This paper explores automating the qualitative analysis of physical systems. It describes a program, called PLR, that takes parameterized ordinary differential equations as input and produces a qualitative description of ...

This report describes MM, a computer program that can model a variety of mechanical and fluid systems. Given a system's structure and qualitative behavior, MM searches for models using an energy-based modeling framework. ...

A procedure is given for recognizing sets of inference rules that generate polynomial time decidable inference relations. The procedure can automatically recognize the tractability of the inference rules underlying ...

This paper investigates the problem of automatically learning how torestructure the reward function of a Markov decision process so as tospeed up reinforcement learning. We begin by describing a method thatlearns a shaped ...

Upgrading the software of long-lived, highly-available distributedsystems is difficult. It is not possible to upgrade all the nodes in asystem at once, since some nodes may be unavailable and halting thesystem for an ...

Upgrading the software of long-lived, highly-available distributed systems is difficult. It is not possible to upgrade all the nodes in a system at once, since some nodes may be unavailable and halting the system for an ...

Upgrading the software of long-lived, highly-available distributedsystems is difficult. It is not possible to upgrade all the nodes in asystem at once, since some nodes may be unavailable and halting thesystem for an ...

The use of active compliance enables robots to carry out tasks in the presence of significant sensing and control errors. Compliant motions are quite difficult for humans to specify, however. Furthermore, robot programs ...

Test factoring creates fast, focused unit tests from slow system-widetests; each new unit test exercises only a subset of the functionalityexercised by the system test. Augmenting a test suite with factoredunit tests ...

Three-dimensional models which contain both geometry and texture have numerous applications such as urban planning, physical simulation, and virtual environments. A major focus of computer vision (and recently graphics) ...

This paper concerns an implementation of an autonomy system for unmanned surface vessels operating in accordance with the Coast Guard Collision Regulations (COLREGS). The autonomy system is implemented by associating a ...

This paper presents a new abstraction for virtual infrastructure in mobile ad hoc networks. An AutonomousVirtual Mobile Node (AVMN) is a robust and reliable entity that is designed to cope with theinherent difficulties ...

Empirical autotuning is increasingly being used in many domains to achieve optimized performance in a variety of different execution environments. A daunting challenge faced by such autotuners is input sensitivity, where ...

processing. In contrast to previous techniques that handlenode failures, our approach also tolerates network failuresand network partitions. The approach is based on a principledtrade-off between consistency and availability ...

We present AvatarSAT, a SAT solver that uses machine-learning classifiers to automatically tune the heuristics of an off-the-shelf SAT solver on a per-instance basis. The classifiers use features of both the input and ...

Intuitively, we expect that averaging --- or bagging --- different regressors with low correlation should smooth their behavior and be somewhat similar to regularization. In this note we make this intuition precise. ...

A recent advance by B.F. Logan in the theory of one octave bandpass signals may throw new light on spatial-frequency-tuned channels in early visual information processing.

Bargaining is a process used to modify conflicting demands on an expendable resource so that a satisfactory allocation can be made. In this paper, I consider the design of a bargaining system to handle the problem of ...

In order to stably grasp objects without using object models, tactile feedback from the fingers is sometimes necessary. This feedback can be used to adjust grasping forces to prevent a part form slipping from a hand. ...

This paper is a corrected version of the paper of the same title given at the Western Joint Computer Conference, May 1961. A tenth section discussing the relations between mathematical logic and computation has been added. ...