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.…

A real-time motion engine for interactive synthetic characters, either virtual or physical, needs to allow expressivity and interactivity of motion in order to maintain the illusion of life. Canned animation examples from an animator or motion capture device are expressive,…

This dissertation investigates how rapid learning occurs in high technology industries, many of which operate in what Bourgeois and Eisenhardt (1988) term "high velocity environments." The dissertation consists of three empirical studies, which follow the method of extended case study…

The climate of the reception of immigrants to the United States has soured, and circumstances are becoming increasingly difficult for persons seeking to gain residency. Reasons often given for the reversal in this practice are that immigrants are poor, uneducated,…

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…

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…

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…