If we are to understand human-level intelligence, we need to understand how meanings can be learned without explicit instruction. I take a step toward that understanding by focusing on the symbol-grounding problem, showing how symbols can emerge from a system…

If we are to understand the innately human ability to solve complex problems, we must first understand the cognitive processes that allow us to combine different kinds of knowledge, to learn new things and to communicate with other people. I…

Nearly 2% of all live births are very premature (gestational age less than 32 weeks), and 50% of all new cases of cerebral palsy occur in survivors of premature birth (gestational age less than 37 weeks). Because of their underdeveloped…

The objective of this study is to improve quality and reliability of safety-critical software in the nuclear industry. It is accomplished by focusing on the following two areas: Formulation of a standard extensive integrated software testing strategy for safety-critical software,…

by John P. Woods., Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, System Design & Management Program, 2001., Includes bibliographical references (p. 85).

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 thesis integrates hardware development, data analysis, and mathematical modeling to facilitate our understanding of brain cognition. Exploration of these brain mechanisms requires both structural and functional knowledge to (i) reconstruct the spatial distribution of the activity, (ii) to estimate…

(cont.) in the ECS signal, no definitive method for sensing blade vibration using an ECS has yet been developed., High cycle fatigue (HCF) cracks generated by compressor blade vibrations are a common source of failure in gas turbine engines. Current…

Satellite and wireless networks operate over time varying channels that depend on attenuation conditions, power allocation decisions, and inter-channel interference. In order to reliably integrate these systems into a high speed data network and meet the increasing demand for high…

This report describes a knowledge-base system in which the information is stored in a network of small parallel processing elements ??de and link units ??ich are controlled by an external serial computer. This network is similar to the semantic network…