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…

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…

If we are to understand how we can build machines capable of broad purpose learning and reasoning, we must first aim to build systems that can represent, acquire, and reason about the kinds of commonsense knowledge that we humans have…

La Gramática del Papel y la Referencia es una teoría funcional del lenguaje que permite la representación de un texto de entrada en términos de su estructura lógica. Con el fin de ir más allá de la gramática nuclear, el…

In this work, non-equilibrium molecular dynamics simulations are used to generate the flow of linear polymer chains (monomer-springs with FENE potential) and a Lennard-Jones fluid (Newtonian fluid) through a con traction-expansion (4:1:4) geometry. An external force field simulating a constant…

Trypanosoma cruzi isolates from 23 acute chagasic patients from localities of Western Venezuela (state
of Barinas) where Chagas’ disease is endemic were typed using ribosomal and mini-exon gene markers.
Results showed that isolates of the two major phylogenetic lineages, T.…

AIM: To discover whether nursing students believed that a post-registration cardiac module was meeting their needs.

METHOD: A descriptive qualitative approach was used in this study. Semi-structured interviews were recorded with a purposive sample of six registered nurses who…

This dissertation analyzes the strategic implications of customization policies available to companies that must simultaneously provide service and learn about their customers through automated interfaces. The first part of the dissertation lays out the theoretical framework within which the analysis…

Signature schemes are fundamental cryptographic primitives, useful as a stand-alone application, and as a building block in the design of secure protocols and other cryptographic objects. In this thesis, we study both the uses that signature schemes find in protocols,…

The purpose of the study was to investigate whether teachers’ knowledge of student assessment was influenced by their gender and if it was related to their teaching experience (years in education). One hundred and twenty six physical education teachers (n=126)…