Acknowledgements

This research was supported in part by a grant from the United States Department of Energy.

I would like to thank Dr. George Nagy (Rennselaer Polytechnic Institute) and Dr. Horst Bunke (Universtat Bern) for multiple suggestions and ideas to improve this work.

I am also very grateful to Dr. Thomas Nartker and Steve Rice of ISRI for their encouragement and support throughout the whole project. Many members of UNLV's CS faculty were very important in my two years here. I am particularly thankful to Dr. Kia Makki and Dr. Angelo Yfantis for their support. I also want to thank Dr. Gennady Bachman for agreeing to review and evaluate my work.

I would also like to thank all other ISRI members who helped with the project. I am specially grateful to Juan Gonzalez who did some of the programming and to Angela Molnar who proofread and corrected earlier versions of this work.

This work would have not been possible without the help of Dr. Junichi Kanai. He proved to be not only an outstanding researcher but an incredible human being. I consider myself very lucky to have been his disciple and I extend my gratitude to him for the countless hours he devoted to this project in particular and to my professional formation in general.

Last, but certainly not least, I would like to thank my wife, Laura, for her unconditional love and support.