This paper presents a knowledge-based approach to facilitate the engineering design
process relating to spacecrafts. Because the design evolves over a long time and typically
involves individuals working at different locations and frequently for different
organizations, the degree of collaboration…

Our approach for automating the negotiation of business
contracts proceeds in three broad steps. First, determine
the structure of the negotiation process by applying general
knowledge about auctions and domain-specific knowledge
about the contract subject along with preferences from po-

In this paper, we study the asset pricing implication of imprecise knowledge about rare events. Modeling rare events as jumps in the aggregate endowment, we explicitly solve the equilibrium asset prices in a pure-exchange economy with a representative agent who…

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…

As part of its national obligations, ONR must ensure US world leadership in those unique technology areas that insure naval superiority. ONR accomplishes this mission through research, recruitment and education, maintaining an adequate base of talent, and sustaining critical infrastructure…

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…

Organizations must establish processes for managing knowledge across boundaries because of the specialized and task-dependent forms of knowledge required to deliver products and services. To address this challenge an integrative framework is developed that identifies and integrates the value of…

Signature schemes are fundamental cryptographic primitives, useful as a stand-alone application, and as a building block in the design of secure protocols and other cryptographic objects. In this thesis, we study both the uses that signature schemes find in protocols,…

Current methods for bipedal walking control include playback of recorded joint motion and the derivation of dynamic equations to map desired forces at the body to the required torques at the joints. Both methods require a significant amount of up-front…

This thesis proposes a miethodology for the design of man-machine interfaces by combining top-down and bottom-up processes in vision. From a computational perspective, we propose that the scientific-cognitive question of combining top-down and bottom-up knowledge is similar to the engineering…