by Stephen R. Balzac., Thesis (M.S.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 1987., Title as it appeared in M.I.T. Graduate List, June 1987: An interactive knowledge classifier., Bibliography: leaves 111-112.

The program described here takes as its input a collection of lines, vertices and surfaces describing a scene, and analyzes the scene into a composition of three-dimensional objects. The program does not need to know the form (model, or pattern)…

Continued advances in the semiconductor industry will require the introduction of new materials and processes concurrent with shrinking device dimensions. These simultaneous demands drastically reduce margins for error and necessitate an increasingly quantitative understanding of semiconductor processes. Leaders of the…

This dissertation investigates how rapid learning occurs in high technology industries, many of which operate in what Bourgeois and Eisenhardt (1988) term "high velocity environments." The dissertation consists of three empirical studies, which follow the method of extended case study…

All intelligence relies on search --- for example, the search for an intelligent agent's next action. Search is only likely to succeed in resource-bounded agents if they have already been biased towards finding the right answer. In artificial agents, the…

This paper analyzes the suitability of reinforcement learning (RL) for both programming and adapting situated agents. We discuss two RL algorithms: Q-learning and the Bucket Brigade. We introduce a special case of the Bucket Brigade, and analyze and compare its…

We develop a novel autonomous control synthesis strategy called Phase Space Navigator for the automatic synthesis of nonlinear control systems. The Phase Space Navigator generates global control laws by synthesizing flow shapes of dynamical systems and planning and navigating system…

We develop a qualitative method for understanding and representing phase space structures of complex systems and demonstrate the method with a program, MAPS --- Modeler and Analyzer for Phase Spaces, using deep domain knowledge of dynamical system theory. Given a…

Modem society requires reliable and safe operation of its infrastructure. Policymakers believe that, in many industries, competitive markets and regulatory incentives will result in system performance superior to that under command-and-control regulation. Analytical techniques to evaluate the reliability and safety…

A key problem in model-based object recognition is selection, namely, the problem of determining which regions in the image are likely to come from a single object. In this paper we present an approach that extracts and uses color region…