Artificial Intelligence

• Cyber Art Technologies
  Application: Cybernetic Artist
  Harold Cohen used Lisp and Allegro CL to create AARON, a software application that creates original artwork. The program uses an expert based system to hierarchically encapsulate and model the behavior that an artist employs to create art. Over the years, AARON's artwork has evolved from simple lines and scribbles to complex colorful paintings of recognizable figures and shapes.

• Microsoft Research
  Application: Player Animations express a sense of process and continuity that is difficult to convey through other techniques. Although interfaces can often benefit from animation, User Interface Management Systems (UIMSs) rarely provide the tools necessary to easily support complex, state-dependent application output, such as animations. Here we describe Player, an interface component that facilitates sequencing these animations. One difficulty of integrating animations into interactive systems is that animation scripts typically only work in very specific contexts. Care must be taken to establish the required context prior to executing animation. Player employs a precondition and postcondition-based specification language, and automatically computes which animation scripts should be invoked to establish the necessary state. Player's specification language has been designed to make it easy to express the desired behavior of animation controllers. Since planning can be a time-consuming process inappropriate for interactive systems, Player precompiles the plan-based specification into a state machine that executes far more quickly. Serving as an animation controller, Player hides animation script dependencies from the application. Player has been incorporated into the Persona UIMS, and is currently used in the Peedy application.

• University of Southern California
  Application: LOOM
  Loom is a language and environment for constructing intelligent applications. The heart of Loom is a knowledge representation system that is used to provide deductive support for the declarative portion of the Loom language. Declarative knowledge in Loom consists of definitions, rules, facts, and default rules. A deductive engine called a classifier utilizes forward-chaining, semantic unification and object-oriented truth maintenance technologies in order to compile the declarative knowledge into a network designed to efficiently support on-line deductive query processing.