If we are to understand human-level intelligence, we need to understand how meanings can be learned without explicit instruction. I take a step toward that understanding by focusing on the symbol-grounding problem, showing how symbols can emerge from a system…

This thesis analyzes how the Auto-ID technology and information infrastructure will change the management and distribution of pharmaceutical products within the health care industry by enabling item level product traceability functionality. The complexity of the health care industry is steadily…

Communication is an integral part of today's workplace, linking people, objects, and information. Now that knowledge exchange is considered a significant work activity, new technologies have been developed to support communication with people who are On the move. As a…

(cont.) in the ECS signal, no definitive method for sensing blade vibration using an ECS has yet been developed., High cycle fatigue (HCF) cracks generated by compressor blade vibrations are a common source of failure in gas turbine engines. Current…

SweetDeal is a rule-based approach to representation of business contracts that enables software agents to create, evaluate, negotiate, and execute contracts with substantial automation and modularity. It builds upon the situated courteous logic programs knowledge representation in RuleML, the emerging…

There are different approaches to the temporal study of time evolving systems. This paper reviews previous works related to time series and it evaluates three approaches focused to the comparison of these type of series. Two approaches are based on…

The first two chapters of this thesis investigate a possibly fundamental aspect of technological progress. If knowledge accumulates as technology progresses, then successive generations of innovators may face an increasing educational burden, forcing them to spend longer periods in education…

Effective document retrieval using domain knowledge and semantics is one of the major challenges in Information Retrieval. Over the last years, there has been a growing interest in ontologies as an artifact for human knowledge representation and a critical component…

(cont.) which is expected, given their additional knowledge resources. The respondents' urgency in looking for the relevant knowledge is the primary explanation for this difference between the two networks. This difference in knowledge networking among the different groups did not…

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…