I . I n t r o d u c t i o n TALUS acts as the domain expert of an intelligent tu tor ing system to teach LISP. A complete intelligent tutor ing system would include a student model, a dialog manager, courseware, and additional domain expertise. Input to TALUS consists of one or more student functions intended to solve an assigned task. Typical tasks include REVERSE, MEMBER, U N I O N , I N T E ...

With the assignment of the last available blocks of public IPv4 addresses from Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, there is continued pressure for widespread IPv6 adoption. Because the IPv6 address space is orders of magnitude larger than the IPv4 address space, researchers need new methods and techniques to accurately measure and characterize growth in IPv6. This thesis focuses on IPv6 router...

Note: Peter Ross and Emma Hart have since moved from the University of Edinburgh to Napier University. The AI Applications Institute at the University of Edinburgh was created in 1984 to transfer AI-related technology from the university into practice, working in partnership with a wide range of international businesses and organisations. These include NASA, the US Department of Defense, the RA...

The notion of treewidth is of considerable interest in relation to NP-hard problems. Indeed, several studies have shown that the tree-decomposition method can be used to solve many basic optimization problems in polynomial time when treewidth is bounded, even if, for arbitrary graphs, computing the treewidth is NP-hard. Several papers present heuristics with computational experiments. For many ...

The heuristic evaluation (HE) method is one of the most common in the suite of tools for usability evaluations because it is a fast, inexpensive and resource-efficient process in relation to the many usability issues it generates. The method emphasizes completely independent initial expert evaluations. Inter-rater reliability and agreement coefficients are not calculated. The variability across...

T hese are exciting times, with a plethora of new technologies that are expediting discovery of the genetic underpinnings of human disease. Comprehensive resequencing of the human genome is now feasible and affordable, allowing each person’s entire genetic makeup to be revealed. The major focus of attention in genetics studies has been the small portion (1%) of the human genome that comprises t...

This thesis examines two combinatorial optimization problems: the Generalized Degree Constrained Minimum Spanning Tree Problem (d-GMSTP) and the Generalized Minimum Vertex Bi-connected Network Problem (GMVBCNP). Both problems are NPhard. Given a clustered graph where nodes are partitioned into clusters, the goal is to find a minimal cost subgraph containing exactly one node from each cluster an...

The use of heuristic search techniques for network optimisation problems has long been noted for its merits. It often requires both a significant understanding of both the heuristic methods themselves and the specific network problem domain. This precludes many network domain experts from effectively using heuristic search paradigms in building solutions. Solutions to network problems using heu...

Path planning belongs to the best-known and well explored problems in computer science. However, in today’s real-time and dynamic applications, such as virtual reality, existing algorithms for static environment are considerably insufficient and, surprisingly, almost no attention is given to techniques for dynamic graphs. This paper introduces two methods to plan a path in an undirected graph w...

Heuristic Search techniques are known for their efficiency and effectiveness in solving NP-Hard problems. However, there has been limited success so far in constructing a software toolkit which is dedicated to these methods and can fully support all the stages and aspects of researching and developing a system based on these techniques. Some of the reasons for that include the lack of problem m...