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

Characterization of defect is one of the important objectives of nondestructive evaluation (NDE) for condition assessment of structures. Among many other NDE techniques, ultrasonic methods play a prominent role in the both quantitative and qualitative assessment of discontinuities in reinforced…

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…

In this paper we explore the degree to which patents are representative of the magnitude,
direction, and impact of the knowledge spilling out of the university by focusing on MIT, and in particular on the departments of Mechanical and Electrical…

The goal of the work reported here is to capture the commonsense knowledge of non-expert human contributors. Achieving this goal will enable more intelligent human-computer interfaces and pave the way for computers to reason about our world. In the domain…

Data quality issues have taken on increasing importance in recent years. In our research, we have discovered that many “data quality” problems are actually “data misinterpretation” problems – that is, problems with data semantics. In this paper, we first illustrate…

This paper presents an intelligent, hybrid system for stamping process planning in progressive die design. The system combines the flexibility of blackboard architecture with case-based reasoning. The hybrid system has the advantage that it can use past knowledge and experience…