The 1990 progress report and future plans

This document describes the progress and plans of the Artificial Intelligence Research Branch (RIA) at ARC in 1990. Activities span a range from basic scientific research to engineering development and to fielded NASA applications, particularly those applications that are enabled by basic research carried out at RIA. Work is conducted in-house and through collaborative partners in academia and industry. Our major focus is on a limited number of research themes with a dual commitment to technical excellence and proven applicability to NASA short, medium, and long-term problems. RIA acts as the Agency's lead organization for research aspects of artificial intelligence, working closely with a second research laboratory at JPL and AI applications groups at all NASA centers

An Architectural Approach to Ensuring Consistency in Hierarchical Execution

Hierarchical task decomposition is a method used in many agent systems to organize agent knowledge. This work shows how the combination of a hierarchy and persistent assertions of knowledge can lead to difficulty in maintaining logical consistency in asserted knowledge. We explore the problematic consequences of persistent assumptions in the reasoning process and introduce novel potential solutions. Having implemented one of the possible solutions, Dynamic Hierarchical Justification, its effectiveness is demonstrated with an empirical analysis

Artificial Intelligence Research Branch future plans

This report contains information on the activities of the Artificial Intelligence Research Branch (FIA) at NASA Ames Research Center (ARC) in 1992, as well as planned work in 1993. These activities span a range from basic scientific research through engineering development to fielded NASA applications, particularly those applications that are enabled by basic research carried out in FIA. Work is conducted in-house and through collaborative partners in academia and industry. All of our work has research themes with a dual commitment to technical excellence and applicability to NASA short, medium, and long-term problems. FIA acts as the Agency's lead organization for research aspects of artificial intelligence, working closely with a second research laboratory at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and AI applications groups throughout all NASA centers. This report is organized along three major research themes: (1) Planning and Scheduling: deciding on a sequence of actions to achieve a set of complex goals and determining when to execute those actions and how to allocate resources to carry them out; (2) Machine Learning: techniques for forming theories about natural and man-made phenomena; and for improving the problem-solving performance of computational systems over time; and (3) Research on the acquisition, representation, and utilization of knowledge in support of diagnosis design of engineered systems and analysis of actual systems

Knowledge-based design support and inductive learning

Designing and learning are closely related activities in that design as an ill-structure problem involves identifying the problem of the design as well as finding its solutions. A knowledge-based design support system should support learning by capturing and reusing design knowledge. This thesis addresses two fundamental problems in computational support to design activities: the development of an intelligent design support system architecture and the integration of inductive learning techniques in this architecture.This research is motivated by the belief that (1) the early stage of the design process can be modelled as an incremental learning process in which the structure of a design problem or the product data model of an artefact is developed using inductive learning techniques, and (2) the capability of a knowledge-based design support system can be enhanced by accumulating and storing reusable design product and process information.In order to incorporate inductive learning techniques into a knowledge-based design model and an integrated knowledge-based design support system architecture, the computational techniques for developing a knowledge-based design support system architecture and the role of inductive learning in Al-based design are investigated. This investigation gives a background to the development of an incremental learning model for design suitable for a class of design tasks whose structures are not well known initially.This incremental learning model for design is used as a basis to develop a knowledge-based design support system architecture that can be used as a kernel for knowledge-based design applications. This architecture integrates a number of computational techniques to support the representation and reasoning of design knowledge. In particular, it integrates a blackboard control system with an assumption-based truth maintenance system in an object-oriented environment to support the exploration of multiple design solutions by supporting the exploration and management of design contexts.As an integral part of this knowledge-based design support architecture, a design concept learning system utilising a number of unsupervised inductive learning techniques is developed. This design concept learning system combines concept formation techniques with design heuristics as background knowledge to build a design concept tree from raw data or past design examples. The design concept tree is used as a conceptual structure for the exploration of new designs.The effectiveness of this knowledge-based design support architecture and the design concept learning system is demonstrated through a realistic design domain, the design of small-molecule drugs one of the key tasks of which is to identify a pharmacophore description (the structure of a design problem) from known molecule examples.In this thesis, knowledge-based design and inductive learning techniques are first reviewed. Based on this review, an incremental learning model and an integrated architecture for intelligent design support are presented. The implementation of this architecture and a design concept learning system is then described. The application of the architecture and the design concept learning system in the domain of small-molecule drug design is then discussed. The evaluation of the architecture and the design concept learning system within and beyond this particular domain, and future research directions are finally discussed

