AI planning benefits greatly from the use of temporally-extended or macro-actions. Macro-actions allow for faster and more efficient planning as well as the reuse of knowledge from previous solutions. In recent years, a significant amount of research has been devoted…

Most routers, to our knowledge, are difficult for researchers and students without root privileges to implement or modify, because their implementation is in kernel space. GINI is an innovative platform on conventional PCs, which brings the whole functionality of a…

In this thesis, we introduce SableJIT, a retargetable just-in-time compiler for the SableVM Java virtual machine. Our design attempts to minimize the amount of work required to port (or to retarget) our compiler to a new platform. We accomplish this…

Assessing software quality is fundamental in the software developing field. Most software quality characteristics cannot be measured before a certain period of use of the software product. However, they can be predicted or estimated based on other measurable quality attributes.…

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…