A real-time motion engine for interactive synthetic characters, either virtual or physical, needs to allow expressivity and interactivity of motion in order to maintain the illusion of life. Canned animation examples from an animator or motion capture device are expressive,…

This dissertation investigates how rapid learning occurs in high technology industries, many of which operate in what Bourgeois and Eisenhardt (1988) term "high velocity environments." The dissertation consists of three empirical studies, which follow the method of extended case study…

The climate of the reception of immigrants to the United States has soured, and circumstances are becoming increasingly difficult for persons seeking to gain residency. Reasons often given for the reversal in this practice are that immigrants are poor, uneducated,…

Understanding the biological signals encoded in a genome is a key challenge of computational biology. These signals are encoded in the four-nucleotide alphabet of DNA and are responsible for all molecular processes in the cell. In particular, the genome contains…

This thesis explores how doctors and nurses use documents to share their knowledge within and across healthcare settings. In addressing this question I draw on a 15-month, multi-sited ethnographic study in several pediatric health care settings, following patients from primary…

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…

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…

The necessity of verification tools for Knowledge Based-Systems (KBSs), that help to guarantee a certain degree of quality and reliability of these systems will increase in the future when more critical systems are developed in areas such as industry, science,…