A real-time motion engine for interactive synthetic characters, either virtual or physical, needs to allow expressivity and interactivity of motion in order to maintain the illusion of life. Canned animation examples from an animator or motion capture device are expressive,…

This dissertation investigates how rapid learning occurs in high technology industries, many of which operate in what Bourgeois and Eisenhardt (1988) term "high velocity environments." The dissertation consists of three empirical studies, which follow the method of extended case study…

The climate of the reception of immigrants to the United States has soured, and circumstances are becoming increasingly difficult for persons seeking to gain residency. Reasons often given for the reversal in this practice are that immigrants are poor, uneducated,…

Understanding the biological signals encoded in a genome is a key challenge of computational biology. These signals are encoded in the four-nucleotide alphabet of DNA and are responsible for all molecular processes in the cell. In particular, the genome contains…

This thesis explores how doctors and nurses use documents to share their knowledge within and across healthcare settings. In addressing this question I draw on a 15-month, multi-sited ethnographic study in several pediatric health care settings, following patients from primary…

We examine a knowledge representation architecture to support context interchange
mediation. For autonomous receivers and sources sharing a common subject domain,
the mediator's reasoning engine can devise query plans integrating multiple sources and
resolving semantic heterogeneity. Receiver…

How do teams complete a task involving critical knowledge that is both complex and
external to the team itself? This is a task characterized by a particularly difficult tradeoff
between external search for important knowledge on one hand…

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…

Traditional scheduling algorithms (using the techniques of PERT charts, decision analysis or operations research) require well-defined quantitative, complete sets of constraints. They are insufficient for scheduling situations where the problem description is ill-defined, involving incomplete, possibly inconsistent and generally qualitative…

The goal of the work reported here is to capture the commonsense knowledge of non-expert human contributors. Achieving this goal will enable more intelligent human-computer interfaces and pave the way for computers to reason about our world. In the domain…