Knowledge acquisition for systems based on knowledge can be called knowledge engineering, according to Feigenbaum (1980) who used the term to describe the reduction of a wide context of knowledge for a set of facts and rules. The term Knowledge…

This dissertation investigates "geological" literature in the 19th century, and aims to describe a poetics of the earth sciences. Focusing on the work of Adalbert Stifter (1805-1868), whose literary experiments translate and transform scientific knowledge, the dissertation argues that the…

In the last few years, several studies have emphasized the use of ontologies as an alternative to organization of the information.
The notion of ontology has become popular in fields such as intelligent information integration, information retrieval on the Internet,…

We present a new algorithm to process captured images of reflected Placido rings. Up to our knowledge, conventional topographers transform from Cartesian to polar coordinates and vice-versa, thus extrapolating corneal data and introducing noise and image artefacts. Moreover, captured data…

In the restricted single-machine common due date problem the goal is to find a schedule for the n jobs which jointly minimizes the sum of earliness and tardiness penalties, while for the weighted tardiness problem the goal is to find…

Over the course of the twentieth century, how were real estate developers and architects involved in transforming their own professional practices and the built form of American cities? My dissertation uses historical, architectural, and urban analysis to show how real…

Instruction may be seen as the intentional creation of conditions around learning so as to facilitate the achievement of determined goals. Normally, instruction is based upon certain educational strategies. It is well accepted in the field of educational technology that…

In healthy cells, cytochrome c (cyt c) acts as an electron transport protein peripherally bound to the inner mitochondrial membrane lipid cardiolipin, but it has an important role in apoptosis - upon apoptotic stimuli, it is released from the mitochondria…

Michel Foucault, Thomas Mann, and more recently, Sven-Olov Wallenstein have argued that the modern European hospital of the early twentieth century acted as a research laboratory for a new way of governing human populations. This dissertation studies a subsequent phase…

Determining an optimal schedule to minimize the completion time of the last job abandoning the system (makespan) becomes a very difficult problem when there are more than two machines in the flow shop. Due both to its economical impact and…