Teaching the Foundations in AI pdf, ps
Shamma D.A., Turner C.W., To be published in the Eleventh Florida Artificial Intelligence Research Symposium. May, 1998.

Much has been written on how best to present course material to students in computer science and AI. However, there is little research on how a given teaching strategy actually changes students' understanding of difficult concepts in computer science and AI. This article describes how a mobile robot project is used to teach foundational concepts in an introductory AI class. The article describes the course reading list and the way in which the robot project is related to the readings. Finally, we report the results of surveys taken of students' attitudes towards AI as measured before and after their participation in the class.

An AI Approach to Computer Aided Tomography pdf, ps
Kolen, J. F. , D. A. Shamma, T. Reichherzer. To be published in the Eleventh Florida Artificial Intelligence Research Symposium. May, 1998.

Computer assited tomography (CAT) systems demand large amounts of time and space. In this paper, we describe an approach to solving the CAT problem using several AI techiques including representation selection and pruing. Rather than backproject intensity data onto a pixel grid or voxel lattice, we solve the problem geometrically - a back projection region is stored as a convex polygon in a planar decomposistion. An algorithm for intersection two planar decompositions is described below. This algorithm allows us to merge intensity information from mutliple sources into a single coherent structure. Knowledge of the task can provide pruing information in the form of stabilized regions that need not be decomposed.

Robots in Education ps
Carl W. Turner, Kenneth M. Ford, Patrick J. Hayes, David Shamma, Rachid Manseur. (1996, November). In A. Kak & Y. Shirai (Eds.) Proceedings of the US-Japan Graduate Student Forum in Robotics (pp. 154-157), Osaka, Japan: Robotics Society of Japan.

The viability of any research domain depends in large part on the number of talented, motivated students entering the field. For several years, the Institute for Human and Machine Cognition has used student-initiated robot projects as a ``hook'' for attracting top students into the study of robotics and artificial intelligence. This article describes how the use of robots complements graduate-level classroom lectures, shows how robots aid students' understanding of theoretical issues in AI, and discusses the practical aspects of introducing robots into the curriculum.