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…

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…

The goal of the work reported here is to capture the commonsense knowledge of non-expert human contributors. Achieving this goal will enable more intelligent human-computer interfaces and pave the way for computers to reason about our world. In the domain…

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…

Control of machines that exhibit flexibility becomes important when designers attempt to push the state of the art with faster, lighter machines. Three steps are necessary for the control of a flexible planet. First, a good model of the plant…

This report describes a computer system that creates simple computer animation in response to high-level, vague, and incomplete descriptions of films. It makes its films by collecting and evaluating suggestions from several different bodies of knowledge. The order in which…

Explanation-based Generalization requires that the learner obtain an explanation of why a precedent exemplifies a concept. It is, therefore, useless if the system fails to find this explanation. However, it is not necessary to give up and resort to purely…

This paper describes ARLO, a representation language loosely modelled after Greiner and Lenant's RLL-1. ARLO is a structure-based representation language for describing structure-based representation languages, including itself. A given representation language is specified in ARLO by a collection of structures…

A fundamental problem in artificial intelligence is obtaining coherent behavior in rule-based problem solving systems. A good quantitative measure of coherence is time behavior; a system that never, in retrospect, applied a rule needlessly is certainly coherent; a system suffering…

We wish to design a diagnostic for a device from knowledge of its structure and function. the diagnostic should achieve both coverage of the faults that can occur in the device, and should strive to achieve specificity in its diagnosis…