Heavily used in the manufacture of integrated circuits, chemical-mechanical polishing (CMP) is becoming an enabling technology for microelectromechanical systems (MEMS). To reliably use CMP in the manufacturing process, designers must be able to accurately predict the CMP process and control…

This study presents a theoretical model for predictions of near-shore hydrodynamic characteristics and the local sediment transport rate along long, straight beaches. The wave may be periodic or random, the beach may be plane or barred, and the bed may…

Direct wafer bonding has emerged as an important technology in the manufacture of silicon-on-insulator substrates (SOI), microelectromechanical systems (MEMS), and three-dimensional integrated circuits (3D IC's). While the process is currently employed in applications such as these, a lack of knowledge…

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.…

(cont.) of free methionine. Therefore, the environments surrounding different methionine sites in G-CSF mainly provide spatial restriction to the access to the solvent but do not affect oxidation in a specific manner, consistent with the good correlation between 2SWCN's and…

A method will be described for finding the shape of a smooth apaque object form a monocular image, given a knowledge of the surface photometry, the position of the lightsource and certain auxiliary information to resolve ambiguities. This method is…

This paper presents an overview of a theory of discourse structure, and discusses a model for assimilating text into a frame-based data structure. The model has been applied to the analysis of news articles. The theory assumes sentences contain links…

If we are to understand how we can build machines capable of broad purpose learning and reasoning, we must first aim to build systems that can represent, acquire, and reason about the kinds of commonsense knowledge that we humans have…

Following the deaths of Victoria Climbié and of Peter Connelly (Baby P) the media has raged about social work competence, the public have expressed dismay and the government has responded with proposals designed to alter practice procedures. Altering procedures gives…

The objective of this study is to improve quality and reliability of safety-critical software in the nuclear industry. It is accomplished by focusing on the following two areas: Formulation of a standard extensive integrated software testing strategy for safety-critical software,…