Knowledge of how groups of people interact is important in many disciplines, e.g. organizational behavior, social network analysis, knowledge management and ubiquitous computing. Existing studies of social network interactions have either been restricted to online communities, where unambiguous measurements about…

The Triple β-Spiral is a novel protein structure that plays a role in viral attachment and pathogenesis. At present, there are two Triple β-Spiral structures with solved crystallographic coordinates - one from Adenovirus and the other from Reovirus. There is…

In this thesis, the opportunities and challenges involved in applying natural language processing techniques to the control of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are addressed. The problem of controlling an unmanned aircraft via natural language inputs is formulated as a feedback…

The quality of higher education has been a growing concern in the United States and United Kingdom. There have been no notable improvements in the education system until the last few years. Considerable transformation in the higher education arena has…

Direct wafer bonding has emerged as an important technology in the manufacture of silicon-on-insulator substrates (SOI), microelectromechanical systems (MEMS), and three-dimensional integrated circuits (3D IC's). While the process is currently employed in applications such as these, a lack of knowledge…

The contribution of this thesis is to provide a tractable framework for supply chains and revenue management problems subject to uncertainty that gives insight into the structure of the optimal policy and requires little knowledge of the underlying probability distributions.…

Satellite and wireless networks operate over time varying channels that depend on attenuation conditions, power allocation decisions, and inter-channel interference. In order to reliably integrate these systems into a high speed data network and meet the increasing demand for high…

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…

by Kimberly G. Waters., Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2002., Includes bibliographical references (p. 45-46).

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…