Over the last two decades, satisfiability and satisfiability-modulo theory (SAT/SMT) solvers have grown powerful enough to be general purpose reasoning engines throughout software engineering and computer science. However, most practical use cases of SAT/SMT solvers require not just solving a single SAT/SMT problem, but solving sets of related SAT/SMT problems....
Image segmentation continues to be a fundamental problem in computer vision and image understanding. In this thesis, we present a Bayesian network that we use for object boundary detection in which the MPE (most probable explanation) before any evidence can produce multiple non-overlapping, non-self-intersecting closed contours and the MPE with...
Image feature detection and matching are two critical processes for many computer vision tasks. Currently, intensity-based local interest region detectors and local feature-based matching methods are used widely in computer vision applications. But in some applications, such as biological object recognition tasks, within-class changes in pose, lighting, color, and texture...
We model the popular board game of Clue as an MDP and evaluate Monte-Carlo policy rollout in a simulated environment pitting different agents and policies against each other. We describe the choices we made in the representation, along with some of the problems we encountered along the way. We find...
Appropriate representations of variational software simplify the analysis of their properties.This thesis proposes tailored representations of two kinds variational softwares: difference files of merge commits in Git and feature models. For the former, we use the Choice Edit Model, which is based on the choice calculus, to represent changes introduced...
Most database users do not know formal query languages, such as SQL, and prefer to express their information needs using usable query languages, such as keyword queries. Keyword queries, however, are inherently ambiguous and challenging for the database systems to understand and answer effectively. We propose a novel approach to...
The study of variational typing originated from the problem of type inference for variational programs, which encode numerous different but related plain programs. In this dissertation, I present a sound and complete type inference algorithm for inferring types of all plain programs encoded in variational programs. The proposed algorithm runs...
The purpose of this article is to explore student reasoning with regard to problems in logic, particularly those related to the Principle of Mathematical Induction (PMI). The five case studies presented build off of work done by other researchers, most notably Dubinsky and Harel, who both looked at how students'...
Tensegrity structures are composed of pure compressional elements that are connected via a network of pure tensional elements. The concept of tensegrity promises numerous advantages to the field of robotics. Tensegrity robots are, however, notoriously difficult to control due to their oscillatory nature and nonlinear interaction between the components. Multiagent...
Automated recognition of object categories in images is a critical step for many real-world computer vision applications. Interest region detectors and region descriptors have been widely employed to tackle the variability of objects in pose, scale, lighting, texture, color, and so on. Different types of object recognition problems usually require...