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…

If we are to understand human-level intelligence, we need to understand how meanings can be learned without explicit instruction. I take a step toward that understanding by focusing on the symbol-grounding problem, showing how symbols can emerge from a system…

Gene expression arrays are a technology used to measure quantities of messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA). Application of the technology involves a variety of physical processes beginning with the acquisition of mRNA samples and ending with the fluorescence imaging of a…

Context can be described as the totality of ideas, situations and information that (a) related to, (b) provide the origins for, and (c) influence our response, perspective or judgment of a thing. Design always takes place in a context. However,…

This dissertation investigates changes that occurred in architectural culture in respect to conditions of modernity. Large-scale industrialization and urbanization caused dramatic ruptures with traditional social and economic hierarchies, forcing a reconceptualization of the theoretical constructs underlying architecture. During the course…

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…

Public authorities and private developers around the world are attempting to create and sustain hubs within the innovation-based economy by fostering successful urban environments. These large-scale developments succeed an earlier generation of post-industrial "technopoles" named after the French word popularized…

Oligomeric mini-proteins, short peptides with protein-like features, constitute valuable minimal models for the study of oligomeric proteins. Oligomerization is a common feature of cellular proteins that may confer structural and functional advantages. Oligomerization is proposed to have arisen by several…

Despite recent progress in materials synthesis, there are few materials with narrow pore size distributions and well-defined pore structures in the size range of 100 - 500 A. Materials with pores of 100 - 500 A possess a potential combination…

This thesis developed and applied tools to bridge the gap between available data and action for urban air quality management, focusing on strategies to reduce particle concentrations. One of the principal thesis contributions is a Bayesian method to exploit the…