Understanding the biological signals encoded in a genome is a key challenge of computational biology. These signals are encoded in the four-nucleotide alphabet of DNA and are responsible for all molecular processes in the cell. In particular, the genome contains…

This thesis explores how doctors and nurses use documents to share their knowledge within and across healthcare settings. In addressing this question I draw on a 15-month, multi-sited ethnographic study in several pediatric health care settings, following patients from primary…

This thesis will explore the design and optimization of a peer-to-peer network application as a solution to complex content management problems. Currently, most content management systems are expensive, cumbersome and inflexible custom solutions that require knowledge workers to change their…

The undergraduate law curriculum adopted at McGill University in 1998—the transsystemic programme—was born of the unique political, social, and intellectual histories of its Faculty of Law. This essay reviews these contexts and characterizes the programme as an ongoing conversation about…

In this work we present an approach to model an action-oriented system controlled by BDI agents using a defeasible argumentation formalism to represent its knowledge. Here, our main concern will be modelling the software agents that drive the physical robots.

Knowledge of how groups of people interact is important in many disciplines, e.g. organizational behavior, social network analysis, knowledge management and ubiquitous computing. Existing studies of social network interactions have either been restricted to online communities, where unambiguous measurements about…

The knowledge imperfections should be considered when modeling complex problems. A solution is to develop a model that reduces the complexity and another option is to represent the imperfections: uncertainty, vagueness and incompleteness in the knowledge base. This paper proposes…

Diabetes mellitus is a syndrome which affects more and more people in all countries over the world. In Mexico, it is commonly treated with herbal extracts. Such treatment may be of considerable benefit especially during the early stages of the…

This report describes a system which maintains canonical expressions for designators under a set of equalities. Substitution is used to maintain all knowledge in terms of these canonical expressions. A partial order on designators, termed the better-name relation, is used…

The dissertation examines aesthetic, scientific and occult evocations of fluids such as air at the turn of the 20th century. Eighteenth century experimental philosophy postulated so-called "imponderable fluids" understood as instances of a subtle matter that fills empty space. The…