Tremendous advances in recent years to the optical frequency comb, particularly frequency combs deriving from solid-state and fiber architectures, have enabled a host of important new applications to emerge - applications ...

This thesis presents an effective alternative to the traditional approach to robotic manipulation. In our approach, manipulation is mainly guided by tactile feedback as opposed to vision. The motivation comes from the fact ...

Many interesting stochastic models can be formulated as finite-state vector Markov processes, with a state characterized by the values of a collection of random variables. In general, such models suffer from the curse of ...

This thesis describes Pastwatch, a distributed version control system. Pastwatch maintains versions of users' shared files. Each version is immutable: to make changes, a user checks out a version onto the user's computer, ...

The proliferation of mobile computing devices and wireless networking products over the past decade has led to an increasingly nomadic computing lifestyle. A computer is no longer an immobile, gargantuan machine that remains ...

Programmable matter systems are composed of small, intelligent modules able to form a variety of macroscale objects with specific material properties in response to external commands or stimuli. While many programmable ...

Effective Al sidekicks must solve the interlinked problems of understanding what their human collaborator's intentions are and planning actions to support them. This thesis explores a range of approximate but tractable ...