by Glenn D. Bartkowski., Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, System Design & Management Program, 2001., Includes bibliographical references (leaves 68-69).

Current reasoning systems attempt to model an agent's knowledge and interaction with its environment in a symbolic manner. This environment, its world is generally dynamic and changing due to natural evolution or the actions of other agents that are a…

The goal of this work involves the developing of an argumentation-based formalism that an agent could use for constructing plans. In this formalism, agents will have certain knowledge about the world, and a set of actions that they will be…

The design of intelligent agents is a key issue for many applications. Although there is no universally accepted de nition of intelligence, a notion of rational agency has been proposed as an alternative for the characterization of intelligent agency.
Modeling…

Artificial Intelligence has long dealt with the issue of finding a suitable formalization for reasoning with incomplete and potentially inconsistent information. Defeasible argumentation [SL92,CML00,PraVre99] has proven to be a successful approach in many respects, since it naturally resembles many aspects…

In the last years there has been an increasing demand of a variety of logical systems, prompted
mostly by applications of logic in AI, logic programming and other related areas. Labeled Deductive
Systems (LDS) were developed as a °exible methodology…

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has long dealt with the issue of finding a suitable formalization for commonsense reasoning. Defeasible argumentation has proven to be a successful approach in many respects, proving to be a confluence point for many alternative logical frameworks.…

Humans recognize optical reflectance properties of surfaces such as metal, plastic, or paper from a single image without knowledge of illumination. We develop a machine vision system to perform similar recognition tasks automatically. Reflectance estimation under unknown, arbitrary illumination proves…

Flow Accelerated Corrosion (FAC) is the most prevalent material degradation mechanism for low carbon steel in steam-water flow systems. The band of uncertainty in predictions of wear rate due to FAC spans one to two orders of magnitude. Such a…

We identify different kinds of relevance relations between formulas that emerge in the process of belief revision. Informal definitions for alternative notions of relevance are suggested and a set of schemas and intuitive postulates for formalizing these notions are proposed.