The construction of expert problem-solving systems requires the development of techniques for using modular representations of knowledge without encountering combinatorial explosions in the solution effort. This report describes an approach to dealing with this problem based on making some knowledge…

Reasoning about motion is an important part of our commonsense knowledge, involving fluent spatial reasoning. This work studies the qualitative and geometric knowledge required to reason in a world that consists of balls moving through space constrained by collisions with…

Traditional scheduling algorithms (using the techniques of PERT charts, decision analysis or operations research) require well-defined quantitative, complete sets of constraints. They are insufficient for scheduling situations where the problem description is ill-defined, involving incomplete, possibly inconsistent and generally qualitative…

This thesis demonstrates how the use of a global context can improve the power of a local character recognizer. The global context considered is a computer tutor of high school algebra that observes a student working algebra problems on a…

This report is concerned with the problem of achieving flexibility (additivity, modularity) and efficiency (performance, expertise) simultaneously in one AI program. It deals with the domain of elementary electronic circuit design. The proposed solution is to provide a deduction-driven problem…

This paper demonstrates the importance of knowledge for effective
management of outsourcing. Drawing on an empirical study on automakers?
management of supplier involvement in product development in Japan, this paper shows
that the level of own knowledge is critical for…

The next generation of artificial intelligence programs will require the ability to organize knowledge as groups of active objects. Each object should have only its own local expertise, the ability to operate in parallel with other objects, and the ability…

How much information about the shape of an object can be inferred from its image? In particular, can the shape of an object be reconstructed by measuring the light it reflects from points on its surface? These questions were raised…

The work reported here lies in the area of overlap between artificial intelligence software engineering. As research in artificial intelligence, it is a step towards a model of problem solving in the domain of programming. In particular, this work focuses…

The computational metaphor which proposes the comparison of processes of mind to realizable or imaginable computer activities suggests a number of educational concerns. This paper discusses some of those concerns including procedural modes of knowledge representation and control knowledge ??owing…