, planning under uncertainty, sensor-based planning, visibility, decision-theoretic planning, game theory, information spaces, reinforcement learning, nonlinear systems, trajectory planning, nonholonomic planning, and kinodynamic planning.

and the requirement for exit. The next several decades pose a major challenge for Western firms and political systems as these forces continue to work their way through the worldwide economy.

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The Sketchpad system uses drawing as a novel communication medium for a computer. The system contains input, output, and computation programs which enable it to interpret information drawn directly on a computer display. It has been used to draw electrical, mechanical, scientific, mathematical, and animated drawings; it is a general purpose system. Sketchpad has shown the most usefulness as an aid to the understanding of processes, such as the notion of linkages, which can be described with pictures. Sketchpad also makes it easy to draw highly repetitive or highly accurate drawings and to change drawings previously drawn with it. The many drawings in this thesis were all made with Sketchpad.

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This essay discusses the effect of technical change on wage inequality. I argue that the behavior of wages and returns to schooling indicates that technical change has been skill-biased during the past sixty years. Furthermore, the recent increase in inequality is most likely due to an acceleration

This paper provides an empirical analysis of how the U.S. Social Security and Medicare insurance system affect the labor supply of older males in the presence of incomplete markets for loans, annuities, and health insurance. We estimate a detailed dynamic programming (DP) model of the joint labor supply and Social Security acceptance decision, focusing on a sample of males in the low to middle income brackets whose only pension is Social Security. The DP model delivers a rich set of predictions about the dynamics of retirement behavior, and comparisons of actual vs. predicted behavior show that the DP model is able to account for wide variety of phenomena observed in the data, including the pronounced peaks in the distribution of retirement ages at 62 and 65 (the ages of early and normal eligibility for Social Security benefits, respectively). We identify a significant fraction of “health insurance constrained” individuals who have no form of retiree health insurance other than Medicare, and who can only obtain fairly priced private health insurance via their employer’s group health plan. The combination of significant individual risk aversion and a long tailed (Pareto) distribution of health care expenditures implies that there is a significant “security value” for these individuals to remain employed until they are eligible for Medicare coverage at age 65. Overall, our model suggests that a number of heretofore puzzling aspects of retirement behavior can be viewed as artifacts of particular details of the Social Security rules, whose incentive effects are especially strong for lower income individuals and those who do not have access to fairly priced loans, annuities, and health insurance.

the Continuously Adaptive Mean Shift (CAMSHIFT) algorithm. CAMSHIFT’s tracking accuracy is compared against a Polhemus tracker. Tolerance to noise, distractors and performance is studied. CAMSHIFT is then used as a computer interface for controlling commercial computer games and for exploring immersive 3D graphic

in exchange for smooth earnings. We find that 55 % of managers would avoid initiating a very positive NPV project if it meant falling short of the current quarter’s consensus earnings. Missing an earnings target or reporting volatile earnings is thought to reduce the predictability of earnings, which in turn

This paper describes the application of reinforcement learning (RL) to the difficult real world problem of elevator dispatching. The elevator domain poses a combination of challenges not seen in most RL research to date. Elevator systems operate in continuous state spaces and in continuous time