Prior knowledge about video structure can be used both as a means to improve the peiformance of content analysis and to extract features that allow semantic classification. We introduce statistical models for two important components of this structure, shot duration and activity, and demonstrate the usefulness of these models by introducing a Bayesian formulation for the shot segmentation problem. The new formulations is shown to extend standard thresholding methods in an adaptive and intuitive way, leading to improved segmentation accuracy.

Prior knowledge about video structure can be used both as a means to improve the peiformance of content analysis and to extract features that allow semantic classification. We introduce statistical models for two important components of this structure, shot duration and activity, and demonstrate the usefulness of these models by introducing a Bayesian formulation for the shot segmentation problem. The new formulations is shown to extend standard thresholding methods in an adaptive and intuitive way, leading to improved segmentation accuracy.

Visual input, providedby a video camera on a miniature robot, is preprocessed by a set of Gabor filters on 31 nodes of a log-polar retinotopic graph. Unsupervised Hebbianlearning is employed to incrementally build a population of localized overlapping place fields. Place cells serve as basis functions forreinforcement learning. Experimental results for goal-oriented navigation of a mobile robot are presented.

Creativity is sometimes taken to be an inexplicable aspect of human activity. By summarizing a considerable body of literature on creativity, I hope to show how to turn some of the best ideas about creativity into programs that are demonstrably more creative than any we have seen to date. I believe the key to building more creative programs is to give them the ability to reflect on and modify their own frameworks and criteria. That is, I believe that the key to creativity is at the metalevel.

This paper presents an implemented system for recognizing the occurrence of events described by simple spatial-motion verbs in short image sequences. The semantics of these verbs is specified with event-logic expressions that describe changes in the state of force-dynamic relations between the participants of the event. An efficient finite representation is introduced for the infinite sets of intervals that occur when describing liquid and semi-liquid events. Additionally, an efficient procedure using this representation is presented for inferring occurrences of compound events, described with event-logic expressions, from occurrences of primitive events. Using force dynamics and event logic to specify the lexical semantics of events allows the system to be more robust than prior systems based on motion profile.

Although today's world offers us unprecedented access to greater and greater amounts of electronic information, we are faced with significant problems when it comes to finding the right information at the right time -- the essence of the information-overload problem. One of the proposed solutions to this problem is to develop technologies for automatically learning about the implicit and explicit preferences of individual users to customize and personalize the search for relevant information. In this article, we describe the development of the personalized television listings system (PTV),1 which tackles the information-overload problem associated with modern TV listings data by providing an Internet-based personalized TV listings service so that each registered user receives a daily TV guide that has been specially compiled to suit his/her particular viewing preferences.

In 1998, the international planning community was invited to take part in the first planning competition, hosted by the Artificial Intelligence Planning Systems Conference, to provide a new impetus for empirical evaluation and direct comparison of automatic domain-independent planning systems. This article describes the systems that competed in the event, examines the results, and considers some of the implications for the future of the field.

These algorithms would take as input a melody such *rspangle@micro.caltech.edu,

The investigation of neural information structures in music is a rather new, exciting research area bringing together different disciplines such as computer science, mathematics, musicology and cognitive science. One of its aims is to find out what determines the personal style of a composer. It has been shown that neural network models - better than other AI approaches - are able to learn and reproduce styledependent features from given examples, e.g., chorale harmonizations in the style of Johann Sebastian Bach (Hild et al., 1992). However when dealing with melodic sequences, e.g., folksong style melodies, all of these models have considerable difficulties to learn even simple structures. The reason is that they are unable to capture high-order structure such as harmonies, motifs and phrases simultaneously occurring at multiple time scales.

Until recently, artificial intelligence researchers have frowned upon the application of probability propagation in Bayesian belief networks that have cycles. The probability propagation algorithm is only exact in networks that are cycle-free. However, it has recently been discovered that the two best error-correcting decoding algorithms are actually performing probability propagation in belief networks with cycles. 1 Communicating over a noisy channel Our increasingly wired world demands efficient methods for communicating bits of information over physical channels that introduce errors. Examples of real-world channels include twisted-pair telephone wires, shielded cable-TV wire, fiberoptic cable, deep-space radio, terrestrial radio, and indoor radio. Engineers attempt to correct the errors introduced by the noise in these channels through the use of channel coding which adds protection to the information source, so that some channel errors can be corrected.