematic violence against women started in March 1947 in Rawalpindi district where Sikh women were targeted by Muslim mobs. Violence was also perpetrated on an organized basis, with Pathans taking Hindu and Sikh women from refugee trains while one accused that he witnessed armed Sikhs periodically dragging Muslim women. It has been estimated that specifically in the Punjab, the number of abducted Muslim women was double the number of abducted Hindu and Sikh women, because of the actions of coordinated Sikh "jathas" who were aided and armed by Sikh rulers of the 16 semi-autonomous princely states in Punjab which overlapped the expected partition border, and had been preparing to oust the Muslims from East Punjab in case of a partition.


text: India and Pakistan later worked to repatriate the abducted women. Muslim women were to be sent to Pakistan and Hindu and Sikh women to India.


text: During partition Punjabi society was affected at all levels by murder, displacement and assault. Rival communities targeted women to humiliate them and actions against women included rape, abduction and forcible conversions. Violence against women also occurred in Jammu and Kashmir and the Rajputana states.


text: In contrast to earlier riots, women were victimised in the direct action day riots in Calcutta. Many Hindu women were kidnapped during the Noakhali violence. Anti-women violence occurred during the 1946 massacres of Muslims in Bihar. Thousands were kidnapped just in Patna district. Muslim women in Bihar committed suicide by jumping into wells. In November 1946, Muslim women were subjected to stripping, nude processions and rape by Hindu mobs in the town of Garhmukteshwar. In Amritsar, Sikhs paraded naked Muslim women, who were then publicly raped before being set fire to in the street.


text: Systematic violence against women started in March 1947 in Rawalpindi district where Sikh women were targeted by Muslim mobs. Numerous Hindu and Sikh villages were wiped out. Huge numbers of Hindus and Sikhs were killed, forcibly converted, children were kidnapped and women were abducted and raped publicly. The official figure of death in Rawalpindi stood at 2,263. Before further attacks many Sikh women committed suicide by jumping in water wells to save honour and avoid conversion.


text: Sikh political leaders had considered plans for the eventual expulsion of Muslims from East Punjab in case of a partition leading up to the event. Tara Singh, a member of Shiromani Akali Dal and principle SIkh leader during the partition said “We took the decision to turn the Muslims out" years before the event. Intending to oust the Muslims in East Punjab to provide lands for the incoming Sikh population from West Punjab. Several districts in Punjab, including Patiala, Faridkot and Nabha were governed by Sikh leaders and reported to have been arming and providing safe haven for Sikh marauding groups in anticipation of partition.


text: Violence was also perpetrated on an organized basis, with local men taking Hindu and Sikh women from refugee trains while one observer witnessed armed Sikhs periodically dragging Muslim women from their refugee column and killing any men who resisted, while the military sepoys guarding the columns did nothing.


text: Both Sikh and Muslim communities also cited revenge as a reason for their attacks. The scholar Andrew Major notes that the large-scale abduction and rape of girls seemed to have been a part of systematic 'ethnic cleansing' in the Gurgaon region on the outskirts of Delhi. There was a nude procession of Muslim women in Amritsar.


text: Although many influential men such as deputy commissioners and police officials tried to prevent abductions or rescue the victims, many other men abused their positions of authority, such as the Maharaja of Patiala who was holding a Muslim girl from a reputable family. Known perpetrators included police officials, landed magnates and Muslim League members as well as criminal elements. Armed Pathans in particular were considered the worst offenders, particularly in the Rawalpindi district. a large number of non-Muslim women from Kashmir were abducted and sold in West Punjab and these sold women often ended up as 'slave girls' in factories. By early 1948, Pathans started abducting even Muslim women.


text: In East Punjab, local police and the Indian military frequently engaged in the abduction and distribution of Muslim women besides the Sikh jathas and refugees from West Punjab. According to Anis Kidwai, the 'better stuff' would be distributed among the police and army while the remaining were distributed among the rest of the attackers. In the villages around Delhi, police and army soldiers participated in the rape of Muslim women.


