Thesis (M.S. in Space Systems Operations)--Naval Postgraduate School, June 2004. / Thesis advisor(s): Rudy Panholzer. Includes bibliographical references (p. 37). Also available online.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2000. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 269-275). Available also in a digital version from Dissertation Abstracts.

Artificial Intelligence Lab, Department of MIS, University of Arizona / This Blackboard-based design uses a neural-net spreading-activation algorithm to traverse multiple thesauri. Guided by heuristics, the algorithm activates related terms in the thesauri and converges on the most pertinent concepts.

Artificial Intelligence Lab, Department of MIS, University of Arizona / For our research, we investigated a different problem-solving scenario called game playing, which is unstructured, complex, and seldom-studied. We considered several real-life game-playing scenarios and decided on greyhound racing. The large amount of historical information involved in the search poses a challenge for both human experts and machine-learning algorithms. The questions then become: Can machine-learning techniques reduce the uncertainty in a complex game-playing scenario? Can these methods outperform human experts in prediction? Our research sought to answer these questions.

Artificial Intelligence Lab, Department of MIS, University of Arizona / A prototype tool classifies output from an electronic meeting system into a manageable list of concepts, topics, or issues that a group can further evaluate. In an experiment with output from GroupSystems electronic meeting system, the tool's recall ability was comparable to that of a human facilitator, but took roughly a sixth of the time.

A multimedia computer system is one that can create, import, integrate, store, retrieve, edit, and delete two or more types of media materials in digital form, such as audio, image, full-motion video, and text information. This paper surveys four possible types of multimedia computer systems: hypermedia, multimedia database, multimedia message, and virtual reality systems. The primary focus is on advanced multimedia systems development projects and theoretical efforts that suggest long-term trends in this increasingly important area.

Artificial Intelligence Lab, Department of MIS, University of Arizona / Predicting blood concentration levels of pharmaceutical agents in human subjects can be made difficult by missing data and variability within and between human subjects. Biometricians use a variety of software tools to analyze pharmacokinetic information in order to conduct research about a pharmaceutical agent. This paper is the comparison between using a feedforward backpropagation neural network to predict blood serum concentration levels of the drug tobramycin in pediatric cystic fibrosis and hemotologicâ oncologic disorder patients with the most commonly used software for analysis of pharmacokinetics, NONMEM. Mean squared standard error is used to establish the comparability of the two estimation methods. The motivation for this research is the desire to provide clinicians and pharmaceutical researchers a cost effective, user friendly, and timely analysis tool for effectively predicting blood concentration ranges in human subjects.

The University Libraries of the University of Houston created an experimental Intelligent Reference Information System (IRIS) over a two-year period. A ten-workstation CD-ROM LAN was implemented that provided access to nineteen citation, full-text, graphic, and numeric databases. An expert system, Reference Expert, was developed to assist users in selecting appropriate printed and electronic reference sources. This expert system was made available on both network and stand-alone workstations. Three research studies were conducted.

Artificial Intelligence Lab, Department of MIS, University of Arizona / Effective and efficient link analysis techniques are needed to help law enforcement and intelligence agencies fight organized crimes such as narcotics violation, terrorism, and kidnapping. In this paper, we propose a link analysis technique that uses shortest-path algorithms, priority-first-search (PFS) and two-tree PFS, to identify the strongest association paths between entities in a criminal network. To evaluate effectiveness, we compared the PFS algorithms with crime investigatorsâ typical association-search approach, as represented by a modified breadth-first-search (BFS). Our domain expert considered the association paths identified by PFS algorithms to be useful about 70% of the time, whereas the modified BFS algorithmâ s precision rates were only 30% for a kidnapping network and 16.7% for a narcotics network. Efficiency of the two-tree PFS was better for a small, dense kidnapping network, and the PFS was better for the large, sparse narcotics network.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) encompasses the following general areas of research: (1) automatic programming, (2) computer vision, (3) expert systems, (4) intelligent computer-assisted instruction, (5) natural language processing, (6) planning and decision support, (7) robotics, and (8) speech recognition. Intelligent library systems utilize artificial intelligence technologies to provide knowledge-based services to library patrons and staff. This paper examines certain key aspects of AI that determine its potential utility as a tool for building library systems. It discusses the barriers that inhibit the development of intelligent library systems, and it suggests possible strategies for making progress in this important area. While all of the areas of AI research indicated previously may have some eventual application in the development of library systems, this paper primarily focuses on a few that the author judges to be of most immediate significance--expert systems, intelligent computer-assisted instruction, and natural language applications. This paper does not discuss the use of AI knowledge-bases in libraries as subject-oriented library materials.