by Glenn D. Bartkowski., Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, System Design & Management Program, 2001., Includes bibliographical references (leaves 68-69).

This study investigates an approach of knowledge discovery and data mining in insufficient databases. An application of Computational Taxonomy analysis demonstrates that the approach is effective in such a data mining process. The approach is characterized by the use of…

Humans recognize optical reflectance properties of surfaces such as metal, plastic, or paper from a single image without knowledge of illumination. We develop a machine vision system to perform similar recognition tasks automatically. Reflectance estimation under unknown, arbitrary illumination proves…

Current reasoning systems attempt to model an agent's knowledge and interaction with its environment in a symbolic manner. This environment, its world is generally dynamic and changing due to natural evolution or the actions of other agents that are a…

The goal of this work involves the developing of an argumentation-based formalism that an agent could use for constructing plans. In this formalism, agents will have certain knowledge about the world, and a set of actions that they will be…

Flow Accelerated Corrosion (FAC) is the most prevalent material degradation mechanism for low carbon steel in steam-water flow systems. The band of uncertainty in predictions of wear rate due to FAC spans one to two orders of magnitude. Such a…

The design of intelligent agents is a key issue for many applications. Although there is no universally accepted de nition of intelligence, a notion of rational agency has been proposed as an alternative for the characterization of intelligent agency.
Modeling…

Novelty is a concept of great importance in the writing of a research paper, given that the author has to persuade the audience of the news value of the reported research, which makes it worth publishing. In this paper I…

Apart from speculating about a series of issues open to debate, such as the dark side of progress and globalization or the conflict between science and morality,
Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake (2003) offers a feasible insight into the state…

The exponential increase of subjective, user-generated content since the birth of the Social Web, has led to the necessity of developing automatic text processing systems able to extract, process and present relevant knowledge. In this paper, we tackle the Opinion…