text: The exact figures of abducted women are unknown and estimates vary. Leonard Mosley wrote that in total 100,000 girls were abducted on all sides. The Indian government estimated that there were 33,000 Hindu and Sikh women in Pakistan and the Pakistani government estimated that there were 50,000 Muslim women abducted in India. Andrew Major estimates that 40-45,000 women in total were abducted in Punjab during the Partition riots, with approximately twice as many Muslim women as Hindu and Sikh women having been abducted. Masroor estimates that 60,000 Muslim women were abducted while Begum Tassaduq Hussain estimated that 90,000 Muslim women were abducted.


text: Others estimate that more Hindu and Sikh women were victims of violence as compared to Muslim women, for instance Urvashi Butalia, who specializes in Partition violence against women, says that anywhere from 25,000 to 29,000 Hindu and Sikh women were concerned as compared to 12,000 to 15,000 Muslim women, numbers which have been endorsed by Indian scholars Roshni Sharma and Priyanca Mathur Velath as well by historian Anwesha Sengupta.


text: In September 1947 both the Indian Prime Minister Nehru and Pakistani Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan vowed not to recognize the forced marriages and both countries ratified this agreement in the Inter-Dominion Conference in December which established the recovery procedure.


text: The job of compiling claims for abducted women by their relatives fell on the Central Recovery Offices in both countries. The task of locating abducted women was given to local police who would be assisted with the guidance of the abducted women's relatives. Social workers and District Liaison Officers who were appointed by the Liaison Agency of the opposite Punjab government also provided much assistance. Non-Muslim women recovered from Pakistan were housed in District transit camps, the Central camp being in Lahore. A similar camp was established for Muslim women in Jalandhar. The Indian and Pakistani Military Evacuation Organization were established to guard and escort women to their respective countries.


text: Recoveries eventually slowed down with Nehru admitting in January 1948, "Neither side has really tried hard enough to recover them". Because Hindu and Sikh refugees in India mistakenly thought that the number of abducted non-Muslim women exceeded the number of abducted Muslim women they mounted a public campaign and demanded that Muslim women be held up from recoveries as hostages. Eventually the two countries agreed to not publicize the figures of women repatriated. India and Pakistan's rivalry also slowed the pace of recoveries.


text: Pakistan claimed that the slow recoveries were because many Hindus and Sikhs refused to take back their women as they considered them 'defiled', an argument which Nehru accepted while accusing Pakistan of being uncooperative. Heavy rains and flooding also slowed the pace of recoveries in West Punjab and in January 1948 Pakistan prohibited Indian officials from entering those districts of Punjab which bordered Kashmir.


text: Many women also refused to be recovered, fearing being shamed and rejected by their families and communities while some women had adjusted to their new 'families' and hence refused to return. By 1954 both governments agreed that women should not be forcibly repatriated.


text: Between December 1947 and December 1949, 6000 females were recovered from Pakistan and 12,000 from India. Most recoveries were made, in order of succession, from East and West Punjab, Jammu, Kashmir and Patiala. Over the eight-year period 30,000 women had been repatriated by both governments. The number of Muslim women recovered was significantly higher; 20,728 against 9,032 non-Muslim women. Most recoveries were made in the period between 1947 and 1952. although some recoveries were made as late as 1956.


text: Between 6 December 1947 and 31 March 1952, the number of non-Muslim women recovered from Pakistan was 8,326. 5,616 of them were from Punjab, 459 from NWFP, 10 from Balochistan, 56 from Sind and 592 from Bahawalpur. After 21 January 1949, 1,593 non-Muslim women were recovered from Jammu and Kashmir.


text: In the same time period the number of Muslim women recovered from India had been 16,545. Of them 11,129 were from Punjab, 4,934 from Patiala and East Punjab Union and after 21 January 1949 the number of Muslim women recovered from Jammu and Kashmir was 482. The number of Muslim women recovered from Delhi was 200.


title: Greenberg (film)

text: Greenberg is a 2010 American comedy-drama film written and directed by Noah Baumbach. The film stars Ben Stiller, Greta Gerwig, Rhys Ifans, Brie Larson and Jennifer Jason Leigh. "Greenberg" was produced by Scott Rudin Productions and distributed by Focus Features. The film's soundtrack features the first film score by James Murphy.


