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 natural language system START. The system analyzes English text and automatically transforms it into an appropriate representation, the knowledge base, which incorporates the information found in the text. The user gains access to information stored in…

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…

The Listener is an automated system that unintrusively performs knowledge acquisition from informal input. The Listener develops a coherent internal representation of a description from an initial set of disorganized, imprecise, incomplete, ambiguous, and possibly inconsistent statements. The Listener can…

The so-called diversity-multiplexing tradeoff characterizes the fundamental interaction between the robustness and capacity gains obtainable from multiple-input and
multiple-output (MIMO) systems in fading environments. This thesis develops practical schemes for approaching the optimal tradeoff in various delay and complexity
regimes.…

Most studies on Japanese supplier-automaker relationships have focused on the nature of
the dyadic inter-firm relationship and the performance of the assembler. We examine the
relationship between a Japanese supplier's "customer scope strategy" (i.e. number of
customers) and the supplier's…

I have invented "Internet Fish," a novel class of resource-discovery tools designed to help users extract useful information from the Internet. Internet Fish (IFish) are semi-autonomous, persistent information brokers; users deploy individual IFish to gather and refine information related to…

One very useful idea in AI research has been the notion of an explicit model of a problem situation. Procedural deduction languages, such as PLANNER, have been valuable tools for building these models. But PLANNER and its relatives are very…

Electrical circuit designers seldom create really new topologies or use old ones in a novel way. Most designs are known combinations of common configurations tailored for the particular problem at hand. In this thesis I show that much of the…

A series-parallel directed acyclic graph, or SP-dag, contains nodes that are either in series or logically in parallel. We present a data structure and algorithm to efficiently determine, in a single serial walk of the dag, whether two nodes are…