"The discrepancy between [our personal experiences] and our idealizations of knowledge leads us into counterproductive strategies for learning and thinking" (Papert 1993). This discrepancy has driven most research towards understanding how people fail to accomplish a task, while few researchers…

(cont.) to variations in the way functional elements interact with verbal roots. Overall, my work not only contributes to our understanding of how events are syntactically represented, but also explicates interactions at the syntax-semantics interface, clarifying the relationship between surface…

(cont.) in the ECS signal, no definitive method for sensing blade vibration using an ECS has yet been developed., High cycle fatigue (HCF) cracks generated by compressor blade vibrations are a common source of failure in gas turbine engines. Current…

Parallel machine scheduling, involves the allocation of jobs to the system resources (a bank of machines in parallel). A basic model consisting of m machines and n jobs is the foundation of more complex models. Here, jobs are allocated according…

Robots have become usual collaborators in our daily life. While robotic systems grow to be more and more complex, the need to engineering their software development process grows as well. Traditional approaches that are used in the development process of…

Web design methodologies should be able to provide a requirements analysis stage to consider the large and heterogeneous audience of Web applications. In this stage, non-functional requirements (NFRs) should be addressed in order to improve the quality of the Web…

(cont.) In this blurred area, a project/group-based curriculum can be developed to involve casual work areas that can fluctuate in size, based on the specifications of the project. Through the cultivation of this type of environment, the social energies of…

(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…

This thesis examines the evolution of Internet based knowledge networks (e-knowledge networks) in the domain of sustainable development. The objective of this thesis is to use an engineering systems approach to understand knowledge networks, identify the barriers to their sustainability…

Well-known methods for solving the shape-from-shading problem require knowledge of the reflectance map. Here we show how the shape-from-shading problem can be solved when the reflectance map is not available, but is known to have a given form with some…