title: Greenberg (film)

text: Although the film received positive reviews, it was a box office bomb, grossing $7 million against a $25 million budget.


title: Greenberg (film)

text: Florence Marr is a personal assistant to the Greenberg family in Hollywood Hills. Before the family leaves on a trip to Vietnam, Phillip Greenberg explains his brother, Roger will be staying at the house, ostensibly to build a doghouse for their pet, Mahler. Phillip's wife, Carol confides that Roger has just been released from a hospital after a nervous breakdown.


title: Greenberg (film)

text: Arriving from New York City, Roger has an awkward encounter with Florence, and spends his time building the doghouse, watching neighbors swim in the Greenbergs’ pool, and writing various letters of complaint. His Welsh friend Ivan Schrank invites him to a party at the home of their former bandmate Eric Beller, where Roger is uncomfortable and Eric is openly hostile. Roger runs into Beth, an ex-girlfriend, explaining he is in Los Angeles to simply do nothing for a while.


title: Greenberg (film)

text: Roger calls Florence to meet for a drink. He does not drive so she picks him up, stopping at her apartment for her purse. They begin to have sex, but Florence stops him, having just come out of a long relationship and not wanting to have meaningless sex. Roger suggests they keep things platonic and she agrees, but they remain drawn to each other.


title: Greenberg (film)

text: Over dinner, Eric vents that Roger declined a major record deal for their band fifteen years ago. He marvels that Ivan, devastated by losing the contract, still speaks to him.


title: Greenberg (film)

text: Noticing Mahler is lethargic, Roger calls Florence to take them to a vet, where they learn he has an auto-immune disease. Their relationship soon escalates, with Florence falling for Roger despite his outbursts and awkwardness.


title: Greenberg (film)

text: Roger meets Beth for drinks and recalls minute details from their time together, which she barely remembers; she leaves abruptly when Roger tries to rekindle their relationship.


title: Greenberg (film)

text: After Florence and Roger finally have sex, he yells at her for pursuing him when he does not want to become involved. The next day, a remorseful Roger calls Florence, who confesses that she is due to have an abortion the following day. Roger offers to take her; since he does not drive, Ivan drives them to the clinic, where she undergoes general anaesthesia and stays overnight.


title: Greenberg (film)

text: Back at the house, Roger's college-age niece, Sara has turned up. Leaving for Australia in the morning with her friend, Muriel, they throw a house party with dozens of their friends, with whom Roger does drugs. Ivan arrives and gets into an argument with Roger, finally voicing his feelings over their lost record deal. Roger confesses he had no idea his personal concerns would end the band, for which he feels immense guilt. They bemoan that they have ended up in lives they did not plan to have, though Ivan has made peace with his. Having learned from Florence that Roger had been hospitalized, and having been through a similar experience himself, Ivan laments that they could have helped each other. He leaves, declaring that they never truly talk, and saddened Roger never made an effort to know Ivan's son. Dejected and inebriated, Roger leaves a long voicemail for Florence, confessing that he really likes her.


title: Greenberg (film)

text: The next day, Roger jumps at Sara's invitation to accompany her to Australia. He convinces the neighbors to take care of Mahler, but on the way to the airport, changes his mind. Instead, he goes to meet Florence at the clinic, and they return to her apartment. The film closes as she listens to Roger's voicemail.


title: Greenberg (film)

text: The story was developed by Jennifer Jason Leigh and Noah Baumbach. In a departure from Baumbach’s previous New York-set films, the story was to be set in Los Angeles.


title: Greenberg (film)

text: Ben Stiller was cast as the titular Greenberg, having been a fan of Baumbach’s work. Said Stiller, "Noah’s work is very detailed and goes into specifics on the characters; it’s all written on the page. We rehearsed a lot; it really has to be said as written. So there was hardly any improvisation on the shoot and that was exciting – not having the burden of having to come up with something to try to make it better. What I had to do was to make sure that I would get the rhythm of his dialogue, his lines, to work. Some sequences – 4-6 pages in the script – were like doing little plays." The film was the first of multiple collaborations between Stiller and Baumbach.


