This thesis describes a methodology, a representation, and an implemented program for troubleshooting digital circuit boards at roughly the level of expertise one might expect in a human novice. Existing methods for model-based troubleshooting have not scaled up to deal…

Ontic is an interactive system for developing and verifying mathematics. Ontic's verification mechanism is capable of automatically finding and applying information from a library containing hundreds of mathematical facts. Starting with only the axioms of Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory, the Ontic…

The activity of designing and developing large, complex, discrete, physical, and engineered products faces the challenges in the physical product system, the organization of people, and the larger systems in which the product resides-the natural and societal systems. This thesis…

In a Communication Bootstrapping system, peer components with different perceptual worlds invent symbols and syntax based on correlations between their percepts. I propose that Communication Bootstrapping can also be used to acquire functional definitions of words and causal reasoning knowledge.…

When faced with challenging technical problems, R&D personnel would often turn to technical papers to seek inspiration for a solution. The building of a corpus of such papers and the easy retrieval of relevant papers by the user in his…

We prove that the scale map of the zero-crossings of almost all signals filtered by the second derivative of a gaussian of variable size determines the signal uniquely, up to a constant scaling and a harmonic function. Our proof provides…

KAM is a computer program that can automatically plan, monitor, and interpret numerical experiments with Hamiltonian systems with two degrees of freedom. The program has recently helped solve an open problem in hydrodynamics. Unlike other approaches to qualitative reasoning about…

by Lori Faith Lamel., Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 1988., Bibliography: leaves 140-150.

by Robert J. Grochowski., Thesis (M.S.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Civil Engineering, 1988., Includes bibliographical references.

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…