Much Learning is done by way of studying precedents and exercises. A teacher supplies a story, gives a problem, and expects a student both to solve a problem and to discover a principle. The student must find the correspondence between…

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…

As advances in computer architecture and changing economics make feasible machines with large-scale parallelism, Artificial Intelligence will require new ways of thinking about computation that can exploit parallelism effectively. We present the actor model of computation as being appropriate for…

The goal of this thesis is to apply the computational approach to motor learning, i.e., describe the constraints that enable performance improvement with experience and also the constraints that must be satisfied by a motor learning system, describe what is…

his dissertation analyzes how local knowledge improves environmental decisions. The premise is that controlling pollution and addressing public health disparities are not problems that professionals alone can solve. Concerned lay publics, especially low-income populations and people of color that experience…

This paper descries D-SCRIPT, a language for representing knowledge in artificial intelligence programs. D-SCRIPT contains a powerful formalism for descriptions, which permits the representation of statements that are problematical for other systems. Particular attention is paid to problems of opaque…

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…

by Robert W. Sommer., Thesis (M.S.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management, 1992., Title as it appears in the M.I.T. Graduate List, June 1992: Building internal knowledge networks in multinational corporations, a study of cross-border research and development., Includes…

TYPICAL is a package for describing and making automatic inferences about a broad class of SCHEME predicate functions. These functions, called types following popular usage, delineate classes of primitive SCHEME objects, composite data structures, and abstract descriptions. TYPICAL types are…

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…