In this dissertation, I trace methods for organizing skilled workers engaged in creative, limited-term projects in the United States between the nineteenth century and the 1950s. Examining eras of system building in technical fields-civil engineering in the nineteenth century, laboratory…

Gene expression arrays are a technology used to measure quantities of messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA). Application of the technology involves a variety of physical processes beginning with the acquisition of mRNA samples and ending with the fluorescence imaging of a…

(cont.) members. The experimental program for RC beams involves qualitative and quantitative observation of the changes in the debonding behavior and load capacity of the beams with various configurations of shear and/or flexural strengthening and anchorage conditions in four evolutionary…

Public authorities and private developers around the world are attempting to create and sustain hubs within the innovation-based economy by fostering successful urban environments. These large-scale developments succeed an earlier generation of post-industrial "technopoles" named after the French word popularized…

An automatic disassembly cell requires of a
computer vision system for recognition and localization of
the products and each of theirs components. The detection
of occlusions adds more information to the knowledge base
to identify components and products, and generate…

(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…

Traditional scheduling algorithms (using the techniques of PERT charts, decision analysis or operations research) require well-defined quantitative, complete sets of constraints. They are insufficient for scheduling situations where the problem description is ill-defined, involving incomplete, possibly inconsistent and generally qualitative…

This thesis examines the evolution of Internet based knowledge networks (e-knowledge networks) in the domain of sustainable development. The objective of this thesis is to use an engineering systems approach to understand knowledge networks, identify the barriers to their sustainability…

The past five years have seen the arrival and extremely rapid expansion of West Nile virus (WNV) in the Western Hemisphere. The rapid sweep across North America has permitted little time for developing knowledge of the virus's potential impacts on…

This report shows how knowledge about the visual world can be built into a shape representation in the form of a descriptive vocabulary making explicit the important geometrical relationships comprising objects' shapes. Two computational tools are offered: (1) Shapestokens are…