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…

The Embrapa Agricultural Instrumentation Center, one of the thematic centers of the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation, is an institution of science and technology in instrumentation. Its purpose is to promote Brazilian agribusiness through the generation, adaptation, and transference of knowledge…

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…

BACKGROUND:A variety of definitions of evidence-based practice (EBP) exist. However, definitions are in themselves insufficient to explain the underlying processes of EBP and to differentiate between an evidence-based process and evidence-based outcome. There is a need for a clear statement…

Organizations must establish processes for managing knowledge across boundaries because of the specialized and task-dependent forms of knowledge required to deliver products and services. To address this challenge an integrative framework is developed that identifies and integrates the value of…

BACKGROUND:Primary prevention of breast cancer through prophylactic mastectomy can reduce the risk of malignancy in high-risk individuals. No type of mastectomy completely removes all breast tissue, but a subcutaneous mastectomy leaves more tissue in situ than does a simple mastectomy.CASE…

Most neural network learning algorithms cannot use knowledge other than what is provided in the training data. Initialized using random weights, they cannot use prior knowledge such as knowledge stored in previously trained networks. This manuscript thesis addresses this problem.…

Organizations must establish processes for managing knowledge across boundaries because of the specialized and task-dependent forms of knowledge required to deliver products and services. To address this challenge an integrative framework is developed that identifies and integrates the value of…

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…