by Gloria G. Moncayo., Thesis (M.B.A.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management, 1999., Includes bibliographical references (leaves 87-88).

Continued advances in the semiconductor industry will require the introduction of new materials and processes concurrent with shrinking device dimensions. These simultaneous demands drastically reduce margins for error and necessitate an increasingly quantitative understanding of semiconductor processes. Leaders of the…

We consider the scheduling problem of minimizing the average weighted completion time of n jobs with release dates on a single machine. We first study two linear programming relaxations of the problem, one based on a time-indexed formulation, the other…

This paper demonstrates the importance of knowledge for effective
management of outsourcing. Drawing on an empirical study on automakers?
management of supplier involvement in product development in Japan, this paper shows
that the level of own knowledge is critical for…

Evaluation of public programming currently tends toward plans that are set in advance of any sampling and adhered to throughout. Because increments in the knowledge profile during the course of an evaluation might beckon adjustment of the working procedure, fixed…

A system for visual recognition is described, with implications for the general problem of representation of knowledge to assist control. The immediate objective is a computer system that will recognize objects in a visual scene, specifically hammers. The computer receives…

Explanation-based Generalization requires that the learner obtain an explanation of why a precedent exemplifies a concept. It is, therefore, useless if the system fails to find this explanation. However, it is not necessary to give up and resort to purely…

This paper descries D-SCRIPT, a language for representing knowledge in artificial intelligence programs. D-SCRIPT contains a powerful formalism for descriptions, which permits the representation of statements that are problematical for other systems. Particular attention is paid to problems of opaque…

The goal of this thesis is to apply the computational approach to motor learning, i.e., describe the constraints that enable performance improvement with experience and also the constraints that must be satisfied by a motor learning system, describe what is…

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…