Despite decades of effort in academia and industry, it is not yet possible to build machines that can replicate many seemingly-basic human perceptual abilities. This work focuses on the problem of face identification that ...

As general purpose robots become more capable, pre-programming of all tasks at the factory will become less practical. We would like for non-technical human owners to be able to communicate, through interaction with their ...

Computer agents are required to make appropriate decisions quickly and efficiently. As the environments in which they act become increasingly complex, efficient decision-making becomes significantly more challenging. This ...

The recent proliferation of sensors in inhospitable environments such as disaster or battle zones has not been matched by in situ data processing capabilities due to a lack of computing infrastructure in the field. We ...

Digital photography and videography have become ubiquitous. With ever-cheaper and more capable cameras, found in dedicated devices and, increasingly, in multipurpose smartphones and tablets, it is now easier than ever ...

The visual appearance of an image is a complex function of factors such as scene geometry, material reflectances and textures, illumination, and the properties of the camera used to capture the image. Understanding how ...

Darwin's theory (1859) proposes that evolution progresses by the survival of those individuals in the population that have greater fitness. Modern understanding of Darwinian evolution is that variation in phenotype, or ...

The Internet has evolved into a platform on which large numbers of individuals take action and join in collaborations via crowdsourcing, social media, and electronic commerce. When designing social and economic systems on ...

This thesis studies several probabilistic algorithms for information and technology flow in the networks. Information flow refers to the circulation of information in social or communication networks for the purpose of ...

This dissertation shows that with simple programming abstractions, network-wide resource coordination is efficient and useful for programming embedded sensor networks. Existing systems have focused primarily on managing ...