Reinventing VAT Collection: Industry Vertical Assessment, Revenue Increase, and Public Sector Reliability, PhD. Thesis, MIT... More > 2008. This dissertation shows how administrative reforms of the State Tax Administration Bureaus STABs in Brazil between 1997 and 2005 contributed to strengthening public sector bureaucracies and institutions at the sub-national level, while increasing tax revenues and compliance. STABs' administrative reform comprised changes in organizational structure, technological processes, and institutional arrangements. Beyond the market-oriented reforms, these joint changes made possible to taxpayers and tax collectors to visualize the connections and functioning of the tax administration and collection process that they were not able to think about before, i.e., there is evidence for how the administrative reform facilitated the understanding of the links among the several processes in the tax collection, particularly the backward and forward linkages in each industry. < Less

REPRESENTATION AND RECOGNITION OF ACTION IN INTERACTIVE SPACES - MIT Media Laboratory, PhD Thesis, 1999.

This thesis... More > presents new theory and technology for the representation and recognition of complex, context-sensitive human actions in interactive spaces. To represent action and interaction a symbolic framework has been developed based on Roger Schank’s conceptualizations, augmented by a mechanism to represent the temporal structure of the sub-actions based on Allen’s interval algebra networks. These concepts have been tested in the context of four projects involving story-driven interactive spaces. The action representation framework has been used in the Intelligent Studio project to enhance the control of automatic cameras in a TV studio. Interval scripts have been extensively employed in the development of “SingSong”; in “It/I”, a full-length computer theater play; and in “It”, an interactive art installation based on the play “It/I” that realizes our concept of immersive stages. < Less

REINVENTING VAT COLLECTION:
INDUSTRY VERTICAL ASSESSMENT, REVENUE INCREASE, AND PUBLIC SECTOR RELIABILITY

PhD. Thesis, MIT... More > 2008.

This dissertation shows how administrative reforms of the State Tax Administration Bureaus (STABs) in Brazil between 1997 and 2005 contributed to strengthening public sector bureaucracies and institutions at the sub-national level, while increasing tax revenues and compliance. STABs’ administrative reform comprised changes in organizational structure, technological processes, and institutional arrangements. Beyond the market-oriented reforms, these joint changes made possible to taxpayers and tax collectors to visualize the connections and functioning of the tax administration and collection process that they were not able to think about before, i.e., there is evidence for how the administrative reform facilitated the understanding of the links among the several processes in the tax collection, particularly the backward and forward linkages in each industry. < Less

REPRESENTATION AND RECOGNITION OF ACTION IN INTERACTIVE SPACES - MIT Media Laboratory, PhD Thesis, 1999.

This thesis... More > presents new theory and technology for the representation and recognition of complex, context-sensitive human actions in interactive spaces. To represent action and interaction a symbolic framework has been developed based on Roger Schank’s conceptualizations, augmented by a mechanism to represent the temporal structure of the sub-actions based on Allen’s interval algebra networks. These concepts have been tested in the context of four projects involving story-driven interactive spaces. The action representation framework has been used in the Intelligent Studio project to enhance the control of automatic cameras in a TV studio. Interval scripts have been extensively employed in the development of “SingSong”; in “It/I”, a full-length computer theater play; and in “It”, an interactive art installation based on the play “It/I” that realizes our concept of immersive stages. < Less

REINVENTING VAT COLLECTION:
INDUSTRY VERTICAL ASSESSMENT, REVENUE INCREASE, AND PUBLIC SECTOR RELIABILITY

PhD. Thesis, MIT... More > 2008.

This dissertation shows how administrative reforms of the State Tax Administration Bureaus (STABs) in Brazil between 1997 and 2005 contributed to strengthening public sector bureaucracies and institutions at the sub-national level, while increasing tax revenues and compliance. STABs’ administrative reform comprised changes in organizational structure, technological processes, and institutional arrangements. Beyond the market-oriented reforms, these joint changes made possible to taxpayers and tax collectors to visualize the connections and functioning of the tax administration and collection process that they were not able to think about before, i.e., there is evidence for how the administrative reform facilitated the understanding of the links among the several processes in the tax collection, particularly the backward and forward linkages in each industry. < Less