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…

IT Outsourcing (contracting-out of Information Technology services) has become a
pivotal economic trend in recent decades. This study traces the interlacing of IT
Outsourcing with Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software systems. Little research
has considered the reciprocal relations between these…

(cont.) Packing/Covering problems, we prove upper and lower bounds on the adaptivity gap depending on the dimension. We also design polynomial-time algorithms achieving near-optimal approximation guarantees with respect to the adaptive optimum. Finally, we prove complexity-theoretic results regarding optimal adaptive…

Aquatic Microbial Oxygenic Phototrophs (AMOP's) capture carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and fix it into organic molecules used for growth and proliferation. However, the mechanisms that decide how photosynthetically fixed carbon is allocated between the major sinks (proteins, lipids, and…

Multi-agent systems (MAS) offer an approach to solve complex problems where data and control are inherently distributed among several agents. Normally, agents have to cope with conflicts based on inconsistent knowledge which arise when they exchange information. A relative common…

This article overviews the concepts of distributed intelligence, outlining the motivations for studying this field of research. First, common systems of distributed intelligence are classified based upon the types of interactions exhibited, since the type of interaction has relevance to…

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…

On étudie l’application des algorithmes de décomposition matricielles tel que la Factorisation Matricielle Non-négative (FMN), aux représentations fréquentielles de signaux audio musicaux. Ces algorithmes, dirigés par une fonction d’erreur de reconstruction, apprennent un ensemble de fonctions de base et un…

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…

Drawing on an empirical study on automakers? management of supplier
involvement in product development in Japan, this paper shows that when the design of
a component is outsourced to a supplier, how much and what automakers know about
the component…