Working Notes from the 1992 AAAI Workshop on Automating Software Design. Theme: Domain Specific Software Design

The goal of this workshop is to identify different architectural approaches to building domain-specific software design systems and to explore issues unique to domain-specific (vs. general-purpose) software design. Some general issues that cut across the particular software design domain include: (1) knowledge representation, acquisition, and maintenance; (2) specialized software design techniques; and (3) user interaction and user interface

Agents for educational games and simulations

This book consists mainly of revised papers that were presented at the Agents for Educational Games and Simulation (AEGS) workshop held on May 2, 2011, as part of the Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent Systems (AAMAS) conference in Taipei, Taiwan. The 12 full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from various submissions. The papers are organized topical sections on middleware applications, dialogues and learning, adaption and convergence, and agent applications

A Program Design Assistant

The DA will be a design assistant which can assist the programmer in low-level design. The input language of the DA is a cliché-based program description language that allows the specification and high-level design of commonly-written programs to be described concisely. The DA language is high-level in the sense that programmers need not bother with detailed design. The DA will provide automatic low-level design assistance to the programmer in selecting appropriate algorithms and data structures. It will also detect inconsistencies and incompleteness in program descriptions. A key related issue in this research is the representation of programming knowledge in a design assistant. The knowledge needed to automate low-level design and the knowledge in specific programming clichés have to be represented explicitly to facilitate reuse.MIT Artificial Intelligence Laborator

Uma comparação entre arquiteturas cognitivas : análise teórica e prática

Orientador: Ricardo Ribeiro GudwinDissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Faculdade de Engenharia Elétrica e de ComputaçãoResumo: Este trabalho apresenta uma comparação teórica e prática entre três das mais populares arquiteturas cognitivas: SOAR, CLARION e LIDA. A comparação teórica é realizada com base em um conjunto de funções cognitivas supostamente existentes no ciclo cognitivo humano. A comparação prática é realizada aplicando-se um mesmo experimento em todas as arquiteturas, coletando alguns dados e comparando-as usando como base algumas métricas de qualidade de software. O objetivo é enfatizar semelhanças e diferenças entre os modelos e implementações, com o objetivo de aconselhar um novo usuário a escolher a arquitetura mais apropriada para uma certa aplicaçãoAbstract: This work presents a theoretical and practical comparison of three popular cognitive architectures: SOAR, CLARION, and LIDA. The theoretical comparison is performed based on a set of cognitive functions supposed to exist in the human cognitive cycle. The practical comparison is performed applying the same experiment in all architectures, collecting some data and comparing them using a set of software quality metrics as a basis. The aim is to emphasize similarities and differences among the models and implementations, with the purpose to advise a newcomer on how to choose the appropriated architecture for an applicationMestradoEngenharia de ComputaçãoMestre em Engenharia Elétric

A Sandbox in Which to Learn and Develop Soar Agents

It is common for military personnel to leverage simulations (and simulators) as cost-effective tools to train and become proficient at various tasks (e.g., flying an aircraft and/or performing a mission, among others). These training simulations often need to represent humans within the simulated world in a realistic manner. Realistic implies creating simulated humans that exhibit behaviors that mimic real-world decision making and actions. Typically, to create the decision-making logic, techniques developed from the domain of artificial intelligence are used. Although there are several approaches to developing intelligent agents; we focus on leveraging and open source project called Soar, to define agent behavior. This research took an off-the-shelf open-source software product (called the AI sandbox) that facilitates the creation of 3D virtual worlds and interfaced it to the Soar package. Because the world created by the sandbox is rich in features, easily configurable using a simple scripting system, and visually engaging, it\u27s ideal as a learning platform to develop Soar agents more aligned with military simulations. In summary, this research develops a platform (or learning environment) to learn how to develop Soar-based agents