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…

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…

This thesis describes a methodology, a representation, and an implemented program for troubleshooting digital circuit boards at roughly the level of expertise one might expect in a human novice. Existing methods for model-based troubleshooting have not scaled up to deal…

All intelligence relies on search --- for example, the search for an intelligent agent's next action. Search is only likely to succeed in resource-bounded agents if they have already been biased towards finding the right answer. In artificial agents, the…

In this thesis we study the general problem of reconstructing a function, defined on a finite lattice from a set of incomplete, noisy and/or ambiguous observations. The goal of this work is to demonstrate the generality and practical value of…

We have developed a compiler for the lexically-scoped dialect of LISP known as SCHEME. The compiler knows relatively little about specific data manipulation primitives such as arithmetic operators, but concentrates on general issues of environment and control. Rather than having…

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…