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…

The dissertation examines aesthetic, scientific and occult evocations of fluids such as air at the turn of the 20th century. Eighteenth century experimental philosophy postulated so-called "imponderable fluids" understood as instances of a subtle matter that fills empty space. The…

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…

This paper presents a discussion of means of describing the discourse and its components which makes speech act interpretation and reference disambiguation possible with minimal search of the knowledge in the database. A portion of this paper will consider how…

Visual recognition remains one of the grand goals of artificial intelligence research. One major challenge is endowing machines with human ability to recognize tens of thousands of categories. Moving beyond previous work that is mostly focused on hundreds of categories,…

This dissertation is about family history and the constitution of the social among the Abenaki, an aboriginal people often associated with the Odanak reserve in southern Quebec. It is an ethnography of belonging among a people whose status as aboriginal…

In today’s world, the European Union is searching for a delicate balance between linguistic integration and diversity. Thanks to international knowledge transmission and exchange as well as co-operation and mobility beyond national boundaries, English has now become the preferred option…

The study of liquid metallic alloys using first principles Molecular Dynamic (MD) requires the knowledge of the liquid phase density that is not easy to obtain experimentally. In this work we calculate the densities for the liquid phase of eutectic…

P>1. A key aspect of the ecology and evolution of adaptive prey responses to predator risk is the timing by which the former develop a defensive trait in response to inducing signals released by the latter. This property, called reactivity,…

We updated the floristic checklist of the Nizanda region, Isthmus of Tehuantepec (southern Mexico), characterized the occurring plant communities based on dominant species, and described the region's flora according to life form, growth form, growth type, and growth habit spectra.…