Human listeners have a remarkable ability to separate a complex mixture of sounds into discrete sources. The processes underlying this ability have been termed ‘auditory scene analysis’ (Bregman 1990; this volume). Recently, an interdisciplinary field known as ‘computational auditory scene analysis’ (CASA) has emerged which aims to develop computer systems that mimic this aspect of hearing (Ros...

The idea of the creative individualist spawning innovations as a solitude effort is no longer realistic. Huge innovation projects, relying on project teams, have to be permanently conducted by organizations to assure their competitiveness. These projects often take place in distributed teams, making use of groupware to bridge temporal and geographical distances. Research in social psychology on...

Requiring that the baryon number of the universe be generated by anomalous elec-troweak interactions places strong constraints on the minimal supersymmetric standard model. In particular, the electric dipole moment of the neutron must be greater than 10 −27 e-cm. Improvement of the current experimental bound on the neutron's electric dipole moment by one order of magnitude would constrain the l...

Scarcely any invention has altered biological science so radically in such a short period as the polyme-rase chain reaction, or PCR. With this technique, minute amounts of DNA can be replicated very rapidly and thereby amplified to such an extent that the DNA becomes easy to detect, study and use for any given purpose. The potential of this technique in medicine has long been known, and ever mo...

Papers in this section are based on submissions to the MRS Symposium Proceedings that were selected by Symposium Organizers as the outstanding paper. Upon selection, authors are invited to submit their research results to Journal of Materials Research. These papers are subject to the same peer review and editorial standards as all other JMR papers. This is another way by which the Materials Res...