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Qualitative Reasoning for Financial Assessments: A Prospectus

AI Magazine

Most high-performance expert systems rely primarily porations, describe the reasoning styles currently used by on an ability to represent surface knowledge about associations people, and show how some of these assessments can be between observable evidence or data, on the one addressed by extending existing AI techniques. Although the present generation of practical systems qualitative causal models in an expert system-remains a shows that this architectural style can be pushed speculative subject. The larger firms are subject to intense captured in the second model would be selected to complement scrutiny by armies of financial analysts, and even the the associational knowledge represented in the first smaller corporations have creditors of various sorts who module. The details of Simulation models have been especially attractive the procedures used to make assessments vary according choices for the complementary representation because of to the specific objective of the analyst. It might be that an the causal relations embedded in them (Brown & Burton, equity investment is under consideration, that a loan request 1975; Cuena, 1983).


I Had a Dream: AAAI Presidential Address

AI Magazine

Twenty-five years ago I had a dream, a daydream, if you will. A dream shared with many of you. I dreamed of a special kind of computer, which had eyes and ears and arms and legs, in addition to its "brain." I did not dream that this new computer friend would be a means of making money for me or my employer or a help for my country - though I loved my country then and still do, and I have no objection to making money. I did not even dream of such a worthy cause as helping the poor and handicapped of the world using this marvelous new machine. No, my dream was filled with the wild excitement of seeing a machine act like a human being, at least in many ways.


KBEmacs: Where's the AI?

AI Magazine

The Knowledge-Based Editor in Emacs (KBEmacs) is the current demonstration system implemented as part of the Programmer's Apprentice project. KBEmacs is capable of acting as a semiexpert assistant to a person who is writing a program, taking over some parts of the programming task. The abilities of KBEmacs stem directly from a few key AI ideas. However, in many ways KBEmacs does not appear to be an AI system, because its abilities are limited and because (like many applied AI systems) the AI ideas are buried in a large volume of code that has little relevance to AI. The primary goal of this article is to present the AI ideas behind KBEmacs. In addition, the construction of applied AI systems is discussed, in general, using the development of KBEmacs as a case history


Letters to the Editor

AI Magazine

In fact, such a pattern can itself be considered a frame, where the position of each pixel is a slot, and the shade or A recent article by Ronald Brachman (Brachman, color at each pixel is then the attached value. It should 1985) points out some philosophical or semantic problems then be possible to represent this pattern as I have just in using the notion of a prototype, which is described by described it-z.e., by a frame representing the background, using default properties. The problem arises since default partially obscured or covered by a frame representing the properties can be overridden or cancelled in representing object of interest, partially obscured or covered by some particular instances, and therefore lack definitional power: other objects. The fact that some part of the object of interest is obscured does not mean that it is no longer there, nor As an example, Brachman presents an elephant joke: that it is not intrinsic to the object's definition. Q: What's big and gray, has a trunk, and lives in the trees?


Automata--theoretic techniques for modal logic of programs

Classics

We present a new technique for obtaining decision procedures for modal logics of programs. The technique centers around a new class of finite automata on infinite trees for which the emptiness problem can be solved in polynomial time. The decision procedures then consist of constructing an automaton Af for a given formula f such that Af accepts some tree if and only if f is satisfiable. We illustrate our technique by giving exponential decision procedures for several variants of deterministic propositional dynamic logic.


Fusion, propagation, and structuring in belief networks

Classics

Belief networks are directed acyclic graphs in which the nodes represent propositions (or variables), the arcs signify direct dependencies between the linked propositions, and the strengths of these dependencies are quantified by conditional probabilities. A network of this sort can be used to represent the generic knowledge of a domain expert, and it turns into a computational architecture if the links are used not merely for storing factual knowledge but also for directing and activating the data flow in the computations which manipulate this knowledge. The first part of the paper deals with the task of fusing and propagating the impacts of new information through the networks in such a way that, when equilibrium is reached, each proposition will be assigned a measure of belief consistent with the axioms of probability theory. It is shown that if the network is singly connected (e.g. The second part of the paper deals with the problem of finding a tree-structured representation for a collection of probabilistically coupled propositions using auxiliary (dummy) variables, colloquially called “hidden causes.”



Arc and path consistency revisited

Classics

Mackworth and Freuder have analyzed the time complexity of several constraint satisfaction algorithms [5]. We present here new algorithms for arc and path consistency and show that the arc consistency algorithm is optimal in time complexity and of the same-order space complexity as the earlier algorithms. A refined solution for the path consistency problem is proposed. However, the space complexity of the path consistency algorithm makes it practicable only for small problems. These algorithms are the result of the synthesis techniques used in alice (a general constraint satisfaction system) and local consistency methods [3].


Perceptual organization and the representation of natural form

Classics

To support our reasoning abilities perception must recover environmental regularities—e.g., rigidity, “objectness,” axes of symmetry—for later use by cognition. To create a theory of how our perceptual apparatus can produce meaningful cognitive primitives from an array of image intensities we require a representation whose elements may be lawfully related to important physical regularities, and that correctly describes the perceptual organization people impose on the stimulus. Unfortunately, the representations that are currently available were originally developed for other purposes (e.g., physics, engineering) and have so far proven unsuitable for the problems of perception or common-sense reasoning. In answer to this problem we present a representation that has proven competent to accurately describe an extensive variety of natural forms (e.g., people, mountains, clouds, trees), as well as man-made forms, in a succinct and natural manner. The approach taken in this representational system is to describe scene structure at a scale that is similar to our naive perceptual notion of “a part,” by use of descriptions that reflect a possible formative history of the object, e.g., how the object might have been constructed from lumps of clay.


A robust, layered, control system for a mobile robot

Classics

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