As advances in computer architecture and changing economics make feasible machines with large-scale parallelism, Artificial Intelligence will require new ways of thinking about computation that can exploit parallelism effectively. We present the actor model of computation as being appropriate for…

This paper describes some problems and opportunities associated with conceptual modeling for the kind of "open systems" we foresee must and will be increasingly recognized as a central line of computer system development. Computer applications will be based on communication…

We prove that the scale map of the zero-crossings of almost all signals filtered by the second derivative of a gaussian of variable size determines the signal uniquely, up to a constant scaling and a harmonic function. Our proof provides…

Well-known methods for solving the shape-from-shading problem require knowledge of the reflectance map. Here we show how the shape-from-shading problem can be solved when the reflectance map is not available, but is known to have a given form with some…

Well-known methods for solving the shape-from-shading problem require knowledge of the reflectance map. Here we show how the shape-from-shading problem can be solved when the reflectance map is not available, but is known to have a given form with some…

Morphological analysis requires knowledge of the stems, affixes, combnatory patterns, and spelling-change processes of a language. The computational difficulty of the task can be clarified by investigating the computational characteristics of specific models of morphologial processing. The use of finite-state…

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…

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…