The Artificial Intelligence Laboratory proposes to continue its work on a group of closely interconnected projects, all bearing on questions about how to make computers able to use more sophisticated kinds of knowledge to solve difficult problems. This proposal explains…

Computers open up new ways to think about knowledge and learning. Learning computer science should draw upon and feed these new approaches. In a previous paper called "Leading a Child to a Computer Culture" I discuss some ways to do…

This thesis considers three complications that arise from applying reinforcement learning to a real-world application. In the process of using reinforcement learning to build an adaptive electronic market-maker, we find the sparsity of data, the partial observability of the domain,…

In recent years, researchers in artificial intelligence have become interested in replicating human physical reasoning talents in computers. One of the most important skills in this area is predicting how physical systems will behave. This thesis discusses an implemented program…

This paper describes a system for the computer understanding of English. The system answers questions, executes commands, and accepts information in normal English dialog. It uses semantic information and context to understand discourse and to disambiguate sentences. It combines a…

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 demonstrates that it is possible to generate a reasonably accurate coordinate system on randomly distributed processors, using only local information and local communication. By coordinate systems we imply that each element assigns itself a logical coordinate that maps…

(cont.) which is expected, given their additional knowledge resources. The respondents' urgency in looking for the relevant knowledge is the primary explanation for this difference between the two networks. This difference in knowledge networking among the different groups did not…

A system for visual recognition is described, with implications for the general problem of representation of knowledge to assist control. The immediate objective is a computer system that will recognize objects in a visual scene, specifically hammers. The computer receives…

by Kimberly G. Waters., Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2002., Includes bibliographical references (p. 45-46).