The goal of this project is to develop algorithms for the purpose of reasoning with time and other higher dimensional space. Reasoning with time and three-dimensional space is ubiquitous in our daily life as well as in computer systems. For example, a detective would often check the temporal consistency of an alibi of some suspects. A system for packing boxes in a container would reason with space. For about the last two decades some researchers within the artificial intelligence community have been engaged in studying this area. The PI has been involved in critically analyzing some of the existing algorithms and developing new efficient algorithms for temporal reasoning. A particular area of interest in this project is on studying temporal reasoning under uncertainty. If the input information is not completely known and is ringed with uncertainty, then how does it affect the reasoning process? How is it possible to determine possible causes for events from the available temporal information? These are the types of questions, which are being investigated in this work. Viewing temporal (or higher dimensional) information as constraints, an algorithmic approach for constraint propagation is being employed in the research. A deeper understanding of dimension related reasoning and more efficient mechanisms for doing it computationally will emerge from this project. http://stallion.jsums.edu/~dmitra/str.html
