To determine why something has stopped working, it's helpful to know how it was supposed to work in the first place. This simple fact underlies recent work on a number of systems that do diagnosis from knowledge about the internal…

There are many situations in which a very detailed low-level description encodes, through a hierarchical organization, a recognizable higher-order pattern. The macro-molecular structural conformations of proteins exhibit higher order regularities whose recognition is complicated by many factors. ARIADNE searches for…

Many systems have been developed for constructing decision trees from collections of examples. Although the decision trees generated by these methods are accurate and efficient, they often suffer the disadvantage of excessive complexity that can render them incomprehensible to experts.…

Intelligent agents in the physical world must work from incomplete information due to partial knowledge and limited resources. An agent copes with these limitations by applying rules of conjecture to make reasonable assumptions about what is known. Circumscription, proposed by…

Consider a world of 'objects.' Our goal is to place these objects into categories that are useful to the observer using sensory data. One criterion for utility is that the categories allow the observer to infer the object's potential behaviors,…

This paper demonstrates that it is possible to generate a reasonably accurate coordinate system on randomly distributed processors, using only local information and local communication. By coordinate systems we imply that each element assigns itself a logical coordinate that maps…

The need for robust and easily extensible systems for word sense disambiguation coupled with successes in training systems for a variety of tasks using large on-line corpora has led to extensive research into corpus-based statistical approaches to this problem. Promising…

At a time when it is clear that climate change adaptation and mitigation are failing, this book examines how our assumptions about (valid and usable) knowledge are preventing effective climate action. Through a cross-disciplinary, empirically-based analysis of climate science and…

A key problem in model-based object recognition is selection, namely, the problem of isolating regions in an image that are likely to come from a single object. This isolation can be either based solely on image data (data-driven) or can…

The preservation, management, and sharing of indigenous knowledge is crucial for social and economic development in ruralAfrica. The high rate of illiteracy (print-based) in rural Africa and the exclusion of indigenous knowledge from Western education add to the information gap…