In order to understand and create human-level intelligence I have developed the Polyscheme cognitive architecture to build systems that combine several representation and inference schemes when they think. Polyscheme is based on three principles. First, different (aspects of) situations that…

I propose a common framework that combines three different paradigms in machine learning: generative, discriminative and imitative learning. A generative probabilistic distribution is a principled way to model many machine learning and machine perception problems. Therein, one provides domain specific…

Chapter one is titled "Social Capital and Group Banking." Lending to the poor is costly due to high screening, monitoring, and enforcement costs. Group lending advocates believe individuals are able to select creditworthy peers, monitor the use of loan proceeds,…

Creating common ground in a community of people who do not all know each other is a chicken-and-egg problem: members do not share enough common ground to support the kinds of conversations that help build it. "Folk Computing" technology is…

The objective of the experiments described in this thesis is to perform a detailed spectroscopic study of the dynamics on the A and X state surfaces of 13C2H2 in order to further understand the acetylene - vinylidene isomerization process in…

Cartilage functions as a load bearing and friction reducing material in synovial joints and it is constantly exposed to in vivo loading which is coupled to electromechanical and physicochemical forces. The swelling pressure of cartilage originates from proteoglycans containing negatively…

Chapter 1. Molybdenum Dinitrogen Chemistry: Formation and Reactivity of (Ar[tBu]N)3MoN2- A collection of (Ar[tBu]N)3MoN2- compounds, supported with Na+, K+, Mg2+ and Ca2+ have been prepared through a variety of synthetic routes. In several experiments, N2 was replaced with other small…

It was hypothesized that children with physical disabilities would show a deficit in procedural and declarative knowledge of ball catching compared to age-matched non-disabled children. The first group of children consisted of sixteen children with physical disabilities, three girls and…

The high rate of sexually transmitted diseases and teen pregnancies among the Cree adolescents indicate that this population frequently engages in unprotected sexual activities. AIDS is a critical health problem worldwide and AIDS contamination within a Cree community could be…

The main objective of the present work is to investigate the nature of the cognitive processes responsible for the problem-solving operations of novices, intermediates, and experts in a semantically rich and complex domain, i.e. electronics trouble shooting, in relation to…