The study of weak scattering from inhomogeneous media or interface roughness has long been of interest in sonar applications. In an acoustic backscattering model of a stationary field of volume inhomogeneities, a stochastic description of the field is more useful than a deterministic description due to the complex nature of the field. A method based on linear inversion is employed to infer info...

This paper deals with a scene recognition system in a robotics context. The general problem is to match images with a priori de­ scriptions. A typical mission would consist in identifying an object in an installation with a vision system situated at the end of a manip­ ulator and with a human operator provided description, formulated in a pseudo-natural language, and possibly redundant. The ori...

A description of natural language (NL) has been an objective of linguistic theory since Antiquity. In the recent decades the attempts at a systematic description have been injected by the formalizing mode of scientific thinking which has been influencing more or less all branches of science since the beginning of the present century. The formal description of natural language has proven itself ...

Many researchers have argued for a description of nature using multiple levels, or modes of description, as we call them. This paper focuses on a confusion that follows from the multiple-mode approach, a confusion due to the notion of causation between modes. Causation between modes is reinterpreted as ordinary causation but with cause and effect described in different modes. In the first part ...

Programming a robot in natural language is a long time dream. Today applications, using a simplified vocabulary, are still far from really interacting in natural language with a robot to ask it to perform actions. Here we investigate why the task is still difficult, focusing on the embodied nature of language. To improve reasoning on we propose using description logics as a way to represent sen...

We introduce a method for characterizing the expressive power of concept expressions in firstorder description logics. The method is essentially model-theoretic in nature in that it gives preservation results uniquely identifying a wide range of description logics as fragments of first-order logic. The languages studied in the paper all belong to the well-known ,Y'/~and ,AZ~ hierarchies. © 1999...

In this paper, we address the nature of uncertainty when attempting to identify food odors with an artificial nose. The entire process of odor recognition presented is multifold beginning with the sensory perception of an odor and resulting in the generation of a linguistic description. An illustration of how we contend with uncertainty in an odor recognition system is presented. We also introd...

This paper proposes constructs that can be used to declaratively specify the disjoint nature of object properties or roles. These constructs may be a useful extension to the Description Logic system that is the basis of OWL.