Digital Commons Network^™

An Integrated Environment For Problem Solving And Program Development, Fadi Pierre Deek

Dissertations

A framework for an integrated problem solving and program development environment that addresses the needs of students learning programming is proposed. Several objectives have been accomplished: defining the tasks required for program development and a literature review to determine the actual difficulties involved in learning those tasks. A comprehensive Study of environments and tools developed to support the learning of problem solving and programming was then performed, covering programming environments, debugging aids, intelligent tutoring systems, and intelligent programming environments. This was followed by a careful analysis and critique of these systems, which uncovered the limitations that have prevented them from …

Structured Document Comparison And Scientific Data Mining On The World Wide Web, Philip B. Johnson

Theses

The usefulness and accessibility of programs and systems have become important issues for users and researchers alike. A program's usefulness can lw measured by the frequency with which it is used. From the author's or maintainer's point of view, the frequency of usage can be determined by how often a request for the software is received. In the past, a user became aware of a particular tool through various means, and contacted the author or maintainer to obtain a copy of it. This presented difficulties, ranging from language barriers to machine incompatibilities to control of the use of the program. …

Algorithms And Tools For Splicing Junction Donor Recognition In Genomic Dna Sequences, Maisheng Yin

Theses

The consensus sequences at splicing junctions in genomic DNA are required for pre-mRNA breaking and rejoining which must be carried out precisely. Programs currently available for identification or prediction of transcribed sequences from within genomic DNA are far from being powerful enough to elucidate genomic structure completely[4]. In this research, we develop a degenerate pattern match algorithm for 5' splicing site (Donor Site) recognition.. Using the Motif models we developed, we can mine out the degenerate pattern information from the consensus splicing junction sequences. Our experimental results show that, this algorithm can correctly recognize 93% of the total donor sites …

Interactive And Batch Creation Of Oodb Medical Vocabularies, Muhammad Arif

Theses

Controlled vocabularies are becoming popular for knowledge representation and querying. They are particularly helpful in the medical field since they can unify disparate terminologies and provide information in a compact, comprehensible manner. In this thesis, we present a mechanism to create OODB controlled medical vocabularies from flat-file format. We also describe a tool by which a user can interactively create, edit and browse the vocabulary. For better understanding of the structure of the vocabulary we designed our interface as a graphical editor and browser. The user of this interface will typically be a medical expert who either wants to add …

Testing Statistical Significance In Sequence Classification Algorithms, Tom Tien-Hua Shih

Theses

Multiple sequence alignment has proven to be a successful method of representing and organizing of protein sequence data. It is crucial to medical researches on the structure and function of proteins.

There have been numerous tools published on how to abstract meaningful relationship from an unknown sequence and a set of known sequences. One study used a method for discovering active motifs in a set of related protein sequences. These are meaningful knowledge abstracted from the known protein database since most protein families are characterized by multiple local motifs. Another study abstracts knowledge regarding the input sequence using a preconstructed …

Analysis Of The Protocol For The Handover In A Micro-Cell Packet Switched Mobile Network, Anna M. Thomas

Theses

The overlay of microcells over macrocells offers new opportunities and is cost effective, which makes the handover in such a micro-cellular environment an important issue. The objective of this study is to analyze and prove the truthfulness of a new protocol proposed, which guarantees no packet loss during the handoff. The study here emphasizes on the data integrity issue, since it is the key factor affecting the throughput performance of the transport layer. It is shown that usage of the Internet Protocol leads to packet loss in the presence of handover. Simulation results reveal that the proposed new protocol preserves …

Efficient Parallel Processing With Optical Interconnections, Lili Hai

Dissertations

With the advances in VLSI technology, it is now possible to build chips which can each contain thousands of processors. The efficiency of such chips in executing parallel algorithms heavily depends on the interconnection topology of the processors. It is not possible to build a fully interconnected network of processors with constant fan-in/fan-out using electrical interconnections. Free space optics is a remedy to this limitation. Qualities exclusive to the optical medium are its ability to be directed for propagation in free space and the property that optical channels can cross in space without any interference. In this thesis, we present …

Multi-Wavelength Infrared Imaging Computer Systems And Applications, Jun Li

Dissertations

This dissertation presents the development of three computer systems for multi-wavelength thermal imaging.

