Conversational interfaces have received much attention as a promising natural communication channel between humans and computers. A typical conversational interface consists of three major systems: speech understanding, dialog management and spoken language generation. In such a conversational interface, speech recognition…

Computers have dramatically changed the nature of structural engineering practice by shifting work from process-oriented tasks, such as performing hand calculations and drafting, to structural modeling and interpretation of computer results. To perform these new functions, engineers need to have…

Despite recent progress in materials synthesis, there are few materials with narrow pore size distributions and well-defined pore structures in the size range of 100 - 500 A. Materials with pores of 100 - 500 A possess a potential combination…

Ensuring flexible and efficient manufacturing of customized products in an increasing dynamic and turbulent environment without sacrificing cost effectiveness, product quality and on-time delivery has become a key issue for most industrial enterprises. A promising approach to cope with this…

The Semantic Web attempts to reach a state in the future where everything on the Web will no longer be only machine-readable, but also machine-understandable. An ontology is an explicit specification of a conceptualization. A conceptualization is an abstract, simplified…

This paper presents a proposal for an architecture that integrates knowledge discovery systems (automatic acquisition) and knowledge based systems (experts systems). This work formulates considerations over the viability of the implementation of this architecture according to the advance of the…

The theory change area have defined several operators trying to model the dynamic of knowledge. The goal of this work is to introduce a preprocessor of perceptions that could be part of an agent. The purpose of the preprocessor is…

The chemical effects of acoustic cavitation are obtained in sono-reactors built-up from a vessel and an ultrasonic
source. In this paper, simulations of an existing sono-reactor are carried out, using a linear acoustics model, accounting
for the vibrations of the…

The supervision of postgraduate Master's Degree dissertations has attracted little attention in the
academic literature and is an under researched area of supervisory activity. This research was a
response to generate new knowledge concerning the praxis of supervisors who supervise…

Content vocabulary may have different connotative values and different denotational meanings in different languages according to cultural idiosyncracy, manifested in culture-specific "key" meanings and culture-related scripts. Our claim here is that, even in all these cases involving the use of…