Thesis (S.M.M.O.T.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management, Management of Technology Program, 2004. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 29-34). / The nuclear winter that filled the vacuum created by the Internet implosion was characterized by highly conservative investments in new technologies. This was particularly true for Internet- and Web-oriented technologies since after all, being a believer just wasn't as popular as it used to be. However, life, business, and science go on, and the Web is no exception. This thesis will examine hurdles in the business case for the Semantic Web. In one sense, the Semantic Web is an extension or enhancement of the existing World Wide Web (Web). As we know it today, the Web is a rich medium that allows humans to express themselves, learn, interact, and reach an audience that was a pipe dream just a decade ago. At the same time, the Web is of limited utility to computers (machines). For example, a human being could easily recognize a postal address or the specifications of an order for steel; a machine could not. To a machine, these data would simply be elements to be rendered and displayed on a monitor, with no intrinsic or cumulative meaning. In this sense, one of the goals set for the Semantic Web is to create meaning and utility for machines that allows for interpretation and action with far less human intervention. Issues related to the challenges, practicalities, theories and opportunities of the Semantic Web will be discussed. In the process, hopefully, this thesis will identify some of the stepping stones in building a business case for this evolution. Notably, today's comments regarding the Semantic Web sound very similar to what was once said about the practicalities of eBusiness and the likelihood of its adoption. / by David Provost. / S.M.M.O.T.

Thesis (S.M.M.O.T.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management, Management of Technology Program, 2003. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 89-90). / Information Technology (IT) is a major enabler of business, yet the most questioned of investments. Time and again, the question asked by senior executives is: What is the business value of IT to our firm? This question is coming in from all directions and bringing to bear enormous pressure on the CIO role. More challenging is the expectation that the business value of IT projects be converted to cash flows, albeit for the sake of easy comparability among projects. The crux of the issue facing organizations with regard to assessing IT projects derives from the fact that there is now wide variety in the nature of such projects and consequently great differences in the nature and measurability of project benefits. Many organizations would like to reduce all benefits from all IT projects to a comparable financial metric, such as NPV based on investment and cash flows returns. While calculating the dollar value of IT projects may not be realistic, anything that helps managers to get a "sense" of, or better judge, the value of IT projects is money on the table. The approach to the thesis is to find a methodology to valuate IT projects. The solution that is recommended is a framework that is accompanied by a survey. The survey probes the business project manager and IT project manager of each project to asses the extent of benefits and risks that impact the objectives of both business management and IT management. It also probes the business unit manager to assess the importance each of these benefits and risks to the business strategy of the business unit. Based on the responses of the business unit manager, business project manager, and IT project manager, the survey assigns weights to the benefits, risks, and the responses, and then computes an Expected Business Value score and an Expected Technical Value score for each project. / by Ravi Chivukula. / S.M.M.O.T.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Aeronautics and Astronautics; and, (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Technology and Policy Program, 2000. / Also available online at the MIT Theses Online homepage <http://thesis.mit.edu>. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 99-101). / The United States Air Force utilizes a significant amount of its budget to maintain its aerospace systems in operational condition. In order to reduce these costs, the Air Force has communicated to aerospace manufactures a desire to reduce the overall costs of its aerospace system maintenance. This thesis investigates how the Air Force and Corporation Alpha, a leading manufacturer of aerospace engines, have adapted their design and development practices to make the EG10 fighter engine family more reliable, durable, and maintainable. I used the metric Unscheduled Engine Removals (UER) per 1000 Effective Flight Hours (UER/1000EFH) to compare the sustainability of different models of EG10 while investigating how the sustainment lessons of the EG10 have been incorporated into Corporation Alpha's latest product, the EG1 5-1. The analysis presented in this thesis will focus on the policies, technology, processes and tools, and final results of efforts to improve the sustainability of these engine systems. The final results show that the sustainability, as measured by the UER metric, have not increased beyond 106 EFH with each succeeding generation of EG10 engine. This illustrates that improving aerospace system sustainability involves factors beyond the design phase of the system. / by Spencer L. Lewis. / S.M.

Thesis (S.M.M.O.T.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management, Management of Technology Program, 2003. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 121-124). / This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections. / eBusiness is rapidly becoming the defacto business model of many firms. The pharmaceutical industry will continue to thrive regardless of recession, terrorism, war, or other external forces. Question is: what eBusiness technologies and trends are being currently pursued by pharmaceutical companies in managing critical relationships with business partners such as doctors, physicians, suppliers, retailers, distributors, and consumers? The purpose of this research is to provide a high-level overview of the pharmaceutical industry and companies that dominate in this vast arena. This is followed by an in-depth analysis of eBusiness in terms of phases, models, architectures, vendors, and products. Finally, eBusiness technologies and trends in global pharmaceutical organizations related to procurement, sales, and supply chain are analyzed in various case studies. This analysis ultimately leads to a carefully orchestrated conclusion that recaps this entire research based on eBusiness in the pharmaceutical industry. / by Imran Qayyum. / S.M.M.O.T.