title: Greenberg (film)

text: Principal photography was completed within seven weeks. Specific LA locations were written into the film, including Lucy’s El Adobe restaurant, the Runyon Canyon hiking trails, the Fairfax district along Melrose Avenue, and the Highland Gardens Hotel.


title: Greenberg (film)

text: The soundtrack is arranged by DFA Records co-founder James Murphy. It is Murphy's debut film score, and it includes original compositions credited to Murphy, his band LCD Soundsystem as well as songs by other artists. The movie itself contained 25 unique songs, leaving 8 out of the soundtrack.


title: Greenberg (film)

text: On review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 76% based on 176 reviews. The site's critical consensus reads: ""Greenberg"'s title character is harder to like than most, but Ben Stiller's nuanced performance and a darkly funny script help take the misanthropic edge off." On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 76 out of 100, based on 39 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews."


title: Greenberg (film)

text: Roger Ebert gave the film stars out of four. Ebert praised Stiller's performance and wrote: "I never knew who Ben Stiller was born to play, but now I do." Peter Travers of "Rolling Stone" magazine, gave the film 3 out of 4 stars and wrote, "Writer-director Noah Baumbach ("The Squid and the Whale") walks the fragile line between humor and heartbreak...Even when you laugh, like in the climactic party scene, it hurts." Ann Hornaday of "The Washington Post" called the film "a quietly funny portrait of grown-ups growing up" and gave it 3 out of 4 stars. Hornaday praised the lead performances, noting "Stiller inhabits his character's neuroses so thoroughly that it's easy to forget what a challenge it is to make such misanthropy the least bit compelling" and said Gerwig "proves her bona fides here as a fine, engaging young actress."


title: Greenberg (film)

text: Not all reviews were positive. Kurt Loder of MTV News wrote, "The movie is set up as a quirky romance between two lost souls, but in the end it seems more like a stalemate than a love match." David Edelstein of "New York" magazine lamented: "Greenberg would be a heckuva movie if we could just get Greenberg out of there."


title: Knowledge representation and reasoning

text: Knowledge representation and reasoning (KRR, KR&R, KR²) is the field of artificial intelligence (AI) dedicated to representing information about the world in a form that a computer system can use to solve complex tasks such as diagnosing a medical condition or having a dialog in a natural language. Knowledge representation incorporates findings from psychology about how humans solve problems and represent knowledge in order to design formalisms that will make complex systems easier to design and build. Knowledge representation and reasoning also incorporates findings from logic to automate various kinds of "reasoning", such as the application of rules or the relations of sets and subsets.


title: Knowledge representation and reasoning

text: Examples of knowledge representation formalisms include semantic nets, systems architecture, frames, rules, and ontologies. Examples of automated reasoning engines include inference engines, theorem provers, and classifiers.


title: Knowledge representation and reasoning

text: The earliest work in computerized knowledge representation was focused on general problem-solvers such as the General Problem Solver (GPS) system developed by Allen Newell and Herbert A. Simon in 1959. These systems featured data structures for planning and decomposition. The system would begin with a goal. It would then decompose that goal into sub-goals and then set out to construct strategies that could accomplish each subgoal.


title: Knowledge representation and reasoning

text: In these early days of AI, general search algorithms such as A* were also developed. However, the amorphous problem definitions for systems such as GPS meant that they worked only for very constrained toy domains (e.g. the "blocks world"). In order to tackle non-toy problems, AI researchers such as Ed Feigenbaum and Frederick Hayes-Roth realized that it was necessary to focus systems on more constrained problems.


title: Knowledge representation and reasoning

text: These efforts led to the cognitive revolution in psychology and to the phase of AI focused on knowledge representation that resulted in expert systems in the 1970s and 80s, production systems, frame languages, etc. Rather than general problem solvers, AI changed its focus to expert systems that could match human competence on a specific task, such as medical diagnosis.


