This book contains the papers presented at the NATO Advanced Study Institute (ASI) on the Basics of Man-Machine Communication for the Design of Educational Systems, held August 16-26, 1993 in Eindhoven, The Netherlands. The ASI addressed the state of the art in the design of educational systems with respect to theories, enabling technologies and advanced applications and implementation issues. The topics discussed are grouped into four main subject areas: 1) Fundamentals of human perception and reasoning, 2) New media: enabling technologies, 3) Artificial Intelligence; software and design...

As robots improve in efficiency and intelligence, there is a growing need to develop more efficient, accurate and powerful sensors in accordance with the tasks to be robotized. This has led to a great increase in the study and development of different kinds of sensor devices and perception systems over the last ten years. Applications that differ from the industrial ones are often more demanding in sensorics since the environment is not usually so well structured. Spatial and agricultural applications are examples of situations where the environment is unknown or variable. Therefore, the work...

Constraint programming is like an octopus spreading its tentacles into databases, operations research, artificial intelligence, and many other areas. The concept of constraint programming was introduced in artificial intelligence and graphics in the 1960s and 1970s. Now the related techniques are used and studied in many fields of computing. Different aspects of constraint processing are investigated in theoretical computer science, logic programming, knowledge representation, operations research, and related application domains. Constraint programming has been included in the lists of...

This volume is an outgrowth of a NATO Advanced Research Workshop on "Expert Judgment and Expert Systems," held in Porto, Portugal, August 1986. Support for the Workshop was provided by the NATO Division of Scientific Affairs, the U.S. Army Research Institute, and the U.S. National Science Foundation. The Workshop brought together researchers from the fields of psychology, decision analysis, and artificial intelligence. The purposes were to assess similarities, differences, and complementarities among the three approaches to the study of expert judgment; to evaluate their relative strengths...

Historically, one of the basic issues in control systems design has been robustness: the ability of a controlled plant to withstand variations in or lack of knowledge of its dynamics. Even if the dynamics of a system are accurately known for purposes of implementation, it is often desirable to design a control system based on a simplified model. Consequently it is essential to be able to guarantee a reasonable performance not only for the nominal plant, but also for its neighbouring perturbations: this is the issue of robustness. Since the beginning of this decade major advances have been...

NATO's Division of Scientific and Environmental Affairs sponsored this Advan ced Study Institute because it was felt to be timely to cover this important and challengjng subject for the first time in the framework of NATO's ASI programme. The significance of real-time systems in everyones' life is rapidly growing. The vast spectrum of these systems can be characterised by just a few examples of increasing complexity: controllers in washing machines, air traffic control systems, control and safety systems of nuclear power plants and, finally, future military systems like the Strategic Defense...

These proceedings contain lectures presented at the NATO-NSF-ARO sponsored Advanced Study I stitute on "Computer Aided Analysis and Optimization of Mechanical System Dynamics" held in Iowa City, Iowa, 1-12 August, 1983. Lectures were presented by free world leaders in the field of machine dynamics and optimization. Participants in the Institute were specialists from throughout NATO, many of whom presented contributed papers during the Institute and all of whom participated actively in discussions on technical aspects of the subject. The proceedings are organized into five parts, each...

For some years, specification of software and hardware systems has been influenced not only by algebraic methods but also by new developments in logic. These new developments in logic are partly based on the use of algorithmic techniques in deduction and proving methods, but are alsodue to new theoretical advances, to a great extent stimulated by computer science, which have led to new types of logic and new logical calculi. The new techniques, methods and tools from logic, combined with algebra-based ones, offer very powerful and useful tools for the computer scientist, which may soon become...