Thesis (Ph. D. in Technology, Management and Policy)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Engineering Systems Division, Technology, Management, and Policy Program, 2011. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. This version of the catalog record was uploaded July 2013. / Includes bibliographical references. / Remotely piloted aircraft and the people that control them are changing how the US military operates aircraft and those who fly, yet few know what "drone" operators actually do, why they do what they do, or how they shape and reflect remote air warfare and human-machine relationships. What do the remote operators and intelligence personnel know during missions to "protect and avenge" coalition forces in Iraq and Afghanistan and how do they go about knowing what they know? In an ethnographic and historical analysis of the Air Force's preeminent weapon system for the counterinsurgencies in the two countries, this study describes how social, technical, and cognitive factors mutually constitute remote air operations in war. Armed with perspectives and methods developed in the fields of the history of technology, sociology of technology, and cognitive anthropology, the author, an Air Force fighter pilot, describes how distributed crews represent, transform, and propagate information to find and kill targets and traces the observed human and machine interactions to policy assumptions, professional identities, employment concepts, and technical tools. In doing so, he shows how the people, practices, and machines associated with remotely piloted aircraft have been oriented to and conditioned by trust in automation, experience, skill, and social interactions and how they have influenced and reflected the evolving operational environment, encompassing organizations, and communities of practice. / by Timothy M. Cullen. / Ph.D.in Technology, Management and Policy

Thesis: S.M. in Technology and Policy, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Engineering Systems Division, 2014. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 119-122). / In many mining markets, one of the central business planning decisions faced by firms is where, when, and by how much to expand their production capacity. Appropriate investment planning methodology is important to both the mining industry and the wider economy. Currently, new mine investment decisions are most often based on the classic project evaluation methodology of discounted cash flow analysis (DCF) applied to the individual potential projects, which is flawed in its inadequate consideration of risk and flexibility, of impact on the profit of the firm, and of competitive dynamics in oligopoly markets. More sophisticated methods that account for these complexities have been proposed in academic literature; however, their value in realistic market settings has been little demonstrated in past literature and they are rarely adopted in practice. This thesis compares four investment decision paradigms of increasing scope and complexity in a three-firm mineral commodity market, based primarily on the firm-level cash flow NPV outcome in Monte Carlo simulations of the market. The analysis is conducted for various market scenarios of different demand growth patterns, volatility, demand elasticity, and supply structure. Simulation results show that in almost all scenarios, the game theoretic and option-based best-firm-NPV policies outperform the positive-mine-NPV policy substantially for all firms, regardless their market and cost position. However, the difference between the best-firm-NPV policy and the positive-firm-NPV policy is often small, depending on the scenario. Overall, the evaluation conducted in this thesis contributes to our understanding of how useful having more sophisticated investment decision methods might be to the firms and under what market conditions. / by Yuanjian Carla Li. / S.M. in Technology and Policy

Thesis (S.M. in Management Research)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management, 2013. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 26-28). / Recent research on immigrant naming demonstrates a market tendency towards "acculturative conservatism," whereby immigrants select given names for their children that were highly popular in an earlier generation of the native population. Acculturative conservatism can potentially be explained as an attempt to address immigrants' feelings of insecurity by favoring cultural practices that most clearly convey the national identity. However, a more straightforward interpretation is that immigrants lack the necessary cultural capital to know which cultural practices are fashionable. In this paper, we first show that acculturative conservatism is a significant social force by examining how it lowered the rate of change in the fashion of given names between 1880 and 1920 in the United States. Second, we develop a novel analytic strategy to distinguish the effects of a lack of security and those of a lack of cultural capital. Our data include the English names of the early male children of Jewish immigrants who immigrated to America between 1880 and 1920, and the male names of the mainstream in the same period. By applying our analytic strategy, we find that Jewish immigrants tend to select among the formerly popular English names by favoring those whose popularity was still rising and to avoid those that were declining in the native population. This suggests that Jewish immigrants had considerable knowledge of the latest fashions, but deliberately chose older names that would convey their national identity more strongly and thereby address their feelings of insecurity. / by Jiayin Zhang. / S.M.in Management Research

