This thesis confronts the nature of the process of learning an intellectual skill, the ability to solve problems efficiently in a particular domain of discourse. The investigation is synthetic; a computational performance model, HACKER, is displayed. Hacker is a computer…

One of the key aspects in the design of an architecture for autonomous agents is the way in which beleifs are revised in the face of new information. An intelligent agent must be prepared to handle new information (be it…

A fundamental problem in artificial intelligence is obtaining coherent behavior in rule-based problem solving systems. A good quantitative measure of coherence is time behavior; a system that never, in retrospect, applied a rule needlessly is certainly coherent; a system suffering…

We present a socially inspired approach that allows agents in Multi-Agent Systems to speed up their own learning process through communication. Thereby, they are able to trade off impact of knowledge by mutation dependent on the recent performance of the…

The Knowledge-Based Editor in Emacs (KBEmacs) is the current demonstration system implemented as part of the Programmer's Apprentice project. KBEmacs is capable of acting as a semi-expert assistant to a person who is writing a program ??king over some parts…

Sensors are increasingly being used for continuous monitoring purposes, the process of which generates huge volumes of data that need to be mined for interesting events in real-time. The purpose of this research is to develop a method to identify…

We analyze an alternative to the standard rationalizability requirement for observed choices by considering non-deteriorating selections. A selection function is a generalization of a choice function where selected alternatives may depend on a reference (or status quo) alternative in addition…

We identify conditions under which preferences over sets of consumption opportunities can be reduced to preferences over bundles of \"commodities\". We distinguish ordinal bundles, whose coordinates are defined up to monotone transformations, from cardinal bundles, whose coordinates are defined up…

We provide a survey of the literature on ranking sets of objects. The interpretations of those set rankings include those employed in the theory of choice under complete uncertainty, rankings of opportunity sets, set rankings that appear in matching theory,…

Scientific knowledge and skills acquired by students during pre-university education has diminished since legislative changes were introduced in Spain during the 1990's. As a result, education in the field of science is suffering. Some initiatives are currently underway in Great…