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…

The typical subroutines that compute $\\sin(x)$ and $\\exp(x)$ bear little resemblance to our mathematical knowledge of these functions: they are composed of concrete arithmetic expressions that include many mysterious numerical constants. Instead of programming these subroutines conventionally, we can express…

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…

The Phase Space is a powerful tool for representing and reasoning about the qualitative behavior of nonlinear dynamical systems. Significant physical phenomena of the dynamical system---periodicity, recurrence, stability and the like---are reflected by outstanding geometric features of the trajectories in…

Obtaining exact depth from binocular disparities is hard if camera calibration is needed. We will show that qualitative depth information can be obtained from stereo disparities with almost no computations and with no prior knowledge (or computation) of camera parameters.…

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…

There has been a long-standing desire in computer science for a way of collecting and using libraries of standard software components. The limited success in actually doing this stems not from any resistance to the idea, nor from any lack…

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.

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…