(cont.) In this blurred area, a project/group-based curriculum can be developed to involve casual work areas that can fluctuate in size, based on the specifications of the project. Through the cultivation of this type of environment, the social energies of…

by Shawn W. Ritchie., Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, System Design and Management Program, 1999., Includes bibliographical references (leaves 80-81).

In the search for meaning, the architectural profession legitimately seeks culture to sanction its products. However, in business organizations, culture is complex and tacit- richer and deeper than any of its external manifestations, including architecture. To compensate for culture's incoherence,…

"The discrepancy between [our personal experiences] and our idealizations of knowledge leads us into counterproductive strategies for learning and thinking" (Papert 1993). This discrepancy has driven most research towards understanding how people fail to accomplish a task, while few researchers…

(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…

(cont.) to variations in the way functional elements interact with verbal roots. Overall, my work not only contributes to our understanding of how events are syntactically represented, but also explicates interactions at the syntax-semantics interface, clarifying the relationship between surface…

The goal of this work involves the developing of an argumentation-based formalism that an agent could use for constructing plans. In this formalism, agents will have certain knowledge about the world, and a set of actions that they will be…

Mémoire numérisé par la Division de la gestion de documents et des archives de l'Université de Montréal

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…

The use of clocks for timekeeping seems to be a straightforward and almost intuitive routine. Glancing at mechanical clocks designed in Edo period Japan, however, we witness how modern-day intuitions betray our attempts to understand devices created in a culture…