Chapter one is titled "Social Capital and Group Banking." Lending to the poor is costly due to high screening, monitoring, and enforcement costs. Group lending advocates believe individuals are able to select creditworthy peers, monitor the use of loan proceeds,…

In order to understand and create human-level intelligence I have developed the Polyscheme cognitive architecture to build systems that combine several representation and inference schemes when they think. Polyscheme is based on three principles. First, different (aspects of) situations that…

Evaluating of Recurrent Selection (RS) programs can lead to increase knowledge of methods, populations, and traits and give support for better management of breeding programs. The objective herein was to evaluate the effects of seven cycles of half-sib selection followed…

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The general objective of this thesis is the development of an adaptive technique for extracting knowledge in large databases. Nowadays, technology allows storing huge volumes of information. For this reason, the availability of techniques that allow, as a first stage,…

There exists a large amount of knowledge representation models. But most of them have significant limitations at the epistemic level. They do not have explanatory power. Most of them do not have means to represent some functional needs to work…

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…

In an m-machines n-jobs flow-shop sequencing problem each job consists of m operations and each operation requires a different machine, so n jobs have to be processed in the same sequence on m machines. The processing time of each job…

his dissertation analyzes how local knowledge improves environmental decisions. The premise is that controlling pollution and addressing public health disparities are not problems that professionals alone can solve. Concerned lay publics, especially low-income populations and people of color that experience…

(cont.) and (2) a forward approach which achieves optimality at the start and grows the system using an optimization technique. We systematically compare the two staging techniques in the context of telescope arrays and evaluate the hypothesis that the backward…