In plasma etching process it is critical to know when the film being etched has cleared to the underlying film, i.e. to detect endpoint, in order to achieve the desired device performance in the resulting integrated circuit. The most highly…

This paper describes a natural language system START. The system analyzes English text and automatically transforms it into an appropriate representation, the knowledge base, which incorporates the information found in the text. The user gains access to information stored in…

The so-called diversity-multiplexing tradeoff characterizes the fundamental interaction between the robustness and capacity gains obtainable from multiple-input and
multiple-output (MIMO) systems in fading environments. This thesis develops practical schemes for approaching the optimal tradeoff in various delay and complexity
regimes.…

How can we insure that knowledge embedded in a program is applied effectively? Traditionally the answer to this question has been sought in different problem solving paradigms and in different approaches to encoding and indexing knowledge. Each of these is…

The Listener is an automated system that unintrusively performs knowledge acquisition from informal input. The Listener develops a coherent internal representation of a description from an initial set of disorganized, imprecise, incomplete, ambiguous, and possibly inconsistent statements. The Listener can…

In a Communication Bootstrapping system, peer components with different perceptual worlds invent symbols and syntax based on correlations between their percepts. I propose that Communication Bootstrapping can also be used to acquire functional definitions of words and causal reasoning knowledge.…

I have invented "Internet Fish," a novel class of resource-discovery tools designed to help users extract useful information from the Internet. Internet Fish (IFish) are semi-autonomous, persistent information brokers; users deploy individual IFish to gather and refine information related to…

This is a partial theory of thinking, combining a number of classical and modern concepts from psychology, linguistics, and AI. Whenever one encounters a new situation (or makes a substantial change in one's viewpoint) he selects from memory a structure…

Electrical circuit designers seldom create really new topologies or use old ones in a novel way. Most designs are known combinations of common configurations tailored for the particular problem at hand. In this thesis I show that much of the…

When faced with challenging technical problems, R&D personnel would often turn to technical papers to seek inspiration for a solution. The building of a corpus of such papers and the easy retrieval of relevant papers by the user in his…