Over the past few years, the amount of electronic information available from the Internet has increased dramatically. Unfortunately, the search tools currently available for retrieving and filtering such information remain inadequate in balancing relevance and comprehensiveness. This work proposes a…

Passively accepting measurements of the world is not enough, as the data obtained is always incomplete, and the inferences made from it uncertain to a degree which is often unacceptable. Machines that operate autonomously will always be faced with this…

The Internet's growing acceptance as a key medium to educate people is the main focus of this thesis. Although distance education has been a popular learning method since the end of the 19th Century, never before has technology made it…

This thesis describes an algorithm for detecting moving objects in images taken from a moving robot. The algorithm distinguishes itself from other similar, existing solutions in that it lends itself to a fast implementation, yet provides results which are reliable…

Computational neuroanatomy is an exciting new area where digital tools are used with great advantage in the analysis of structure and function of the brain. One major area of research in this field involves automatically creating computerized representations of the…

The incorporation of temporally extended actions, or options , into the reinforcement learning framework has proven to be useful in planning and knowledge representation. Options provide a form of temporal abstraction, as they represent courses of action of variable duration.…

"Model Driven Software Development" is a recent trend in development of software-intensive systems. In the Model Driven Software Development process, all knowledge pertaining to the software system to be built is represented in the form of models, in the right…

People are efficient when they make decisions under uncertainty, even when their decisions have long-term ramifications, or when their knowledge and their perception of the environment are uncertain. We are able to experiment with the environment and learn, improving our…

A cis-regulatory module (CRM) is a DNA region of a few hundred base pairs that consists of clustering of several transcription factor binding sites and regulates the expression of a nearby gene. This thesis presents a new computational approach to…

Narratives play a significant role in many computer games, and this is especially true in genres such as role-playing and adventure games. Even so, many games have narratives which possess a certain number of flaws that can deteriorate the playing…