My research seeks to answer the question of how any agent that is tasked with making sense of its world, by finding explanations for evidence (e.g., sensor reports) using domain-general strategies, may accurately and efficiently handle incomplete evidence, noisy evidence, and an incomplete knowledge base. I propose the following answer to the question. The agent should employ an optimal abducti...

The decision table is one of the simplest representations of the rules underlying a systematic decisionmaking process, and is especially valuable in the development of knowledge-based systems. A two dimensional table links all relevant combinations of input conditions to the desired combinations of output actions in a very intuitive way. This simplicity belies the complex considerations involve...

This paper is an extended abstract of the talk given at ICCS’09. Rules have long been considered as an essential component of knowledge-based systems. We focus here on conceptual graph rules and on the semantically equivalent knowledge constructs in logic and databases, namely rules with existential variables and tuple-generating dependencies. The aim of this presentation is to synthesize main ...

A knowledge based system that uses one pass only for thinning is described. The study of existing thinning algorithms reveals that appropriate thinning techniques are application dependent. Thinning algorithms suitable for applications such as Chinese characters unfortunately leave extraneous pixels (branches) in other applications such as Arabic characters. Alternatively, existing algorithms t...

We introduce a product configurator with the ability of optimal re-configuration built on MaxSAT as the background engine. A product configurator supported by a SAT solver can provide an answer at any time about which components are selectable and which are not. But if a user wants to select a component which has already been disabled, a purely SAT based configurator does not support a guided r...

We present a mechanism for recovering consistent data from inconsistent set of assertions. For a common family of knowledge-bases we also provide an efficient algorithm for doing so automaticly. This method is nonmonotonic and paraconsistent. It is particularly useful for making diagnoses on faulty devices. Subject areas: Knowledge-based systems, Non-standard logics for AI, Reasoning under unce...