Purpose: This paper is the result of empirical research funded by The British Academy. The overall purpose of the study is to investigate the initial barriers to internationalization experienced and perceived by small retailers based in the UK and the…

The extension to new languages is a well known bottleneck for rule-based systems. Considerable human effort, which typically consists in re-writing from scratch huge amounts of rules, is in fact required to transfer the knowledge available to the system from…

In the last decade several ways to formalize defeasible reasoning have been studied. A particular approach, defeasible argumentation, has been particularly successful to achieve this goal.
The inference process of argument-based systems is based on the interaction of ar- guments…

This thesis argues that Chinese firms can catch up with the technological frontier in the scope of new climate friendly energy technologies and provides a detailed study of the case of wind power.

Existing surveys demonstrate that in the United States, most homeowners believe that their home insurance coverage will cover the complete costs to rebuild their home in the event of a total loss. Yet, most dwellings are insured for an amount…

The tools for fault impact analysis are important for the deployment of critical mission systems. These tools can be also used as a development phase aid. We introduce several concepts related to "business alarms". Business alarms are an approximation to…

Knowledge of how groups of people interact is important in many disciplines, e.g. organizational behavior, social network analysis, knowledge management and ubiquitous computing. Existing studies of social network interactions have either been restricted to online communities, where unambiguous measurements about…

GPUs are flexible parallel processors capable of accelerating real applications. To exploit them, programmers rewrite programs in new languages using intimate knowledge of the underlying hardware. This is a step backwards in abstraction and ease of use from sequential programming.…

This research looks at the efficiency and effectiveness of the United States Child
Welfare System. Specifically, it focuses on the lack of standardization in the system
as well as the relationship between the two main institutions involved in the
system—Child…

A program, some TECO macros, and some small modifications to existing systems software have been written, called PRO, whose purpose is to reduce the large number of control languages and system programs it has been necessary to know about and…