<p> Starting from Edward Edinger's portrayal of Jung's process of individuation as the creation of consciousness, this dissertation asks in what ways the creation of artificial intelligence (AI) can be seen as the recreation of consciousness, and specifically whether the AI's maturation from nonconsciousness to something equivalent to consciousness will have an analogous effect on humanity's development out of unconsciousness toward a greater state of cognitive freedom. Taking a functional perspective, this dissertation asks whether B. F. Skinner's metaphor of the human psyche as a black box, normally seen as expressing the belief that humans are mechanistic and determined, is in fact an attempt to insulate the most intimate of human experiences (the soul) from the intrusive gaze of the scientific mindset. Juxtaposing this black box metaphor with two other metaphors&mdash;that of the box that holds Schrodinger's cat and that of Pandora's box&mdash;this dissertation asks whether the presence of an entirely constructed entity that displays all the signs of soul will cause the artificially intelligent entity to act as a mirror, reflecting humanity's gaze past our inner defenses, to an inner absence where a metaphysical soul was once surmised to be. Although such a change in self-image would initially entail an apparent loss of meaning, this dissertation notes that such a lacuna of meaning is already growing in society and concludes that the loss of this concept would eventually result in a new concept of self that would represent an important milestone for the collective individuation of the species.</p>

This thesis presents a development environment for Design Expert Systems that features a new language where the roles of knowledge and the way it is brought to bear are predefined by the solution method. / The language also allows knowledge to be organized into classes of objects whose dynamic creation corresponds to the structure of the components to be configured. This approach, combined with a specialized control strategy for Design problems, helps in narrowing the representation gap between the expert's knowledge and the system's knowledge. / The environment assists knowledge acquisition by means of a structured editor and by static and dynamic analyses for validation; it is implemented on a micro-computer and includes an internal Production System to execute the Expert Systems that are generated. Two applications to Engineering Design are used to demonstrate the environment's capabilities.

A robotic workcell is a collection of robots, sensors, and other industrial equipment grouped in a cooperative environment to perform various complex tasks. Due to their distributed nature however, the control and programming of robotic workcells is often a difficult task, for which dedicated environments have to be designed and built. / Simulation, especially graphic simulation, can greatly contribute to the development of programs for such integrated robotic applications: the simulator emulates the behavior of the workcell on a computer display, and allows the programmer to test and debug programs without requiring an immediate access to the physical equipment. / This thesis presents the design of a graphic simulator for robotic workcell applications. The simulator is based on SAGE/WRAP, an environment for the programming and run-time control of robotic workcells. Given a WRAP program as input, the simulator displays a top-view of the workcell and animates graphically the execution of the program; the coordination and the flow of operations within the workcell being shown, the programmer can quickly assess the overall validity of the program. / The simulator was developed in C under the X Window System, and is currently implemented as a standalone software; the design was made flexible and modular, to facilitate an eventual integration to the WRAP environment.

Planning under uncertainty is an increasingly important research field, and it is clear that the design of robust and scalable algorithms which consider uncertainty is key to the development of effective autonomous and semi-autonomous systems. Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs) offer a powerful mathematical framework for making optimal action choices in noisy and/or uncertain environments. However, integration of the POMDP model with real world applications has been slow due to the high computation cost of exact approaches to POMDP planning. / In recent years, point-based POMDP solvers have emerged as efficient methods for providing approximate solutions by planning over a small subset of the belief space. This thesis first provides a survey on many of the proposed point-based POMDP solvers. We then conduct an empirical analysis on the key components of point-based methods, the belief collection and belief updating processes. This is an important contribution, as previous publications on point-based methods have only compared full algorithms, without comparing the underlying processes. As well, we verify the effect of a variety of parameters and optimizations that could be used within a point-based solver. Experiments are conducted on a variety of POMDP environments. / L'importance grandissante de la recherche dans le domaine de la planification sous incertitude est signe que l'élaboration d'algorithmes robustes et extensibles qui gèrent l'incertitude est un élément clé dans le développement de systèmes autonomes et semi-autonomes efficaces. Les processus de décision markoviens partiellement observables (POMDP) constituent une puissante fondation mathématique pour le choix d'actions optimales dans un environnement incertain. Il a cependant été difficile d'incorporer les POMDPs à des applications réelles, à cause de leur coût de calcul élevé lorsqu'une solution exacte est requise. / Récemment, les approches de résolution de POMDPs dites par points, qui planifient sur un petit sous-ensemble de l'état des croyance, se sont révélées être efficaces pour obtenir des solutions approximatives. Le présent m´emoire propose tout d'abord une revue de plusieurs approches par points. Par la suite, une analyse empirique des composantes primordiales des approches par points, de la collecte d'observations, ainsi que du processus de mise à jour de l'état des croyance, est proposée. De plus, les effets de différents paramètres et optimisations liés aux approches par points sont vérifiés. Des expériences sont conduites avec une variété d'environnements de type POMDP.

Thesis (PhD)--University of South Australia, 1997

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2006. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 68-02, Section: B, page: 1090. Adviser: Gul Agha. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 190-205) Available on microfilm from Pro Quest Information and Learning.

Thesis (PH.D.) -- Syracuse University, 2007. / "Publication number AAT 3266311"

Thesis (M.F.A.)--Rochester Institute of Technology, 1988. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 31-32).

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of Mathematics, 2007. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 68-07, Section: B, page: 4531. Adviser: Lawrence Moss. Title from dissertation home page (viewed Apr. 22, 2008).

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2007. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 68-11, Section: B, page: 7454. Adviser: Sylvian R. Ray. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 105-113) Available on microfilm from Pro Quest Information and Learning.