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  1. Heuristic Abstraction in the Decision-Theoretic Pathfinder System 

    November 1, 1989 | Eric Horvitz, David Heckerman, Keung-Chi Ng, and Bharat Nathwani

    A criticism of diagnostic systems, which are based on the formal foundations of probability and utility, is that their reasoning strategies and recommendations are inflexible and unnatural. We have developed a facility that increases the flexibility of normative reasoning systems by providing multiple human-oriented perspectives…

  2. Automatic new word acquisition: spelling from acoustics 

    October 15, 1989 | Fil Alleva and Kai-Fu Lee

    The problem of extending the lexicon of words in an automatic speech recognition system is commonly referred to as the new word problem. When encountered in the context of an embedded speech recognition system this problem can be be divided into the following sub-problems. First,…

  3. The Challenger-Solver game: Variations on the theme of P =?NP 

    October 2, 1989 | Yuri Gurevich

    Originally in Bulletin of the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science October 1989, 112-121. Reprinted in 1993 World Scientific book Current Trends in Theoretical Computer Science. pages 245-253 The question P=?NP is the focal point of much research in theoretical computer science. But is it…

  4. The Case Against User Interface Consistency 

    October 1, 1989 | Jonathan Grudin

    Designers striving for user interface consistency can resemble Supreme Court justices trying to define pornqgraphy: each of us feels we know it when we see it, but people often disagree and a precise definition remains elusive. A close examination suggests that consistency is an unreliable…

  5. Availability and Consistency Tradeoffs in the Echo Distributed File System 

    September 1, 1989

    Workstations typically depend on remote servers accessed over a network for such services as mail, printing, storing files, booting, and time. The availability of these remote services has a major impact on the usability of the workstation. Availability can be increased by replicating the servers.…

  6. Kalman Filter-based Algorithms for Estimating Depth from Image Sequences 

    August 31, 1989 | Larry Matthies, Rick Szeliski, and Takeo Kanade

    Using known camera motion to estimate depth from image sequences is an important problem in robot vision. Many applications of depth-from-motion, including navigation and manipulation, require algorithms that can estimate depth in an on-line, incremental fashion. This requires a representation that records the uncertainty in…

  7. Task-level robot learning: juggling a tennis ball more accurately 

    August 6, 1989 | E. Aboaf, Steven Drucker, and C.G. Atkeson

    Results are presented from a preliminary investigation of task-level learning, an approach to learning from practice. The authors programmed a robot to juggle a single ball in three dimensions by batting it upwards with a large paddle. The robot uses a real-time binary vision system…

  8. Bounded Conditioning: Flexible Inference for Decisions Under Scarce Resources 

    August 1, 1989 | Eric Horvitz, H. Jacques Suermondt, and Gregory F. Cooper

    We introduce a graceful approach to probabilistic inference called bounded conditioning. Bounded conditioning monotonically refines the bounds on posterior probabilities in a belief network with computation, and converges on final probabilities of interest with the allocation of a complete resource fraction. The approach allows a…

  9. Realizable and Unrealizable Specifications of Reactive Systems 

    July 5, 1989 | Martin Abadi, Leslie Lamport, and Pierre Wolper

    Abadi and I came upon the concept of realizability in [97]. Several other people independently came up with the idea at around the same time, including Wolper. Abadi and Wolper worked together to combine our results and his into a single paper. Abadi recollects that…

  10. Stability of Toroidicity Induced Drift Waves in Divertor Tokamaks 

    July 4, 1989

    The stability of toroidicity‐induced drift waves in a tokamak equilibrium with magnetic separatrix is studied both analytically and numerically. In particular, the task of a proper determination of the complex ballooning parameter θ0 is performed by solving the stationarity condition for the eigenvalue. Results show…

  11. Infinite Games 

    June 4, 1989 | Yuri Gurevich

    Infinite games are widely used in mathematical logic. Recently infinite games were used in connection to concurrent computational processes that do not necessarily terminate. For example, operating system may be seen as playing a game "against" the disruptive forces of users. The classical question of…

  12. High-performance parallel graph reduction 

    June 1, 1989 | SL Peyton Jones, C Clack, J Salkild, and Simon Peyton Jones

    Parallel graph reduction is an attractive implementation for functional programming languages because of its simplicity and inherently distributed nature. This paper outlines some of the issues raised by parallel compiled graph reduction, and presents the approach we have adopted for our parallel machine, GRIP. We…