his dissertation analyzes how local knowledge improves environmental decisions. The premise is that controlling pollution and addressing public health disparities are not problems that professionals alone can solve. Concerned lay publics, especially low-income populations and people of color that experience…

We develop a qualitative method for understanding and representing phase space structures of complex systems and demonstrate the method with a program, MAPS --- Modeler and Analyzer for Phase Spaces, using deep domain knowledge of dynamical system theory. Given a…

Automated Program Analysis is the process of discovering decompositions of a system into sub-units such that the behavior of the whole program can be inferred from the behavior of its parts. Analysis can be employed to increase the explanatory power…

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,…

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 wish to design a diagnostic for a device from knowledge of its structure and function. the diagnostic should achieve both coverage of the faults that can occur in the device, and should strive to achieve specificity in its diagnosis…

The thesis explores architectural form generation through two behavior based artificial intelligence approaches: the communication of agents in an unpredictable simulation system, and the codification of information within an evolutionary process. Both concepts stem from the evaluation of potentially definable…

This thesis describes the development of a model-based vision system that exploits hierarchies of both object structure and object scale. The focus of the research is to use these hierarchies to achieve robust recognition based on effective organization and indexing…

The work reported here lies in the area of overlap between artificial intelligence software engineering. As research in artificial intelligence, it is a step towards a model of problem solving in the domain of programming. In particular, this work focuses…

Computers have dramatically changed the nature of structural engineering practice by shifting work from process-oriented tasks, such as performing hand calculations and drafting, to structural modeling and interpretation of computer results. To perform these new functions, engineers need to have…