(cont.) updates. It produces plan-ready information, by exploiting the self-serving and opportunistic pursuit of instant return-on-investment by frontline offices. Thanks to its emergent qualities, City Knowledge engenders unexpected plan-demanding situations, where the ability to conduct second-order analyses leads to deeper…

Conversational interfaces have received much attention as a promising natural communication channel between humans and computers. A typical conversational interface consists of three major systems: speech understanding, dialog management and spoken language generation. In such a conversational interface, speech recognition…

IntraCavity Laser Absorption Spectroscopy (ICLAS) is a high-resolution, high sensitivity spectroscopic method capable of measuring line positions, linewidths, lineshapes, and absolute line intensities with a sensitivity that far exceeds that of a traditional multiple pass absorption cell or Fourier Transform…

This thesis explores a novel approach to visual speech modeling. Visual speech, or a sequence of images of the speaker's face, is traditionally viewed as a single stream of contiguous units, each corresponding to a phonetic segment. These units are…

This report focuses on recycling. As an objective neutral party, MIT has compiled a knowledge base that examines the many complex issues relating to re-cycling. Although this report was prepared at the request of the Automotive board of Governors, it…

We propose an information extraction framework to support automated construction of decision models in biomedicine. Our proposed technique classifies text-based documents from a large biomedical literature repository, e.g., MEDLINE, into predefined categories, and identifies important keywords for each category based…

I shall describe a model of the evolution of the rule-structured knowledge that serves as a cornerstone of our development of computer-based coaches. The key idea is a graph structure whose nodes represent rules, and whose links represent various evolutionary…

(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…

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…

his dissertation analyzes how local knowledge improves environmental decisions. The premise is that controlling pollution and addressing public health disparities are not problems that professionals alone can solve. Concerned lay publics, especially low-income populations and people of color that experience…