by C. Annique Un., Thesis (Ph.D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management, February 2001., "February 2000.", Includes bibliographical references (leaves 297-311).

Conversational interfaces have received much attention as a promising natural communication channel between humans and computers. A typical conversational interface consists of three major systems: speech understanding, dialog management and spoken language generation. In such a conversational interface, speech recognition…

by Antoine D. Guivarch., Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Engineering Systems Division, Technology and Policy Program; and, (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Mechanical Engineering, 2003., Includes bibliographical references (p. 149-152).

In the traditional small community, people learned how to maintain their own homes by watching activities in which the elements of their physical environment were made. This work was done out in the open, where everyone could see it as…

by Lori Faith Lamel., Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 1988., Bibliography: leaves 140-150.

This thesis focuses on the search for a more equitable urban environment. In Western Europe, the hope that cities are relevant forms of living and interacting, still exists. In Brussels, in the last fifteen years, the inhabitants formed a unique…

Current methods for bipedal walking control include playback of recorded joint motion and the derivation of dynamic equations to map desired forces at the body to the required torques at the joints. Both methods require a significant amount of up-front…

Intelligent autonomous agents working cooperatively accomplish tasks more efficiently than single agents, as well as tasks that were infeasible for the single agent. For example, a single agent transporting a ton of blocks will need to take multiple trips, possibly…

Firm boundaries have been the subject of much scholarly interest in recent years, as firms increasingly hire external, "contingent" workers and outsource previously core activities. However, little empirical research has directly studied what happens differently inside the firm's boundaries, versus…

(cont.) which is expected, given their additional knowledge resources. The respondents' urgency in looking for the relevant knowledge is the primary explanation for this difference between the two networks. This difference in knowledge networking among the different groups did not…