Nowadays, data intensive applications are in constant demand and there is need of computing environments with better intelligent capabilities than those present in today's Database Management Systems (DBMS). To build such systems we need formalisms that can perform complicate inferences,…

The so-called diversity-multiplexing tradeoff characterizes the fundamental interaction between the robustness and capacity gains obtainable from multiple-input and
multiple-output (MIMO) systems in fading environments. This thesis develops practical schemes for approaching the optimal tradeoff in various delay and complexity
regimes.…

This paper describes a natural language system START. The system analyzes English text and automatically transforms it into an appropriate representation, the knowledge base, which incorporates the information found in the text. The user gains access to information stored in…

The Listener is an automated system that unintrusively performs knowledge acquisition from informal input. The Listener develops a coherent internal representation of a description from an initial set of disorganized, imprecise, incomplete, ambiguous, and possibly inconsistent statements. The Listener can…

I have invented "Internet Fish," a novel class of resource-discovery tools designed to help users extract useful information from the Internet. Internet Fish (IFish) are semi-autonomous, persistent information brokers; users deploy individual IFish to gather and refine information related to…

Electrical circuit designers seldom create really new topologies or use old ones in a novel way. Most designs are known combinations of common configurations tailored for the particular problem at hand. In this thesis I show that much of the…

Information Retrieval Systems normally deal with keywordbased technologies. Although those systems reach satisfactory results, they aren’t able to answer more complex queries done by users, especially those directly in natural language. To do that, there are the KnowledgeBased Systems, which…

Une préoccupation essentielle traverse cette thèse: l'indifférence systémique de la Loi internationale sur la propriété intellectuelle a l'égard des savoirs traditionnels autochtones. De manière générale, un écart semble d'ailleurs croissant entre l'importance des accords internationaux sur les questions d'intérêt commercial…

Public authorities and private developers around the world are attempting to create and sustain hubs within the innovation-based economy by fostering successful urban environments. These large-scale developments succeed an earlier generation of post-industrial "technopoles" named after the French word popularized…

Oligomeric mini-proteins, short peptides with protein-like features, constitute valuable minimal models for the study of oligomeric proteins. Oligomerization is a common feature of cellular proteins that may confer structural and functional advantages. Oligomerization is proposed to have arisen by several…