Most knowledge representation languages are based on classes and taxonomic relationships between classes. Taxonomic hierarchies without defaults or exceptions are semantically equivalent to a collection of formulas in first order predicate calculus. Although designers of knowledge representation languages often express…

This paper reports work in progress on an experimental text editor called CREF, the Cross Referenced Editing Facility. CREF deals with chunks of text, called segments, which may have associated features such as keywords or various kinds of links to…

With the rapid increase in low-cost and sophisticated digital technology the need for techniques to authenticate digital material will become more urgent. In this paper we address the problem of authenticating digital signals assuming no explicit prior knowledge of the…

We consider the scheduling problem of minimizing the average weighted completion time of n jobs with release dates on a single machine. We first study two linear programming relaxations of the problem, one based on a time-indexed formulation, the other…

This thesis developed and applied tools to bridge the gap between available data and action for urban air quality management, focusing on strategies to reduce particle concentrations. One of the principal thesis contributions is a Bayesian method to exploit the…

This paper presents an adaptive learning model for market-making under the reinforcement learning framework. Reinforcement learning is a learning technique in which agents aim to maximize the long-term accumulated rewards. No knowledge of the market environment, such as the order…

This thesis considers three complications that arise from applying reinforcement learning to a real-world application. In the process of using reinforcement learning to build an adaptive electronic market-maker, we find the sparsity of data, the partial observability of the domain,…

Humans recognize optical reflectance properties of surfaces such as metal, plastic, or paper from a single image without knowledge of illumination. We develop a machine vision system to perform similar recognition tasks automatically. Reflectance estimation under unknown, arbitrary illumination proves…

We have developed a technique called RISE (Random Image Structure Evolution), by which one may systematically sample continuous paths in a high-dimensional image space. A basic RISE sequence depicts the evolution of an object's image from a random field, along…

All intelligence relies on search --- for example, the search for an intelligent agent's next action. Search is only likely to succeed in resource-bounded agents if they have already been biased towards finding the right answer. In artificial agents, the…