by Robert J. Grochowski., Thesis (M.S.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Civil Engineering, 1988., Includes bibliographical references.

There is a great need among educators for a way to quickly assign teams in large or distance learning classrooms in a manner superior to random assignment or student self-selection. Forming teams based on knowledge of students' characteristics is too…

The Telematics Industry faces tremendous challenges for growth. Regardless of the efforts and investment from vehicle manufacturers and suppliers, telematics has not been that profitable industry that many analyst forecasted five years ago; a 40 billion industry by 2003. This…

This study presents a theoretical model for predictions of near-shore hydrodynamic characteristics and the local sediment transport rate along long, straight beaches. The wave may be periodic or random, the beach may be plane or barred, and the bed may…

Early Americans defined themselves, and the nation, through their relations with the world. This dissertation explores a crucial aspect of these relations, examining how global commerce, and Americans' ideas about global commerce, produced theories and practices of power. It approaches…

Introduction: Coordination through CVHL/BVCS gives Canadian health libraries access to information technology they could not offer individually, thereby enhancing the library services offered to Canadian health professionals. An example is the portal being developed. Portal best practices are of increasing…

This paper proposes a new manufacturing paradigm, we call Cloud Agile Manufacturing, and whose principal objective is to offer industrial production systems as a service. Thus users can access any functionality available in the cloud of manufacturing (process design, production,…

This paper provides lessons learned and some unexpected transformations in the learning process when advanced collaboration technology was used to overcome limitations of a popular, existing collaboration technology. The activities pursued in these advanced undergraduate and graduate computer and information…

This thesis is focused on temporal information processing, which is a task framed in the field of natural language processing. The aim of this task is to obtain the temporal location and ordering of the events expressed in text or…

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…