Many people use information systems as sense-making tools. Standard information retrieval systems can support reasonably well the search for pieces of relevant information when the user can identify her information need or knowledge gap to certain extent. However, in order to make sense of the information they found, users need to understand the pieces of interrelated information, identify patt...

the concepts of democracy have been around for centuries in different fields of human sciences. however, in most of these fields the idealistic and far-fetched features attributed to democracy have not been manipulated yet. it should be mentioned that there have been only a few serious attempts to find proper go-between elements, which could make such a concept as comprehensible and tangible as...

In this paper, the ByoRISC (“Build your own RISC”) configurable application-specific instruction-set processor (ASIP) family is presented. ByoRISCs, as vendor-independent cores, provide extensive architectural parameters over a baseline processor, which can be customized by application-specific hardware extensions (ASHEs). Such extensions realize multi-input multi-output (MIMO) custom instructi...

Thesis Supervisor: Chris Csikszentmihalyi Title: Director, Computing Culture Group at the MIT Media Lab In contemporary Western society, electronic devices are becoming so prevalent that many people find themselves surrounded by technologies they find frustrating or annoying. The electronics industry has little incentive to address this complaint; I designed two counter-technologies to help peo...

We discuss the design and implementation of CAD tools for creating decorative solids that tile 3-space in a regular, isohedral manner. Isohedral tilings of the plane, as popularized by M. C. Escher, can be constructed by hand or using existing tools on the web. Specialized CAD tools have also been developed for tiling other 2-manifolds. This work addresses the question: How can we generate inte...

β-lactamases, which degrade the antibiotic molecules; (B) Reduced binding affinities between the antibiotics and receptors in the bacterial cells. These antibiotic resistance mechanisms are of great clinical concern as their development and spread across many species of bacteria has led to the erosion of the efficacy of many commonly prescribed antibiotics, in particular penicillin and its deri...

We present algebraic techniques to analyze state space models in the areas of structural identifiability, observability, and indistinguishability. While the emphasis is on surveying existing algebraic tools for studying ODE systems, we also present a variety of new results. In particular: On structural identifiability, we present a method using linear algebra to find identifiable functions of t...

The explicit-state verification of complex concurrent systems, whose underlying state spaces may be prohibitively large, requires an important amount of memory and computation time. Although explicit state space generation is known to be exponential as the number of concurrent processes in the system increases, it is tempting to push forward the capabilities of verification tools by exploiting ...

NASA and its international partners will increasingly depend on software-based systems to implement advanced functions for future space missions, such as Martian rovers that autonomously navigate long distances exploring geographic features formed by surface water early in the planet's history. The software-based functions for these missions will need to be robust and highly reliable, raising s...