We describe an adaptation of the knowledge gradient, originally developed for discrete ranking and selection problems, to the problem of calibrating continuous parameters for the purpose of tuning a simulator. The knowledge gradient for continuous parameters uses a continuous approximation…

Information Retrieval Systems normally deal with keywordbased technologies. Although those systems reach satisfactory results, they aren’t able to answer more complex queries done by users, especially those directly in natural language. To do that, there are the KnowledgeBased Systems, which…

This dissertation sets a detailed, technical history of ideas of Dutch-born lens maker and natural philosopher Nicolas Hartsoeker (1656-1725). Hartsoeker's case exemplifies the kinds of intellectual journeys a university-educated man with technical skills undertook to navigate the chaos and uncertainty…

Palm leaves are an important resource for family households. The effect of harvest on leaf production, growth and fecundity of wild individual palm trees has been studied, but little is known about palm harvest in agro-forestry systems. In the Maya…

Nowadays, data intensive applications are in constant demand and there is need of computing environments with better intelligent capabilities than those present in today's Database Management Systems (DBMS). To build such systems we need formalisms that can perform complicate inferences,…

In this work, we discuss aspects of a framework to support the understanding and the improvement in hypermedia development processes. The framework is built taking into account two modeling approaches and four domain levels. The modeling approaches are called prescriptive…

The Semantic Web attempts to reach a state in the future where everything on the Web will no longer be only machine-readable, but also machine-understandable. An ontology is an explicit specification of a conceptualization. A conceptualization is an abstract, simplified…

Collaborative systems are becoming a widely used tool particularly among professional communities and research groups. They provide a suitable context for distributed people working on the same subject to concentrate their work in a shared place to which everyone has…

In this paper, we present an approach to student's evaluation in a well-defined domain based on a semantic network. A similarity matrix based on the semantic memory structure of humans is used to build a semantic distance model in order…

In this work we analyze the problem of knowledge representation in a collaborative multi-agent system where agents can obtain new information from others through communication. Namely, we analyze several approaches of belief revision in multi-agent systems. We will describe different…