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 Kazunori Yamagata., Thesis (S.M.M.O.T.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management, Management of Technology Program, 2002., Includes bibliographical references (leaves 95-99).

by Jose Maria Gonzalez Pinto., Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2002., Includes bibliographical references (p. 68-69).

In this thesis, I examine how spinning off new ventures from academic institutions works in an environment outside developed high tech clusters and how it affects models of ventures. I examine these questions by studying the case of Belgium. There…

In plasma etching process it is critical to know when the film being etched has cleared to the underlying film, i.e. to detect endpoint, in order to achieve the desired device performance in the resulting integrated circuit. The most highly…

Complex goods and processes require ever more sophisticated and specialized knowledge; harnessing multiple kinds of expertise to execute tasks, solve problems, and develop strategies is increasingly critical to organizations' survival. When specialists come together, however, they often speak in different…

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…

This dissertation analyzes the strategic implications of customization policies available to companies that must simultaneously provide service and learn about their customers through automated interfaces. The first part of the dissertation lays out the theoretical framework within which the analysis…

Signature schemes are fundamental cryptographic primitives, useful as a stand-alone application, and as a building block in the design of secure protocols and other cryptographic objects. In this thesis, we study both the uses that signature schemes find in protocols,…

Current methods for bipedal walking control include playback of recorded joint motion and the derivation of dynamic equations to map desired forces at the body to the required torques at the joints. Both methods require a significant amount of up-front…