Machines Who Think: A Personal Inquiry into the History and Prospect of Artificial Intelligence, Pamela McCorduck, San Francisco, California, Freeman, 1979, 375 pp., ISBN 0-7167-11135-4.

In general, modeling is a complex and creative task, and building qualitative models is no exception. One way of automating this task is by means of machine learning. Observed behaviors of a modeled system are used as examples for a learning algorithm that constructs a model that is consistent with the data. In this article, we review approaches to learning qualitative models, either from numeric data or qualitative observations. We describe the QUIN program that looks for qualitative patterns in numeric data and outputs the results of learning as "qualitative trees." We illustrate this using applications associated with systems control, in particular, the identification and optimization of controllers and human operator's control skill. We also review approaches that learn models in terms of qualitative differential equations.

We examine different formalisms for modeling qualitatively physical systems and their associated inferential processes that allow us to derive qualitative predictions from the models. We highlight the mathematical aspects of these processes along with their potential and limitations. The article then bridges to quantitative modeling, highlighting the benefits of qualitative reasoning-based approaches in the framework of system identification, and discusses open research issues.

Traditional approaches to ecological modeling, based on mathematical equations, are hampered by the qualitative nature of ecological knowledge. In this article, we demonstrate that qualitative reasoning provides alternative and productive ways for ecologists to develop, organize, and implement models. We present a qualitative theory of population dynamics and use this theory to capture and simulate commonsense theories about population and community ecology. Advantages of this approach include the possibility of deriving relevant conclusions about ecological systems without numeric data; a compositional approach that enables the reusability of models representing partial behavior; the use of a rich vocabulary describing objects, situations, relations, and mechanisms of change; and the capability to provide causal interpretations of system behavior.

The automotive industry was the first to promote the development of applications of model-based systems technology on a broad scale and, as a result, has produced some of the most advanced prototypes and products. In this article, we illustrate the features and benefits of model-based systems and qualitative modeling by prototypes and application systems that were developed in the automotive industry to support on-board diagnosis, design for diagnosability, and failure modes and effects analysis.

A wide range of sensor-rich, networked embedded systems are being created that must operate robustly for years in the face of novel failures by managing complex autonomic processes. These systems are being composed, for example, into vast networks of space, air, ground, and underwater vehicles. Our objective is to revolutionize the way in which we control these new artifacts by creating reactive model-based programming languages that enable everyday systems to reason intelligently and enable machines to explore other worlds. A model-based program is state and fault aware; it elevates the programming task to specifying intended state evolutions of a system. The program's executive automatically coordinates system interactions to achieve these states, entertaining known and potential failures, using models of its constituents and environment. At the executive's core is a method, called CONFLICT-DIRECTED A*, which quickly prunes promising but infeasible solutions, using a form of one-shot learning. This approach has been demonstrated on a range of systems, including the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Deep Space One probe. Model-based programming is being generalized to hybrid discrete-continuous systems and the coordination of networks of robotic vehicles.

We argue that qualitative modeling provides a valuable way for students to learn. Two modelbuilding environments, VMODEL and HOMER/- VISIGARP, are presented that support learners by constructing conceptual models of systems and their behavior using qualitative formalisms. Both environments use diagrammatic representations to facilitate knowledge articulation. Preliminary evaluations in educational settings provide support for the hypothesis that qualitative modeling tools can be valuable aids for learning.

Aided Design of User Interfaces. (ICKEDS 2004). "Halpern presents a masterful, complete and unified account of the many ways in which the connections between logic, probability theory and commonsensical linguistic terms can be formalized. 'believed,' 'known,' 'default,' 'relevant,' "Presents a novel thesis--that the mind is a'independent,' and'preferred' are given rigorous program whose components are semantically semantical and syntactical analyses, and their meaningful modules--and explores it with a rich interrelationships explicated and exemplified. An array of evidence drawn from a variety of fields.

Reasoning about spatial data is a key task in many applications, including geographic information systems, meteorological and fluid-flow analysis, computer-aided design, and protein structure databases. Such applications often require the identifi- cation and manipulation of qualitative spatial representations, for example, to detect whether one object will soon occlude another in a digital image or efficiently determine relationships between a proposed road and wetland regions in a geographic data set. Qualitative spatial reasoning (QSR) provides representational primitives (a spatial "vocabulary") and inference mechanisms for these tasks. This article first reviews representative work on QSR for data-poor scenarios, where the goal is to design representations that can answer qualitative queries without much numeric information. It then turns to the data-rich case, where the goal is to derive and manipulate qualitative spatial representations that efficiently and correctly abstract important spatial aspects of the underlying data for use in subsequent tasks. This article focuses on how a particular QSR system, SPATIAL AGGREGATION, can help answer spatial queries for scientific and engineering data sets. A case study application of weather analysis illustrates the effective representation and reasoning supported by both data-poor and data-rich forms of QSR

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