title: Knowledge representation and reasoning

text: Expert systems gave us the terminology still in use today where AI systems are divided into a "knowledge base", with facts about the world and rules, and an "inference engine", which applies the rules to the knowledge base in order to answer questions and solve problems. In these early systems the knowledge base tended to be a fairly flat structure, essentially assertions about the values of variables used by the rules.


title: Knowledge representation and reasoning

text: In addition to expert systems, other researchers developed the concept of frame-based languages in the mid-1980s. A frame is similar to an object class: It is an abstract description of a category describing things in the world, problems, and potential solutions. Frames were originally used on systems geared toward human interaction, e.g. understanding natural language and the social settings in which various default expectations such as ordering food in a restaurant narrow the search space and allow the system to choose appropriate responses to dynamic situations.


title: Knowledge representation and reasoning

text: It was not long before the frame communities and the rule-based researchers realized that there was a synergy between their approaches. Frames were good for representing the real world, described as classes, subclasses, slots (data values) with various constraints on possible values. Rules were good for representing and utilizing complex logic such as the process to make a medical diagnosis. Integrated systems were developed that combined frames and rules. One of the most powerful and well known was the 1983 Knowledge Engineering Environment (KEE) from Intellicorp. KEE had a complete rule engine with forward and backward chaining. It also had a complete frame-based knowledge base with triggers, slots (data values), inheritance, and message passing. Although message passing originated in the object-oriented community rather than AI it was quickly embraced by AI researchers as well in environments such as KEE and in the operating systems for Lisp machines from Symbolics, Xerox, and Texas Instruments.


title: Knowledge representation and reasoning

text: The integration of frames, rules, and object-oriented programming was significantly driven by commercial ventures such as KEE and Symbolics spun off from various research projects. At the same time as this was occurring, there was another strain of research that was less commercially focused and was driven by mathematical logic and automated theorem proving. One of the most influential languages in this research was the KL-ONE language of the mid-'80s. KL-ONE was a frame language that had a rigorous semantics, formal definitions for concepts such as an Is-A relation. KL-ONE and languages that were influenced by it such as Loom had an automated reasoning engine that was based on formal logic rather than on IF-THEN rules. This reasoner is called the classifier. A classifier can analyze a set of declarations and infer new assertions, for example, redefine a class to be a subclass or superclass of some other class that wasn't formally specified. In this way the classifier can function as an inference engine, deducing new facts from an existing knowledge base. The classifier can also provide consistency checking on a knowledge base (which in the case of KL-ONE languages is also referred to as an Ontology).


title: Knowledge representation and reasoning

text: Another area of knowledge representation research was the problem of common-sense reasoning. One of the first realizations learned from trying to make software that can function with human natural language was that humans regularly draw on an extensive foundation of knowledge about the real world that we simply take for granted but that is not at all obvious to an artificial agent. Basic principles of common-sense physics, causality, intentions, etc. An example is the frame problem, that in an event driven logic there need to be axioms that state things maintain position from one moment to the next unless they are moved by some external force. In order to make a true artificial intelligence agent that can converse with humans using natural language and can process basic statements and questions about the world, it is essential to represent this kind of knowledge. One of the most ambitious programs to tackle this problem was Doug Lenat's Cyc project. Cyc established its own Frame language and had large numbers of analysts document various areas of common-sense reasoning in that language. The knowledge recorded in Cyc included common-sense models of time, causality, physics, intentions, and many others.


title: Knowledge representation and reasoning

text: The starting point for knowledge representation is the "knowledge representation hypothesis" first formalized by Brian C. Smith in 1985:


title: Knowledge representation and reasoning

text: Any mechanically embodied intelligent process will be structural ingredients that a) we as external observers naturally take to represent a propositional account of the knowledge that the overall process exhibits, and b) independent of such external semantic attribution, play a formal but causal and essential role in engendering the behavior that manifests that knowledge.


