Local communities are important stakeholders in resource management and conservation efforts, particularly in the developing world. Although evidence is mixed in suggesting that these resident stakeholders are optimal forest stewards, it is highly unlikely that large tracts of tropical forests…

In wireless communications, the broadcast nature can be explored to efficiently support multicast services while the difference in channel gains among the wireless links of users promotes multiuser diversity which can be used to improve multicast performance. This thesis proposes…

This work examines the patterns inherent to the understanding of the nature of the forbidden fruit in an attempt to demonstrate parallels between the reasoning of biblical interpreters, on one hand, and of artists, on the other., While the biblical…

It has been proposed that forms of dialogue (Keegan, 1993) are differentially related to subject knowledge possessed by the student and the roles that teachers and students play within those dialogues. A reading of the socio-constructivist literature suggests that maximal…

This thesis proposes a knowledge based expert system tool that can be used as an on- line controller for the charging/discharging of an energy storage system in a wind-diesel microgrid. The wind-diesel microgrid is modelled, and a typical energy storage…

In reasoning about multi-agent systems, it is important to look beyond the realm of propositional logic and to reason about the knowledge of agents within the system, as what they know about the environment will affect how they behave. A…

Interest in curriculum is often divided between the work of curriculum theorists on one end and the manifestation of curriculum in the classroom on the other. Researchers are drawn to the study of both of these groups, but a third…

Semantic background knowledge is crucial for many intelligent applications. A classical way to represent such knowledge is through semantic networks. Wikipedia's hyperlink graph can be considered a primitive semantic network, since the links it contains usually correspond to semantic relationships…

Reinforcement Learning is a branch of Artificial Intelligence addressing the problem of single-agent autonomous sequential decision making. It proposes computational models which do not rely on the complete knowledge of the dynamics of stochastic environments. Options are a formalism used…

This thesis investigates possible origins of the distinction between consonant and dissonant auditory events and how persons with and without formal musical training judge the distinction. Two studies comprising six experiments used behavioral methods to explore perceptual and cognitive differences…