This report investigates some techinques appropriate to representing the knowledge necessary for understanding a class of electronic machines -- radio receivers. A computational performance model - WATSON - is presented. WATSONs task is to isolate failures in radio receivers whose…

Freud's theory of jokes explains how they overcome the mental "censors" that make it hard for us to think "forbidden" thoughts. But his theory did not work so well for humorous nonsense as for other comical subjects. In this essay…

This paper presents an overview of a theory of discourse structure, and discusses a model for assimilating text into a frame-based data structure. The model has been applied to the analysis of news articles. The theory assumes sentences contain links…

This paper deals with the "Calculus of Knowledge", an extension of the propositional calculus in which one may reason about what other people know. Semantic and Syntactic systems are developed, certain theorems are proven, and a formal solution in the…

This thesis proposes a methodology for the design of man-machine interfaces by combining top-down and bottom-up processes in vision. From a computational perspective, we propose that the scientific-cognitive question of combining top-down and bottom-up knowledge is similar to the engineering…

The report describes a recognition system called GROPER, which performs grouping by using distance and relative orientation constraints that estimate the likelihood of different edges in an image coming from the same object. The thesis presents both a theoretical analysis…

The goal of the Programmer's Apprentice project is to develop a theory of how expert programmers analyze, synthesize, modify, explain, specify, verify, and document programs. This research goal overlaps both artificial intelligence and software engineering. From the viewpoint of artificial…

Build is a tool for keeping modular systems in a consistent state by managing the construction tasks (e.g. compilation, linking, etc.) associated with such systems. It employs a user supplied system model and a procedural description of a task to…

Much Learning is done by way of studying precedents and exercises. A teacher supplies a story, gives a problem, and expects a student both to solve a problem and to discover a principle. The student must find the correspondence between…

This thesis describes a methodology, a representation, and an implemented program for troubleshooting digital circuit boards at roughly the level of expertise one might expect in a human novice. Existing methods for model-based troubleshooting have not scaled up to deal…