his dissertation analyzes how local knowledge improves environmental decisions. The premise is that controlling pollution and addressing public health disparities are not problems that professionals alone can solve. Concerned lay publics, especially low-income populations and people of color that experience…

Complex goods and processes require ever more sophisticated and specialized knowledge; harnessing multiple kinds of expertise to execute tasks, solve problems, and develop strategies is increasingly critical to organizations' survival. When specialists come together, however, they often speak in different…

by Kazunori Yamagata., Thesis (S.M.M.O.T.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management, Management of Technology Program, 2002., Includes bibliographical references (leaves 95-99).

by Jose Maria Gonzalez Pinto., Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2002., Includes bibliographical references (p. 68-69).

As interconnect linewidths continue to scale downward, a detailed knowledge of stress evolution and void growth processes enables a determination of the electromigration-induced failure times of these interconnects. This thesis provides this knowledge through the development of an electromigration simulation…

In this thesis, I examine how spinning off new ventures from academic institutions works in an environment outside developed high tech clusters and how it affects models of ventures. I examine these questions by studying the case of Belgium. There…

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…

The Embrapa Agricultural Instrumentation Center, one of the thematic centers of the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation, is an institution of science and technology in instrumentation. Its purpose is to promote Brazilian agribusiness through the generation, adaptation, and transference of knowledge…

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…

In the traditional small community, people learned how to maintain their own homes by watching activities in which the elements of their physical environment were made. This work was done out in the open, where everyone could see it as…