Thesis: S.M. in Technology and Policy, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Engineering Systems Division, 2014. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 123-128). / In the coming years and decades, shifts in weather, population, land use, and other human factors are expected to have an impact on the occurrence and severity of landslides. A landslide inventory database from Switzerland is used to perform two types of analysis. The first presents a proof of concept for an analogue method of detecting the frequency in landslide activity with future climate change conditions. Instead of relying on modeled precipitation, it uses composites of atmospheric variables to identity the conditions that are associated with days on which a landslide occurred. The analogues are compared to relevant meteorological variables in MERRA reanalysis data to achieve a success rate of over 50% in matching observed landslide days within 7 days. The second analysis explores the effectiveness of machine learning as a technique to evaluate the likelihood of a slide to create high damage. The algorithm is tuned to accommodate unbalanced data, extraneous variables, and variance in voting to achieve the best predictive success. This method provides an efficient way of calculating vulnerability and identifying the spatial and temporal factors which influence it. The results are able to identify high damage landslides with a success of upwards of 70%. A machine-learning based model has the potential for use as a policy tool to identify areas of high risk. / by Erin Leidy. / S.M. in Technology and Policy

Remotely piloted aircraft and the people that control them are changing how the US military operates aircraft and those who fly, yet few know what "drone" operators actually do, why they do what they do, or how they shape and reflect remote air warfare and human-machine relationships. What do the remote operators and intelligence personnel know during missions to "protect and avenge" coalition forces in Iraq and Afghanistan and how do they go about knowing what they know? In an ethnographic and historical analysis of the Air Force's preeminent weapon system for the counterinsurgencies in the two countries, this study describes how social, technical, and cognitive factors mutually constitute remote air operations in war. Armed with perspectives and methods developed in the fields of the history of technology, sociology of technology, and cognitive anthropology, the author, an Air Force fighter pilot, describes how distributed crews represent, transform, and propagate information to find and kill targets and traces the observed human and machine interactions to policy assumptions, professional identities, employment concepts, and technical tools. In doing so, he shows how the people, practices, and machines associated with remotely piloted aircraft have been oriented to and conditioned by trust in automation, experience, skill, and social interactions and how they have influenced and reflected the evolving operational environment, encompassing organizations, and communities of practice. / by Timothy M. Cullen. / Thesis (Ph. D. in Technology, Management, and Policy)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Engineering Systems Division, Technology, Management, and Policy Program, 2011. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 290-298).

Thesis (Ph. D. in Technology, Management, and Policy)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Engineering Systems Division, Technology, Management, and Policy Program, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 169-180). / The unrelenting increase in oil use by the U.S. light-duty vehicle (LDV) fleet presents an extremely challenging energy and environmental problem. A variety of propulsion technologies and fuels have the promise to reduce petroleum use and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from motor vehicles. Previous work in this domain has compared individual vehicle or fuel alternatives. The aim of this research was to deepen the understanding of the likely scale and timing of the fleet-wide impact of emerging technologies. A model of the light-duty vehicle fleet showed that fuel consumption of mainstream gasoline internal combustion engine (ICE) technology vehicles will determine the trajectory of fleet fuel use and GHG emissions over the next two decades. Using vehicle simulations and historical data, the trade-off between vehicle performance, size and fuel consumption was quantified. It was shown that up to 26 percent reduction in future LDV fuel use is possible with mainstream gasoline ICE vehicles alone if emphasis of vehicle technology is on reducing fuel consumption rather than improving performance. Addressing this vehicle performance-size-fuel consumption trade-off should be the priority for policymakers. By considering both supply and demand side constraints on building up vehicle production rates, three plausible scenarios of advanced vehicle market penetration were developed. Due to strong competition from mainstream gasoline vehicles and high initial cost, market penetration rates of diesels and gasoline hybrids in the U.S. are likely to be slow. As a result, diesels and gasoline hybrids have only a modest, though growing potential for reducing fleet fuel use before 2025. In general, the time-scales to impact of new technologies are twenty to twenty-five years. / (cont.) Integrating vehicle and fuel scenarios showed that measures which reduce greenhouse gas emissions also reduce petroleum consumption, but the converse is not necessarily true. Policy efforts therefore should be focused on measures that improve both energy security and carbon emissions at the same time. While up to 35 percent reduction in fleet GHG emissions from a No Change scenario is possible by 2035, the magnitude of changes required to achieve these reductions are daunting, as all of the current trends run counter to the changes required. / by Anup P. Bandivadekar. / Ph.D.