This thesis describes a methodology, a representation, and an implemented program for troubleshooting digital circuit boards at roughly the level of expertise one might expect in a human novice. Existing methods for model-based troubleshooting have not scaled up to deal…

Supporting quality learning in online discussion forums is an intricate task, particularly for e-tutors aspiring to facilitate vigorous interactive learning environments. I argue that the key to successful online discussion forums is the ability of e-tutors to provide learners with…

This paper examines the issues and the solutions that have been studied in database (DB) integration research and tries to draw lessons from them for knowledge base (KB) integration.

This report shows how knowledge about the visual world can be built into a shape representation in the form of a descriptive vocabulary making explicit the important geometrical relationships comprising objects' shapes. Two computational tools are offered: (1) Shapestokens are…

This paper describes a natural language system START. The system analyzes English text and automatically transforms it into an appropriate representation, the knowledge base, which incorporates the information found in the text. The user gains access to information stored in…

This thesis presents a new approach to building a design for testability (DFT) system. The system takes a digital circuit description, finds out the problems in testing it, and suggests circuit modifications to correct those problems. The key contributions of…

Current approaches to generation for machine translation make use of direct-replacement templates, large grammars, and knowledge-based inferencing techniques. Not only are rules language-specific, but they are too simplistic to handle sentences that exhibit more complex phenomena. Furthermore, these systems are…

Dynamic systems which undergo rapid motion can excite natural frequencies that lead to residual vibration at the end of motion. This work presents a method to shape force profiles that reduce excitation energy at the natural frequencies in order to…

This thesis describes two programs for generating tests for digital circuits that exploit several kinds of expert knowledge not used by previous approaches. First, many test generation problems can be solved efficiently using operation relations, a novel representation of circuit…

The report describes a recognition system called GROPER, which performs grouping by using distance and relative orientation constraints that estimate the likelihood of different edges in an image coming from the same object. The thesis presents both a theoretical analysis…