title: Knowledge representation and reasoning

text: Currently, one of the most active areas of knowledge representation research are projects associated with the Semantic Web. The Semantic Web seeks to add a layer of semantics (meaning) on top of the current Internet. Rather than indexing web sites and pages via keywords, the Semantic Web creates large ontologies of concepts. Searching for a concept will be more effective than traditional text only searches. Frame languages and automatic classification play a big part in the vision for the future Semantic Web. The automatic classification gives developers technology to provide order on a constantly evolving network of knowledge. Defining ontologies that are static and incapable of evolving on the fly would be very limiting for Internet-based systems. The classifier technology provides the ability to deal with the dynamic environment of the Internet.


title: Knowledge representation and reasoning

text: Recent projects funded primarily by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) have integrated frame languages and classifiers with markup languages based on XML. The Resource Description Framework (RDF) provides the basic capability to define classes, subclasses, and properties of objects. The Web Ontology Language (OWL) provides additional levels of semantics and enables integration with classification engines.


title: Knowledge representation and reasoning

text: Knowledge-representation is a field of artificial intelligence that focuses on designing computer representations that capture information about the world that can be used for solving complex problems.


title: Knowledge representation and reasoning

text: The justification for knowledge representation is that conventional procedural code is not the best formalism to use to solve complex problems. Knowledge representation makes complex software easier to define and maintain than procedural code and can be used in expert systems.


title: Knowledge representation and reasoning

text: For example, talking to experts in terms of business rules rather than code lessens the semantic gap between users and developers and makes development of complex systems more practical.


title: Knowledge representation and reasoning

text: Knowledge representation goes hand in hand with automated reasoning because one of the main purposes of explicitly representing knowledge is to be able to reason about that knowledge, to make inferences, assert new knowledge, etc. Virtually all knowledge representation languages have a reasoning or inference engine as part of the system.


title: Knowledge representation and reasoning

text: A key trade-off in the design of a knowledge representation formalism is that between expressivity and practicality. The ultimate knowledge representation formalism in terms of expressive power and compactness is First Order Logic (FOL). There is no more powerful formalism than that used by mathematicians to define general propositions about the world. However, FOL has two drawbacks as a knowledge representation formalism: ease of use and practicality of implementation. First order logic can be intimidating even for many software developers. Languages that do not have the complete formal power of FOL can still provide close to the same expressive power with a user interface that is more practical for the average developer to understand. The issue of practicality of implementation is that FOL in some ways is too expressive. With FOL it is possible to create statements (e.g. quantification over infinite sets) that would cause a system to never terminate if it attempted to verify them.


title: Knowledge representation and reasoning

text: Thus, a subset of FOL can be both easier to use and more practical to implement. This was a driving motivation behind rule-based expert systems. IF-THEN rules provide a subset of FOL but a very useful one that is also very intuitive. The history of most of the early AI knowledge representation formalisms; from databases to semantic nets to theorem provers and production systems can be viewed as various design decisions on whether to emphasize expressive power or computability and efficiency.


title: Knowledge representation and reasoning

text: In a key 1993 paper on the topic, Randall Davis of MIT outlined five distinct roles to analyze a knowledge representation framework:


title: Knowledge representation and reasoning

text: Knowledge representation and reasoning are a key enabling technology for the Semantic Web. Languages based on the Frame model with automatic classification provide a layer of semantics on top of the existing Internet. Rather than searching via text strings as is typical today, it will be possible to define logical queries and find pages that map to those queries. The automated reasoning component in these systems is an engine known as the classifier. Classifiers focus on the subsumption relations in a knowledge base rather than rules. A classifier can infer new classes and dynamically change the ontology as new information becomes available. This capability is ideal for the ever-changing and evolving information space of the Internet.


title: Knowledge representation and reasoning

text: The Semantic Web integrates concepts from knowledge representation and reasoning with markup languages based on XML. The Resource Description Framework (RDF) provides the basic capabilities to define knowledge-based objects on the Internet with basic features such as Is-A relations and object properties. The Web Ontology Language (OWL) adds additional semantics and integrates with automatic classification reasoners.


title: Knowledge representation and reasoning

text: In the early years of knowledge-based systems the knowledge-bases were fairly small. The knowledge-bases that were meant to actually solve real problems rather than do proof of concept demonstrations needed to focus on well defined problems. So for example, not just medical diagnosis as a whole topic, but medical diagnosis of certain kinds of diseases.