Surfaces of buildings at the archaeological site of Palenque, Mexico, are colonized by cyanobacteria that form biofilms, which in turn cause aesthetic and structural damage. The structural characterization and species composition of biofilms from the walls of one of these…

One of the most difficult problems that humanity currently faces is the sustainable development of our society, i.e. how to meet the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. Solving this…

Knowledge acquisition for systems based on knowledge can be called knowledge engineering, according to Feigenbaum (1980) who used the term to describe the reduction of a wide context of knowledge for a set of facts and rules. The term Knowledge…

Purpose – The idea that knowledge management can be a potential source of competitive advantage has gained strength in the last few years. However, a number of business actions are needed to generate an appropriate environment and infrastructure for knowledge…

My dissertation centers on the meaning of dreams as interpreted by literati in the late Ming (1368-1644), viewed through the lens of the 1636 encyclopedia Forest of Dreams. This thirty-four-juan tome is the largest extant Chinese dream encyclopedia and includes…

Data mining is at the core of the knowledge discovery process. However, an initial preprocessing step is crucial for assuring reliable results within this process. Preprocessing of data is a time-consuming and non-trivial task since data quality issues should be…

Current reasoning systems attempt to model an agent's knowledge and interaction with its environment in a symbolic manner. This environment, its world is generally dynamic and changing due to natural evolution or the actions of other agents that are a…

The Semantic Web purports to give computeraccessible meaning to the content of the World Wide Web. The rationale behind this project is to create an environment where all this information could be freely exchanged among diverse entities, yet retaining its…

In the last decade, several argument-based formalisms have emerged, with application in many areas, such as legal reasoning, autonomous agents and multi-agent systems; many are based on Dung’s seminal work characterizing Abstract Argumentation Frameworks (AF).
Recent research in the area…

The Nusayri-'Alawis, the syncretistic Shiite sect currently prominent in Syria, are some of the only survivors of the heterodox cults of Early Islam. For theological and precautionary reasons they are forbidden from sharing their beliefs with outsiders. As a result,…