He leaves a legacy of groundbreaking, deep insights that have changed the course of AI. "Only one same reason is shared by all of us: we wish to create worlds as real as, but other than the world that is." The quotation captures what was special about Ray: He had an adventurer's desire to go beyond the boundaries of our current understanding, together with a mathematician's insistence on precision. Ray the adventurer was always eager to try new ideas and directions. He was not afraid to enter murky areas, and he always left them better illuminated. He introduced terms to the AI community such as default logic, closed-world assumption, and cognitive robotics; he opened avenues of theoretical research with new resolution proof methods and logics for nonmonotonic reasoning, diagnosis, and action; and he was the prime mover in the Cognitive Robotics initiative that has led to a whole new program of research.

We develop, analyze, and evaluate a novel, supervised, specific-to-general learner for a simple temporal logic and use the resulting algorithm to learn visual event definitions from video sequences. First, we introduce a simple, propositional, temporal, event-description language called AMA that is sufficiently expressive to represent many events yet sufficiently restrictive to support learning. We then give algorithms, along with lower and upper complexity bounds, for the subsumption and generalization problems for AMA formulas. We present a positive-examples--only specific-to-general learning method based on these algorithms. We also present a polynomial-time--computable ``syntactic'' subsumption test that implies semantic subsumption without being equivalent to it. A generalization algorithm based on syntactic subsumption can be used in place of semantic generalization to improve the asymptotic complexity of the resulting learning algorithm. Finally, we apply this algorithm to the task of learning relational event definitions from video and show that it yields definitions that are competitive with hand-coded ones.

A knowledge base is redundant if it contains parts that can be inferred from the rest of it. We study the problem of checking whether a CNF formula (a set of clauses) is redundant, that is, it contains clauses that can be derived from the other ones. Any CNF formula can be made irredundant by deleting some of its clauses: what results is an irredundant equivalent subset (I.E.S.) We study the complexity of some related problems: verification, checking existence of a I.E.S. with a given size, checking necessary and possible presence of clauses in I.E.S.'s, and uniqueness. We also consider the problem of redundancy with different definitions of equivalence.

We propose a perspective on knowledge compilation which calls for analyzing different compilation approaches according to two key dimensions: the succinctness of the target compilation language, and the class of queries and transformations that the language supports in polytime. We then provide a knowledge compilation map, which analyzes a large number of existing target compilation languages according to their succinctness and their polytime transformations and queries. We argue that such analysis is necessary for placing new compilation approaches within the context of existing ones. We also go beyond classical, flat target compilation languages based on CNF and DNF, and consider a richer, nested class based on directed acyclic graphs (such as OBDDs), which we show to include a relatively large number of target compilation languages.

We present a propositional logic to reason about the uncertainty of events, where the uncertainty is modeled by a set of probability measures assigning an interval of probability to each event. We give a sound and complete axiomatization for the logic, and show that the satisfiability problem is NP-complete, no harder than satisfiability for propositional logic.

We propose a structured approach to the problem of retrieval of images by content and present a description logic that has been devised for the semantic indexing and retrieval of images containing complex objects. As other approaches do, we start from low-level features extracted with image analysis to detect and characterize regions in an image. However, in contrast with feature-based approaches, we provide a syntax to describe segmented regions as basic objects and complex objects as compositions of basic ones. Then we introduce a companion extensional semantics for defining reasoning services, such as retrieval, classification, and subsumption. These services can be used for both exact and approximate matching, using similarity measures. Using our logical approach as a formal specification, we implemented a complete client-server image retrieval system, which allows a user to pose both queries by sketch and queries by example. A set of experiments has been carried out on a testbed of images to assess the retrieval capabilities of the system in comparison with expert users ranking. Results are presented adopting a well-established measure of quality borrowed from textual information retrieval.

Automated Theorem Proving: A Review

This first part covers mathematical that teachers will find useful.

Thus, the reader is able to experiment is a logical consequence of a set of aspects of the deduction steps as both a user and a developer statements (the axioms and hypotheses).