Massachusetts Institute of Technology

About: Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a education organization based out in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Laser. The organization has 116795 authors who have published 268000 publications receiving 18272025 citations. The organization is also known as: MIT & M.I.T..

80 Million Tiny Images: A Large Data Set for Nonparametric Object and Scene Recognition

Abstract: With the advent of the Internet, billions of images are now freely available online and constitute a dense sampling of the visual world. Using a variety of non-parametric methods, we explore this world with the aid of a large dataset of 79,302,017 images collected from the Internet. Motivated by psychophysical results showing the remarkable tolerance of the human visual system to degradations in image resolution, the images in the dataset are stored as 32 x 32 color images. Each image is loosely labeled with one of the 75,062 non-abstract nouns in English, as listed in the Wordnet lexical database. Hence the image database gives a comprehensive coverage of all object categories and scenes. The semantic information from Wordnet can be used in conjunction with nearest-neighbor methods to perform object classification over a range of semantic levels minimizing the effects of labeling noise. For certain classes that are particularly prevalent in the dataset, such as people, we are able to demonstrate a recognition performance comparable to class-specific Viola-Jones style detectors.

The Voice of the Customer

Abstract: In recent years, many U.S. and Japanese firms have adopted Quality Function Deployment QFD. QFD is a total-quality-management process in which the "voice of the customer" is deployed throughout the R&D, engineering, and manufacturing stages of product development. For example, in the first "house" of QFD, customer needs are linked to design attributes thus encouraging the joint consideration of marketing issues and engineering issues. This paper focuses on the "Voice-of-the-Customer" component of QFD, that is, the tasks of identifying customer needs, structuring customer needs, and providing priorities for customer needs. In the identification stage, we address the questions of 1 how many customers need be interviewed, 2 how many analysts need to read the transcripts, 3 how many customer needs do we miss, and 4 are focus groups or one-on-one interviews superior? In the structuring stage the customer needs are arrayed into a hierarchy of primary, secondary, and tertiary needs. We compare group consensus affinity charts, a technique which accounts for most industry applications, with a technique based on customer-sort data. In the stage which provides priorities we present new data in which product concepts were created by product-development experts such that each concept stressed the fulfillment of one primary customer need. Customer interest in and preference for these concepts are compared to measured and estimated importances. We also address the question of whether frequency of mention can be used as a surrogate for importance. Finally, we examine the stated goal of QFD, customer satisfaction. Our data demonstrate a self-selection bias in satisfaction measures that are used commonly for QFD and for corporate incentive programs. We close with a brief application to illustrate how a product-development team used the voice of the customer to create a successful new product.

Representations of Coxeter Groups and Hecke Algebras.

Abstract: here l(w) is the length of w In the case where Wis a Weyl group and q is specialized to a fixed prime power, | ~ can be interpreted as the algebra of intertwining operators of the space of functions on the flag manifold of the corresponding finite Chevalley group G(Fq) (see [loc cit, Ex 24]) Therefore, the problem of decomposing this space of functions into irreducible representations of G(Fq) is equivalent to the problem of decomposing the regular representation o f ~ | (12 It is known that, in this case, | is isomorphic to the group algebra of W; however, in general, this isomorphism cannot be defined without introducing a square root of q (see [1]) It is therefore, natural to extend the ground ring of ~ as follows For any Coxeter group (W, S) we define the Hecke algebra ~ to be J{' | A, where A is the ring of Laurent polynomials with integral coefficients in the indeterminate ql/2 Our purpose is to construct representations oL,Uf endowed with a special basis They will be defined in terms of certain graphs We define a W-graph to be a set of vertices X, with a set Y of edges (an edge is a subset of X consisting of two elements) together with two additional data: for each vertex xeX , we are given a subset I x of S and, for each ordered pair of vertices y, x such that {y, x} e Y, we are given an integer p(y, x) +0 These data are subject to the requirements (10a), (10b) below Let E be

Theory and Applications of Robust Optimization

Abstract: In this paper we survey the primary research, both theoretical and applied, in the area of robust optimization (RO). Our focus is on the computational attractiveness of RO approaches, as well as the modeling power and broad applicability of the methodology. In addition to surveying prominent theoretical results of RO, we also present some recent results linking RO to adaptable models for multistage decision-making problems. Finally, we highlight applications of RO across a wide spectrum of domains, including finance, statistics, learning, and various areas of engineering.