Complex goods and processes require ever more sophisticated and specialized knowledge; harnessing multiple kinds of expertise to execute tasks, solve problems, and develop strategies is increasingly critical to organizations' survival. When specialists come together, however, they often speak in different…

A real-time motion engine for interactive synthetic characters, either virtual or physical, needs to allow expressivity and interactivity of motion in order to maintain the illusion of life. Canned animation examples from an animator or motion capture device are expressive,…

All intelligence relies on search - for example, the search for an intelligent agent's next action. Search is only likely to succeed in resource-bounded agents if they have already been biased towards finding the right answer. In artificial agents, the…

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…

by Levent M. Talgar., Thesis (S.B. and M.Eng.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 1998., Includes bibliographical references (leaf 32).

This dissertation analyzes the strategic implications of customization policies available to companies that must simultaneously provide service and learn about their customers through automated interfaces. The first part of the dissertation lays out the theoretical framework within which the analysis…

This thesis presents two applications of the prototypical make-to-stock queue model that are mainly motivated by supply chain management and e-commerce issues. In the first part, we consider the decentralized version of the make-to-stock model. Two different agents that we…

The FAA is developing the Local Area Augmentation System (LAAS) to replace ground-based navigation aids as the primary means of aircraft precision approaches. Stringent requirements on the integrity of the system have caused significant delays and raised questions about the…

This report shows how knowledge about the visual world can be built into a shape representation in the form of a descriptive vocabulary making explicit the important geometrical relationships comprising objects' shapes. Two computational tools are offered: (1) Shapestokens are…

(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…