Humans are remarkably efficient in learning by interacting with other people and observing their behavior. Children learn by watching their parents’ actions and mimic their behavior. When they are not sure about their parents demonstration, they communicate with them, ask questions, and learn from their feedback. On the other hand,...
In this thesis, I present the variational database management system, a formal framework and its implementation for representing variation in relational databases and managing variational information needs. A variational database is intended to support any kind of variation in a database. Specific kinds of variation in databases have already been...
We investigate a search and coverage planning problem, where an area of interest has to be explored by a number of vehicles, given a fixed time budget. A good coverage plan has a low probability of a target remaining unobserved. We introduce a formal problem statement, suggest a greedy algorithm...
For today’s ubiquitous portable devices, innovative integrated circuits with high performance
yet very low power are necessary. As these devices are used to communicate and sense real world signals in the environment, analog-to-digital converters (ADC) and systems are the key interface circuits needed to digitize the sensed information and they...
Diffusion processes in networks are common models for many domains, including species colonization, information/idea cascade, disease propagation and fire spreading. In diffusion networks, a diffusion event occurs when a behavior spreads from one node to the other following a probabilistic model, where the behavior could be species, an idea, a...
Advances in sensor technology are greatly expanding the range of quantities that can be measured while simultaneously reducing the cost. However, deployed sensors drift out of calibration and fail, so every sensor network requires quality control procedures to promptly detect these failures. To address these problems, we propose a two-level...