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…

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…

A transmitter antenna array has the ability to direct data simultaneously to multiple receivers within a wireless network, creating potential for a more integrated view of algorithmic system components. In this thesis, such a perspective informs the design of two…

If we are to understand human-level intelligence, we need to understand how meanings can be learned without explicit instruction. I take a step toward that understanding by focusing on the symbol-grounding problem, showing how symbols can emerge from a system…

The lack of effective data integration and knowledge representation in patient monitoring limits its utility to clinicians. Intelligent alarm algorithms that use artificial intelligence techniques have the potential to reduce false alarm rates and to improve data integration and knowledge…

Speech synthesis is an automatic encoding process carried out by machine through which symbols conveying linguistic information are converted into an acoustic waveform. In the past decade or so, a recent trend toward a non-parametric, corpus-based approach has focused on…

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…

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…