We have developed a method and prototype program for assisting two experts in their attempts to construct a single, consensus knowledge base. We show that consensus building can be effectively facilitated by a debugging approach that identifies, explains, and resolves…

This paper examines the issues and the solutions that have been studied in database (DB) integration research and tries to draw lessons from them for knowledge base (KB) integration.

(cont.) to the verifier., We consider an implementation of a weakened notion of zero-knowledge (weak ZK) where the simulator is also allowed to depend on the distinguisher as well, so this type of ZK entails exhibiting an efficient simulator for…

There are many situations in which a very detailed low-level description encodes, through a hierarchical organization, a recognizable higher-order pattern. The macro-molecular structural conformations of proteins exhibit higher order regularities whose recognition is complicated by many factors. ARIADNE searches for…

Many systems have been developed for constructing decision trees from collections of examples. Although the decision trees generated by these methods are accurate and efficient, they often suffer the disadvantage of excessive complexity that can render them incomprehensible to experts.…

The object oriented programming style used in the Smalltalk and Actor languages is available in Lisp Machine Lisp, and used by the Lisp Machine software system. It is used to perform generic operations on objects. Part of its implementation is…

PATN is a design for a machine problem solver which uses an augmented transition network (ATN) to represent planning knowledge. In order to explore PATN's potential as a theory of human problem solving, a linguistic approach to protocol analysis is…

Intelligent agents in the physical world must work from incomplete information due to partial knowledge and limited resources. An agent copes with these limitations by applying rules of conjecture to make reasonable assumptions about what is known. Circumscription, proposed by…

Consider a world of 'objects.' Our goal is to place these objects into categories that are useful to the observer using sensory data. One criterion for utility is that the categories allow the observer to infer the object's potential behaviors,…

To determine why something has stopped working, it's helpful to know how it was supposed to work in the first place. This simple fact underlies recent work on a number of systems that do diagnosis from knowledge about the internal…