Potentially relevant literature for the years 1990-1999 was identified by (a) conducting keyword searches of computerized bibliographic databases, especially CAB Abstracts and Aquatic Sciences and Fisheries Abstracts, (b) reading through the tables of contents of a few especially relevant journals, (c) searching the internet for pertinent bibliographies, and (d) to...
Coordination in large multiagent systems in order to achieve a system level goal is a critical challenge. Given the agents' intention to cooperate, there is no guarantee that the agent actions will lead to good system objective especially when the system becomes large. One of the primary difficulties in such...
Knowledge workers are struggling in the information flood. There is a growing interest in intelligent desktop environments that help knowledge workers organize their daily life. Intelligent desktop environments allow the desktop user to define a set of “activities” that characterize the user’s desktop work. These environments then attempt to identify...
The functioning of marine habitats needs to be understood in the context of the ecological relationships and associations between organisms and the physical and biogenic environment they inhabit. Thus, it becomes important to explore and define habitat features which contribute to these relationships and which are important in the life...
Building intelligent computer assistants has been a long-cherished goal of AI. Many intelligent assistant systems were built and fine-tuned to specific application domains. In this work, we develop a general model of assistance that combines three powerful ideas: decision theory, hierarchical task models and probabilistic relational languages. We use the...
The thesis focuses on model-based approximation methods for reinforcement
learning with large scale applications such as combinatorial optimization problems.
First, the thesis proposes two new model-based methods to stablize the
value–function approximation for reinforcement learning. The first one is the
BFBP algorithm, a batch-like reinforcement learning process which iterates between...
Rockfish of the genus Sebastes are important components of Oregon reef communities. I examined patterns of age and growth in young-of-year rockfish across two nested spatial scales – local and regional – along the Oregon coast. Using otolith microstructural examination, I examined the relative importance of local versus regional factors...