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In the mid-1950s, researchers in the United States melded formal theories of problem solving and intelligence with another powerful new tool for control: the electronic digital computer. Several branches of western mathematical science emerged from this nexus, including computer science (1960s–), data science (1990s–) and artificial intelligence (AI). This thesis offers an account of the origins and politics of AI in the mid-twentieth century United States, which focuses on its imbrications in systems of societal control. In an effort to denaturalize the power relations upon which the field came into being, I situate AI’s canonical origin story in relation to the structural and intellectual priorities of the U.S. military and American industry during the Cold War, circa 1952 to 1961. This thesis offers a detailed and comparative account of the early careers, research interests, and key outputs of four researchers often credited with laying the foundations for AI and machine learning—Herbert A. Simon, Frank Rosenblatt, John McCarthy and Marvin Minsky. It chronicles the distinct ways in which each sought to formalise and simulate human mental behaviour using digital electronic computers. Rather than assess their contributions as discontinuous with what came before, as in mythologies of AI's genesis, I establish continuities with, and borrowings from, management science and operations research (Simon), Hayekian economics and instrumentalist statistics (Rosenblatt), automatic coding techniques and pedagogy (McCarthy), and cybernetics (Minsky), along with the broadscale mobilization of Cold War-era civilian-led military science generally. I assess how Minsky’s 1961 paper 'Steps Toward Artificial Intelligence' simultaneously consolidated and obscured these entanglements as it set in motion an initial research agenda for AI in the following two decades. I argue that mind-computer metaphors, and research in complex information processing generally, played an important role in normalizing the small- and large-scale structuring of social behaviour using mathematics in the United States from the second half of the twentieth century onward.

This thesis investigates the design of audio for feedback in human-technology interaction- auditory displays. Despite promising progress in research and the potential benefits, we currently see little impact of audio in everyday interfaces. Changing interaction paradigms, new contexts of use and inclusive design principles, however, increase the need for an efficient, non-visual means of conveying information. Motivated by these needs, this work describes the development and evaluation of a methodological design framework, aiming to enhance knowledge and skill transfer in auditory display design and to enable designers to build more efficient and compelling auditory solutions. The work starts by investigating the current practice in designing audio in the user interface. A survey amongst practitioners and researchers in the field and a literature study of research papers highlighted the need for a structured design approach. Building on these results, paco - pattern design in the context space has been developed, a framework providing methods to capture, apply and refine design knowledge through design patterns. A key element of paco, the context space, serves as the organising principle for patterns, artefacts and design problems and supports designers in conceptualising the design space. The evaluation of paco is the first comparative study of a design methodology in this area. Experts in auditory display design and novice designers participated in a series of experiments to determine the usefulness of the framework. The evaluation demonstrated that paco facilitates the transfer of design knowledge and skill between experts and novices as well as promoting reflection and recording of design rationale. Alongside these principle achievements, important insights have been gained about the design process which lay the foundations for future research into this subject area. This work contributes to the field of auditory display as it reflects on the current practice and proposes a means of supporting designers to communicate, reason about and build on each other's work more efficiently. The broader field of human-computer interaction may also benefit from the availability of design guidance for exploiting the auditory modality to answer the challenges of future interaction design. Finally, with paco a generic methodology in the field of design patterns was proposed, potentially similarly beneficial to other designing disciplines.

In 85 B.C. a Greek philosopher called Posidonius set sail to answer an age-old question: how deep is the ocean? By lowering a large rock tied to a very long length of rope he determined that the ocean was 2km deep. These line and sinker methods were used until the 1920s when oceanographers developed the first echo sounders that could measure the water's depth by reflecting sound waves off the seafloor. The subsequent increase in sonar depth soundings resulted in oceanologists finally being able to view the alien underwater landscape. Paper printouts and records dominated the industry for decades until the mid 1980s when new digital sonar systems enabled computers to process and render the captured data streams. In the last five years, the offshore industry has been particularly slow to take advantage of the significant advancements made in computer and graphics technologies. Contemporary marine visualization systems still use outdated 2D representations of vessels positioned on digital charts and the potential for using 3D computer graphics for interacting with multidimensional marine data has not been fully investigated. This thesis is concerned with the issues surrounding the visualization of offshore activities and data using interactive 3D computer graphics. It describes the development of a novel 3D marine visualization system and subsequent study of marine visualization techniques through a number of offshore case studies that typify the marine industry. The results of this research demonstrate that presenting the offshore engineer or office based manager with a more intuitive and natural 3D computer generated viewing environment enables complex offshore tasks, activities and procedures to be more readily monitored and understood. The marine visualizations presented in this thesis take advantage of recent advancements in computer graphics technology and our extraordinary ability to interpret 3D data. These visual enhancements have improved offshore staffs' spatial and temporal understanding of marine data resulting in improved planning, decision making and real-time situation awareness of complex offshore data and activities.

