Surfaces of buildings at the archaeological site of Palenque, Mexico, are colonized by cyanobacteria that form biofilms, which in turn cause aesthetic and structural damage. The structural characterization and species composition of biofilms from the walls of one of these…

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-

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…

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…

My dissertation centers on the meaning of dreams as interpreted by literati in the late Ming (1368-1644), viewed through the lens of the 1636 encyclopedia Forest of Dreams. This thirty-four-juan tome is the largest extant Chinese dream encyclopedia and includes…

Data mining is at the core of the knowledge discovery process. However, an initial preprocessing step is crucial for assuring reliable results within this process. Preprocessing of data is a time-consuming and non-trivial task since data quality issues should be…

This thesis confronts the nature of the process of learning an intellectual skill, the ability to solve problems efficiently in a particular domain of discourse. The investigation is synthetic; a computational performance model, HACKER, is displayed. Hacker is a computer…

by Robert W. Sommer., Thesis (M.S.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management, 1992., Title as it appears in the M.I.T. Graduate List, June 1992: Building internal knowledge networks in multinational corporations, a study of cross-border research and development., Includes…

Most Natural Language Processing (NLP) systems traditionally use a sequential architecture that represents the classical linguistic levels (lexical-morphological, syntactical, semantic, etc.), but they claim for huge and monolithic modules, that make the backtracking among such modules difficult. By using a…

Current reasoning systems attempt to model an agent's knowledge and interaction with its environment in a symbolic manner. This environment, its world is generally dynamic and changing due to natural evolution or the actions of other agents that are a…