The first two chapters of this thesis investigate a possibly fundamental aspect of technological progress. If knowledge accumulates as technology progresses, then successive generations of innovators may face an increasing educational burden, forcing them to spend longer periods in education…

Characterization of defect is one of the important objectives of nondestructive evaluation (NDE) for condition assessment of structures. Among many other NDE techniques, ultrasonic methods play a prominent role in the both quantitative and qualitative assessment of discontinuities in reinforced…

We examine semantic interoperability problems in the fixed income securities industry
and propose a knowledge representation architecture for context interchange
mediation to support dynamic integration of autonomous database, web, and
procedural sources of information. For sources and…

The thesis explores architectural form generation through two behavior based artificial intelligence approaches: the communication of agents in an unpredictable simulation system, and the codification of information within an evolutionary process. Both concepts stem from the evaluation of potentially definable…

Micro embossing is the process of fabricating micron-sized features by plastic deformation of a work piece by means of a shaped tool or die. In our work we are concerned with hot embossing of PMMA to produce features in the…

This thesis integrates hardware development, data analysis, and mathematical modeling to facilitate our understanding of brain cognition. Exploration of these brain mechanisms requires both structural and functional knowledge to (i) reconstruct the spatial distribution of the activity, (ii) to estimate…

Previous research on corporate household and corporate householding has presented
examples, literature review, and working definitions. In this paper, we first improve our
understanding of the area by developing a typology of corporate householding tasks
and knowledge…

We show how to interoperate, semantically and inferentially, between the leading Semantic Web approaches to rules (RuleML Logic Programs) and ontologies (OWL/DAML+OIL Description Logic) via analyzing their expressive intersection. To do so, we define a new intermediate knowledge representation (KR)…

Organizations must establish processes for managing knowledge across boundaries because of the specialized and task-dependent forms of knowledge required to deliver products and services. To address this challenge an integrative framework is developed that identifies and integrates the value of…

Does knowledge of language consist of symbolic rules? How do children learn and use their linguistic knowledge? To elucidate these questions, we present a computational model that acquires phonological knowledge from a corpus of common English nouns and verbs. In…