Comics have a rich visual vocabulary, and people find them appealing. They are also an effective form of communication. We have built a system, called Comic Chat, that represents on-line communications in the form of comics. Comic Chat automates numerous aspects of comics generation, including balloon construction and layout, the placement and orientation of comic characters, the default selection of character gestures and expressions, the incorporation of semantic panel elements, and the choice of zoom factor for the virtual camera. This paper describes the mechanisms that Comic Chat uses to perform this automation, as well as novel aspects of the program’s user interface. Comic Chat is a working program, allowing groups of people to communicate over the Internet. It has several advantages over other graphical chat programs, including the availability of a graphical history, and a dynamic graphical presentation.

Learning and Problem Solving with Multilayer Connectionist Systems September 1986 Charles William Anderson B.S., University of Nebraska M.S., University of Massachusetts Ph.D., University of Massachusetts Directed by: Professor Andrew G. Barto The di#culties of learning in multilayered networks of computational units has limited the use of connectionist systems in complex domains. This dissertation elucidates the issues of learning in a network's hidden units, and reviews methods for addressing these issues that have been developed through the years. Issues of learning in hidden units are shown to be analogous to learning issues for multilayer systems employing symbolic representations.

Architecture The Alma Abstract Architecture (AAA) is the virtual architecture used during the intermediate code generation phase of the Alma-0 compiler. The AAA combines the features of the abstract machines for imperative languages and for logic programming languages. The compiler compiles the Alma-0 programs into AAA programs. In a second phase the AAA instructions are translated into C statements. As the Alma-0 language itself, the AAA aims to combine the best of both worlds; elements were taken from virtual machines used to compile imperative languages (in particular the RISC architecture described in Wirth [1996, pp. 55--59], and from the WAM machine used to compile a logical language (see Ait-Kaci [1991]). Still, the AAA resembles most the virtual machines used in the compilation of imperative languages. The additions made to provide for the extensions of the Alma-0 language are ---the failure handling instructions ONFAIL, FAIL, 40 \Delta Krzysztof R. Apt et al ---the log ...

Event distribution middleware supports the integration of distributed applications by accepting events from information producers and disseminating applicable events to interested consumers. In this paper we present a flexible new model, the Information Flow Graph (IFG), for specifying the flow of information in such a system. We illustrate the use of the IFG for: (1) content-based publish/subscribe; (2) stateless event transformations that consolidate events from diverse sources; and (3) stateful event interpretation functions for deriving trends, summaries, and alarms from published events and for defining equivalent event sequences. We introduce two techniques for efficient implementation of such systems: (1) a flow graph rewriting optimization which allows stateless IFGs to be converted to a form which can exploit

Object) TEACH Event: officer child animate living human other-animal adult plant horse (a) Lexicalized Conceptual Knowledge (b) Non-Lexical Concept Hierarchies (or Graphs) physicalobject abstractobject telescope opticalinsrument course thing lifeless object Figure 8.6: Representation of Conceptual Knowledge. 135 Though conceptual units state selectional preferences for role fillers, there is no completeness requirement that they must specify every role that can ever be attached to a concept. Optional roles such as a location role can be attached to any event, for instance. Once again, a distinction is made between required units and optional units and the representations are designed to distinguish between the two. The required roles, such as the agent, theme, and experiencer roles of a particular event for example, form the collection of roles that are typically present for the event. However, this is not a strict requirement constraint as in syntax. Some of the roles mentioned i...