The development of increasingly powerful computers, which has enabled the use of windowing software, has also opened the way for the computer study, via simulation, of very complex physical systems. In this study, the main issues related to the implementation of interactive simulations of complex systems are identified and discussed. Most existing simulators are closed in the sense that there is no access to the source code and, even if it were available, adaptation to interaction with other systems would require extensive code re-writing. This work aims to increase the flexibility of such software by developing a set of object-oriented simulation classes, which can be extended, by subclassing, at any level, i.e., at the problem domain, presentation or interaction levels. A strategy, which involves the use of an object-oriented framework, concurrent execution of several simulation modules, use of a networked windowing system and the re-use of existing software written in procedural languages, is proposed. A prototype tool which combines these techniques has been implemented and is presented. It allows the on-line definition of the configuration of the physical system and generates the appropriate graphical user interface. Simulation routines have been developed for the chemical recovery cycle of a paper pulp mill. The application, by creation of new classes, of the prototype to the interactive simulation of this physical system is described. Besides providing visual feedback, the resulting graphical user interface greatly simplifies the interaction with this set of simulation modules. This study shows that considerable benefits can be obtained by application of computer science concepts to the engineering domain, by helping domain experts to tailor interactive tools to suit their needs.

Linear Programming (LP) is a powerful decision making tool extensively used in various economic and engineering activities. In the early stages the success of LP was mainly due to the efficiency of the simplex method. After the appearance of Karmarkar's paper, the focus of most research was shifted to the field of interior point methods. The present work is concerned with investigating and efficiently implementing the latest techniques in this field taking sparsity into account. The performance of these implementations on different classes of LP problems is reported here. The preconditional conjugate gradient method is one of the most powerful tools for the solution of the least square problem, present in every iteration of all interior point methods. The effect of using different preconditioners on a range of problems with various condition numbers is presented. Decomposition algorithms has been one of the main fields of research in linear programming over the last few years. After reviewing the latest decomposition techniques, three promising methods were chosen the implemented. Sparsity is again a consideration and suggestions have been included to allow improvements when solving problems with these methods. Finally, experimental results on randomly generated data are reported and compared with an interior point method. The efficient implementation of the decomposition methods considered in this study requires the solution of quadratic subproblems. A review of recent work on algorithms for convex quadratic was performed. The most promising algorithms are discussed and implemented taking sparsity into account. The related performance of these algorithms on randomly generated separable and non-separable problems is also reported.

This work is concerned with the problem of constructing associative memory models which store and retrieve information in a distributed fashion - that is each store location can be involved in the storage of more than one piece of information. The models are to be logically simple in form and efficient in their use of store. It is hoped that those proposed may find a place in neurophysiological theories of memory. From the starting point of seeking a less complex representation of a holographic model of memory called the Holophone, several memory models have been proposed and their properties investigated by analytical and computer simulation methods. All the systems considered belong to a family of memory models which are described by a pair of matrix equations. It is found that the models which perform well are non-linear devices which have to store and retrieve highly redundant information. One of these, the Associative Net, is closely related to a recent theory of the cerebellum. Some of the contents of Chapters 3, 4 and 5 have already appeared in papers published in collaboration with H.C. Longuet-Higgins and O.P. Buneman. Otherwise this dissertation is believed to be original in content and in arrangement.

This paper describes a computer program which produces English discourse. The program is capable of describing in a sequence of English sentences any game of noughts-&-crosses (tic-tac-toe), whether given or actually played with the program. The object is to understand something of what a speaker is doing when he speaks, and the program therefore demonstrates the operation of rules for selecting information into sentences, for connecting sentences into a discourse, and for constructing clauses, groups, and words to convey the required information with the maximum possible economy. The program uses a systemic functional grammar to co-operate with semantic procedures in producing English. The grammar generates only a limited range of English, but one which is nonetheless sufficient to illustrate the advantages both theoretical and practical of such a grammar for a productive system. Many other computer programs have accepted more or less natural English input, usually in the form of questions requiring an answer, but few have been designed to produce natural English, particularly connected discourse. As a producing system the present model offers a view of language use from a viewpoint slightly different from that of its predecessors. However comprehension and production are dependent on each other, so that study of one may be expected to illuminate the other.

This work concerns a problem in modelling people's understanding of music. The problem is cast in the terms of discovering formal rules for transcribing melodies into musical notation, as this might be done by a student in a harmony class, taking musical dictation from a 'deadpan' performance on the keyboard. The score that results reflects important aspects of the structure and interpretation of the piece, which are only implicit in the performance. In Part I it is argued that this paradigm raises questions of general relevance to the study of our perception of music. In carrying out the task of notating a piece, two kinds of problem arise: what are the harmonic relations between the notes, and what are the metric units into which they are grouped? These two problems are considered in isolation from one another. In Part II, algorithms which embody two kinds of rule for the inference of metre are presented . In Part III the harmonic problem is considered. It arises from the fact that the number of keyboard semitones between two notes does not, by itself, identify their harmonic relation, which is what the notation has to express. Among other considerations, the key of the piece is an important characterisation of this identification - but the key is not explicit in the performance, and must itself be inferred. An earlier theory of harmonic relations is further developed into algorithms for assigning key-signatures and notation to melodies. By -the definition of the problem, we are committed to the concern of music belonging to the tradition of Western tonal music, to which the idea of key applies. Most of' the musical examples discussed will be taken from the work of one of its outstanding exponents, J.S. Bach, and in particular we shall be dealing with the fugue subjects of his “Well-Tempered Clavier". Some of the contents of Part II, Section § 2, and of Part III, Section § 3, have already appeared in a paper published in collaboration with H.C. Longuet-Higgins. Part III, Section § 2.1, describes his prior work in formulating the theory of harmonic relations, mentioned above, which forms the foundation of the work described in that section and has been published elsewhere by him.