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,…

by Jaime Francisco Brito., Thesis (M.S.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Civil and Environmental Engineering, 1994., Includes bibliographical references (leaf 348).

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…

This dissertation is a critical analysis of the transformations in the definition of a modem architectural artifact and the artifact's changing status in an institutional context. This work develops on a series of themes which proceed on the assumption that…

Effective document retrieval using domain knowledge and semantics is one of the major challenges in Information Retrieval. Over the last years, there has been a growing interest in ontologies as an artifact for human knowledge representation and a critical component…

Trypanosoma cruzi congenital transmission in wild bats (Molossus molossus), associated with infected
Rhodnius prolixus in a natural habitat from a rural locality in western Venezuela, is reported. T. cruzi blood
circulating trypomastigotes in a pregnant batwere detected by parasitologicalmethods. Polymerase…

We describe an adaptation of the knowledge gradient, originally developed for discrete ranking and selection problems, to the problem of calibrating continuous parameters for the purpose of tuning a simulator. The knowledge gradient for continuous parameters uses a continuous approximation…

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…

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…