Towards Explainable Inference about Object Motion using Qualitative
  Reasoning
  The capability of making explainable inferences regarding physical processes
has long been desired. One fundamental physical process is object motion.
Inferring what causes the motion of a group of objects can even be a
challenging task for experts, e.g., in forensics science. Most of the work in
the literature relies on physics simulation to draw such infer- ences. The
simulation requires a precise model of the under- lying domain to work well and
is essentially a black-box from which one can hardly obtain any useful
explanation. By contrast, qualitative reasoning methods have the advan- tage in
making transparent inferences with ambiguous infor- mation, which makes it
suitable for this task. However, there has been no suitable qualitative theory
proposed for object motion in three-dimensional space. In this paper, we take
this challenge and develop a qualitative theory for the motion of rigid
objects. Based on this theory, we develop a reasoning method to solve a very
interesting problem: Assuming there are several objects that were initially at
rest and now have started to move. We want to infer what action causes the
movement of these objects.
