Alex Muncy was still an apprentice at STIHL Inc. when the company enlisted him in revamping an automated packaging process. The package would contain the outdoor power equipment manufacturer’s signature trimmer line, the colorful cord used to give lawns a precise, neat appearance. The goal: satisfy the customer while cutting production costs. Muncy’s team developed a concept, designed the packa...

Project-specific knowledge is the rationale behind the project data and specifications, including the design decisions that link elements of basic data, design data, project-specifications, domain knowledge, and general knowledge to explain the design. This information should be available in design documentation, but usually it is missing. The paper describes an approach for improving design do...

The number of minimally invasive cardiological interventions has increased over the last few years and therefore computer based training systems find growing interest. They offer a better learning schedule compared to traditional master-apprentice models due to the repeatability of the learning situation and the possibility to learn individual tasks. Below we present the research system CathI t...

Learning systems in dynamic environments have to be able to process examples that occurred in different hidden contexts. We review several approaches to hidden context aware concept learning systems and question the appropriateness of the Calendar Apprentice domain as a real world benchmark for hidden context aware learning systems. By providing a simple lower error bound for batch learning sys...

Interventional cardiology training traditionally involves one-on-one experience following a master-apprentice model, much as other procedural disciplines. Development of a realistic computer-based training system that includes hand-eye coordination, catheter and guide wire choices, three-dimensional anatomic representations, and an integrated learning system is desirable, in order to permit lea...

Disciple is an approach for developing interactive learning agents where the user teaches the agent in much the same way in which he would teach a human apprentice, by giving the agent specific examples of problems and solutions, explanations of these solutions, supervising the agent as it solves new problems and validating its solutions. In this paper we review the Disciple approach emphasizin...

We summarize the continuous thread of research we have conducted over the past thirty years on human-computer collaboration. This research reflects many of the themes and issues in operation in the greater field of AI over this period, such as knowledge representation and reasoning, planning and intent recognition, learning, and the interplay of human theory and computer engineering. Human-Comp...

Artificial neural networks (ANNs) are being explored increasingly in medicine as decision-making aids. In the last 2 years, >630 articles dealing with the use of ANNs have been listed in Medline, including several recent reviews with application to the clinical laboratory [1, 2]. Is the interest and enthusiasm warranted , or will this introduction mirror that of other diagnostic tests in medici...

This paper describes our work in progress on building a Question Answering System. It is a prototype computer "apprentice system" to aid researchers and students in addressing the energy, environmental, and economic (EE&E) issues which arise in studies of integrated energy policy assessment. Much of the task of forming a reasoned opinion about such issues involves finding the relevant numbers f...

Machine learning is an emerging field of computer science concerned with the learning of knowledge from exploration of already stored data. However, effective utilization of extracted knowledge is an important issue. Extracted knowledge may be best utilized via feeding to knowledge based system. To this end, the work reported in this paper is based on a novel idea to enhance the productivity of...