Genesis of an Expert System For UMR Degree Auditing

This paper describes the features, design, and development of an expert system for degree auditing at the University of Missouri--Rolla. It summarizes artificial intelligence as it is known today while specifically addressing expert systems. It describes selected expert systems currently in existence. The present audit procedure utilized at the University of Missouri--Rolla is discussed. A description is given of the design and development of an expert system, written in LISP, to conduct a degree audit. Finally there are concluding remarks which include an analysis of the system and a discussion of possible system enhancement

A Representation for Serial Robotic Tasks

The representation for serial robotic tasks proposed in this thesis is a language of temporal constraints derived directly from a model of the space of serial plans. It was specifically designed to encompass problems that include disjunctive ordering constraints. This guarantees that the proposed language can completely and, to a certain extent, compactly represent all possible serial robotic tasks. The generality of this language carries a penalty. The proposed language of temporal constraints is NP-Complete. Specific methods have been demonstrated for normalizing constraints posed in this language in order to make subsequent sequencing and analysis more tractable. Using this language, the planner can specify necessary and alternative orderings to control undesirable interactions between steps of a plan. For purposes of analysis, the planner can factor a plan into strategies, and decompose those strategies into essential components. Using properly normalized constraint expressions the sequencer can derive admissible sequences and admissible next operations. Using these facilities, a robot can be given the specification of a task and it can adapt its sequence of operations according to run-time events and the constraints on the operations to be performed

Data Structure for the Use of Patterns in the Perceptual Ordering of the Game of Chess

It is well known that the way one perceives a problem can influence the difficulty of solving the problem in a profound way. In the case of computer chess playing programs, one finds that most programs perceive the game in much the same way. They are all based on Shannon\u27s original proposal for chess playing programs. His approach was to generate all of the possible combinations of moves up to a certain number of plays and then a subset of all combinations to a deeper level thereafter. Each of these moves would then be evaluated as to its relative worth. This paper lays the foundation for research in an alternate method of approaching the game based on how human experts perceive the board initially. A suitable data structure for this is then proposed and discussed

A Computerized Audio-Visual Speech Model

This thesis describes an expert system able to animate (graphically) and reproduce (acoustically) a text in any language which uses the Latin alphabet. A rule editor has been developed to create and modify the set of letter-to-sound rules of the target language. A parser has been implemented to apply the set of rules and translate text-to-speech. Each phoneme has a unique sound and thus requires its particular positioning of the vocal organs which are displayed in two different projections: a front view and a profile cross view of a human face in synchronization with the output sounds of the speech synthesizer

An Experimental Study of the Effects of Modularity on Resource Consumption in Software Development

Many authors have encouraged the use of modular programming techniques in software development. In fact, there is almost total agreement within industrial and academic circles that modularity is a desirable feature of any software package. Unfortunately, the desirability of modular design is almost always voiced without support from experimental evidence. This paper consists of an experiment comparing the resource consumption of programmers based on the modularity practices employed during the design and programming phases of software development. The experiment tests the effectiveness of modularity in reducing psychological complexity of software. The results of the research show that in some cases there is indeed a difference in resource consumption between the modularity practices tested. However, the stated benefits of modularity did not carry over to the design and programming phases of software development. The use of modularity seemed, in fact, to increase development costs in some cases

CIEGEN: A System for Testing Knowledge Base Compilation Heuristics on a Microcomputer

The expert system has proven itself to be a valuable aid in diagnosing and treating problems in domains requiring expertise. The commercial world has been alerted to this fact and the thrust is to make the expert system portable and available on small computers. The goal of this research has been to lay the groundwork for a domain independent expert system builder on a microcomputer. The result of this effort was CIEGEN, a system consisting of a rule compiler, inference engine, and rule generator developed on the IBM PC. It is domain independent, responsible for transforming a knowledge base of rules into heuristic based decision trees, and capable of performing backward chaining consultations. The system is also heuristic independent, allowing a knowledge base to be compiled by different heuristics and compared using the log created by the inference engine. A subgoal of the development of CIEGEN has been to study the heuristics used to compile a knowledge base because the efficiency of the expert system is based on the intelligence of the heuristic. The heuristic used by EMYCIN was implemented and compared with a heuristic developed by the author. For the six types of knowledge based generated by CIEGEN\u27s rule generator, EMYCIN\u27s heuristic, on the average, executed more quickly

A Focus Of Attention Algorithm For Expert Systems

This research is primarily concerned with increasing the performance of expert systems. A refined focus of attention strategy and its affect on performance are discussed. Early expert systems used a brute force approach to process the knowledge base. Each production rule in the knowledge base was evaluated each cycle. More recently, processing efficiency has been increased by focusing the attention of the inference engine on a subset of the rules by filtering for further testing, only rules that could possibly fire given the current content of the context base. Focus of attention as developed in this research increases performance over filtering systems by further narrowing the focus of attention of the inference engine, down to the subexpression level. Positive results are reported

An Algorithm for Parallel Subsumption

Many current automated theorem provers use a refutation procedure based on some version of the principle of resolution. These methods normally lead to the generation of large numbers of new clauses. Subsumption is a process that eliminates the superfluous clauses from the clause space, thus speeding up the proof. The research presented in this thesis is concerned with the design and implementation of a subsumption algorithm which exploits the parallelism provided by a multiprocessor. For portability, all coding is done in the programming language C. Monitors are used as the synchronization mechanism. Correct performance in both a multiprocessor and uniprocessor mode is stressed. The parallel tests are run on a Denelcor HEP located at Argonne National Laboratory

The Optimal Trajectory Modelling of Robot Manipulators

Greater robot capability can be achieved through the use of robot manipulator control systems. Crucial to the success of these control systems is the optimal trajectory modelling of the path traced by the end- effector. To create this optimal path the utilization of B-Spline curve functions will be investigated, and compared to Cubic Spline curve functions