This thesis argues that Chinese firms can catch up with the technological frontier in the scope of new climate friendly energy technologies and provides a detailed study of the case of wind power.

Existing surveys demonstrate that in the United States, most homeowners believe that their home insurance coverage will cover the complete costs to rebuild their home in the event of a total loss. Yet, most dwellings are insured for an amount…

This research looks at the efficiency and effectiveness of the United States Child
Welfare System. Specifically, it focuses on the lack of standardization in the system
as well as the relationship between the two main institutions involved in the
system—Child…

The extension to new languages is a well known bottleneck for rule-based systems. Considerable human effort, which typically consists in re-writing from scratch huge amounts of rules, is in fact required to transfer the knowledge available to the system from…

GPUs are flexible parallel processors capable of accelerating real applications. To exploit them, programmers rewrite programs in new languages using intimate knowledge of the underlying hardware. This is a step backwards in abstraction and ease of use from sequential programming.…

In the last decade several ways to formalize defeasible reasoning have been studied. A particular approach, defeasible argumentation, has been particularly successful to achieve this goal.
The inference process of argument-based systems is based on the interaction of ar- guments…

In this paper, a human action recognition method is presented in which pose representation is based on the contour points of the human silhouette and actions are learned by making use of sequences of multi-view key poses. Our contribution is…

Adaptive websites usually change as effect of user navigational actions. Most current web engineering approaches (which consider personalization) allow to detect basic user browsing behaviour (e.g. user click on a link) but don’t consider the definition of (complex) behaviour events…

The analysis of changes in land cover and land use over time as sources of information and geographical diagnosis at a regional scale, is primary to improving knowledge of land cover and land use modelling in Mediterranean environments. The study…

Personalization of web sites has become an important issue in web modeling methods. Many of these methods use similar approaches to specify personalization. However even with similar (personalization) requirements the resulting implementations differ. The consequence is that we cannot reuse…