Qualitative Reasoning for Intelligent Agents

Project Summary: This project explores the use of qualitative physics to provide capabilities for intelligent agents. Understanding and using common sense reasoning about the physical world is a necessary prerequisite to creating many kinds of useful intelligent agents that collaborate with human partners to accomplish tasks. Examples of such tasks include damage control assessment, operations planning, sifting through on-line information for relevant data, teaching and tutoring, and developing complex scientific and engineering models. Our vehicle for these investigations is the creation of an experimental prototype, an Explanation Agent that accumulates explanations of how engineered systems work, and that uses this accumulated knowledge to answer questions and interactively formulate task-specific models of those systems.