by Richard J. Donnelly and Philip G. Potts., Thesis (S.M.M.O.T.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management, 1998., Vitae., Includes bibliographical references (leaves 80-81).

A fuzzy controller is usually designed by formulating the knowledge of a human expert into a set of linguistic variables and fuzzy rules. As it is well known, the use of prior knowledge can dramatically improve the performance and quality…

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…

Ce mémoire propose une analyse critique du discours de l’enregistrement sonore à domicile (home recording). Dans la foulée des propos mettant de l’avant l’ «accessibilité» et la «démocratisation» de l’enregistrement sonore, ce mémoire analyse les relations de savoir/pouvoir produites et…

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,…

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…

This thesis proposes a miethodology for the design of man-machine interfaces by combining top-down and bottom-up processes in vision. From a computational perspective, we propose that the scientific-cognitive question of combining top-down and bottom-up knowledge is similar to the engineering…

L'appropriation culturelle possède une diffusion très large et est un phénomène essentiellement intemporel. L'appropriation culturelle est définie comme «the taking- from a culture that is not one’s own- of intellectual property, cultural expressions or artifacts, history and ways of knowledge»…

Computers have dramatically changed the nature of structural engineering practice by shifting work from process-oriented tasks, such as performing hand calculations and drafting, to structural modeling and interpretation of computer results. To perform these new functions, engineers need to have…