(cont.) updates. It produces plan-ready information, by exploiting the self-serving and opportunistic pursuit of instant return-on-investment by frontline offices. Thanks to its emergent qualities, City Knowledge engenders unexpected plan-demanding situations, where the ability to conduct second-order analyses leads to deeper…

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…

The decline in Pharmaceutical R&D productivity has been attributed to high clinical failure rates suggesting that targets, leads and clinical candidates may be of lower quality in recent years. Senior R&D management generally believes that a greater integration of drug…

This thesis presents research about the potential business impacts of the Semantic Web. The concept of the Semantic Web is an expansion of the Web for computers, enabling them to comprehend the meaning of information. In addition, Semantic Web Services…

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…

IntraCavity Laser Absorption Spectroscopy (ICLAS) is a high-resolution, high sensitivity spectroscopic method capable of measuring line positions, linewidths, lineshapes, and absolute line intensities with a sensitivity that far exceeds that of a traditional multiple pass absorption cell or Fourier Transform…

This thesis explores a novel approach to visual speech modeling. Visual speech, or a sequence of images of the speaker's face, is traditionally viewed as a single stream of contiguous units, each corresponding to a phonetic segment. These units are…

Building energy simulation (ES) and computational fluid dynamics (CFD) can play important roles in building design by providing essential information to help design energy-efficient, thermally comfortable and healthy buildings. However, separate applications of ES and CFD usually cannot give an…

Background: Local adaptation of guidelines may increase compliance with guidelines that have been developed at a national level and are often not used in practice because of contextual factors. We have developed a representation scheme known as HieroGLIF, that facilitates…

(cont.) which are then applied to developmentally acquire new object representations. The humanoid robot therefore sees the world through the caregiver's eyes. Building an artificial humanoid robot's brain, even at an infant's cognitive level, has been a long quest which…