by Guru Prasanna., Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Mechanical Engineering, 2001., Page 123 blank., Includes bibliographical references (p. 121-122).

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…

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.…

It is obvious to anyone familiar with the rules of the game of chess that a king on an empty board can reach every square. It is true, but not obvious, that a knight can reach every square. Why is…

Flow Accelerated Corrosion (FAC) is the most prevalent material degradation mechanism for low carbon steel in steam-water flow systems. The band of uncertainty in predictions of wear rate due to FAC spans one to two orders of magnitude. Such a…

In order to understand and create human-level intelligence I have developed the Polyscheme cognitive architecture to build systems that combine several representation and inference schemes when they think. Polyscheme is based on three principles. First, different (aspects of) situations that…

Synechocystis PCC 6803 is a photosynthetic bacterium that has the potential to make bioproducts from carbon dioxide and light. Biochemical production from photosynthetic organisms is attractive because it replaces the typical bioprocessing steps of crop growth, milling, and fermentation, with…

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…

(cont.) which is expected, given their additional knowledge resources. The respondents' urgency in looking for the relevant knowledge is the primary explanation for this difference between the two networks. This difference in knowledge networking among the different groups did not…