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…

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…

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…

This report describes a domain independent reasoning system. The system uses a frame-based knowledge representation language and various reasoning techniques including constraint propagation, progressive refinement, natural deduction and explicit control of reasoning. A computational architecture based on active objects which…

In this thesis we study the general problem of reconstructing a function, defined on a finite lattice from a set of incomplete, noisy and/or ambiguous observations. The goal of this work is to demonstrate the generality and practical value of…

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…

A system for visual recognition is described, with implications for the general problem of representation of knowledge to assist control. The immediate objective is a computer system that will recognize objects in a visual scene, specifically hammers. The computer receives…

This report develops a conceptual framework in which to talk about mathematical knowledge. There are several broad categories of mathematical knowledge: results which contain the traditional logical aspects of mathematics; examples which contain illustrative material; and concepts which include formal…

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…