Two computer systems were developed for the multi-wavelength imaging pyrometers (M-WIPs) that yield non-contact temperature measurements by remotely sensing the surface of objects with unknown wavelength-dependent emissivity. These M-WIP computer systems represent the state-of-art development in remote temperature measurement system based on the multi-wavelength approach. The dissertation research includes M-WIP computer system integration, software development, performance evaluation, and also applications in monitoring and control of temperature distribution of silicon wafers in a rapid thermal process system.

The two M-WIPs are capable of data acquisition, signal processing, system …

High Speed Protocols For Dual Bus And Dual Ring Network Architectures, Yaling Zhou

Dissertations

In this dissertation, two channel access mechanisms providing fair and bandwidth efficient transmission on dual bus and dual ring networks with high bandwidth-latency product are proposed. In addition, two effective priority mechanisms are introduced to meet the throughput and delay requirements of the diverse arrays of applications that future high speed networks must support.

For dual bus architectures, the Buffer Insertion Bandwidth Balancing (BI_BWB) mechanism and the Preemptive priority Bandwidth Balancing (P_BI_BWB) mechanism are proposed. BI_BWB can significantly improve the delay performance of remote stations. It achieves that by providing each station with a shift register into which the station …

On Document Filing Based Upon Predicates, Zhijian Zhu

Dissertations

This dissertation presents a formal approach to modeling documents in a personal office environment, proposes a heterogeneous algebraic query language to manipulating objects (folders) in the document model, and investigates a predicate-driven document filing system for automatically filing documents.

The document model was initially proposed in [38] which adopts a very natural view for describing the office documents using the relational and object-oriented paradigms. The model employs a dual approach to classifying and categorizing office documents by defining both a document type hierarchy and a folder organization. This dissertation extends and specifies formally the document model. Documents are partitioned into …

A Graphical Environment For Change Detection In Structured Documents, Girish A. Patel

Theses

Change detection in structured documents (e.g. SGML is important in data warehousing, digital libraries and Internet databases. This thesis presents a graphical environment for detecting changes in the structured documents. We represent. each document by alp ordered labeled tree based on the underlying markup language. We then compare two documents by invoking previously developed algorithms for approximate pattern matching and pattern discovery in trees. Several operators are developed to support. the comparison of the documents; graphical devices are provided to facilitate the use of the operators. We believe the proposed tool is useful for not only document management, but also …

Object Oriented Partitioning For A Medical Vocabulary Based On Semantic Network, Mansnimar Singh

Theses

Computers have become ubiquitous and indispensable part of everyday life both for personal use and in the workplace. Medicine is one of the few domains that has not fully adopted computerization. One impediment to this emanates from a communication gap between the computer science professional and the medical professional. Besides, medical terminology is full of synonyms and medical professionals use them according to their personal preferences. This lack of common terminology has prevented sharing of knowledge and automating data processing, resulting in the healthcare information explosion.

Semantic network models have been developed to represent medical concepts and to provide a …

Design And Implementation Of On-Line Metrics, Ashok Vantipalli

Theses

The performance of a software product plays an important role in the software industry to survive the tough competition given by the other software vendors. The real test for a software product starts after its release when it is extensively used by the end users and in different environments. And the software goes through a number of tests by the end users which can be very different and insufficient from the regression tests the software vendor performed on it. This critical issue; requires each vendor to have a department mainly dealing with the testing and analysing the performance of a …

Least Space-Time First Scheduling Algorithm : Scheduling Complex Tasks With Hard Deadline On Parallel Machines, Bo-Chao Cheng

Dissertations

Both time constraints and logical correctness are essential to real-time systems and failure to specify and observe a time constraint may result in disaster. Two orthogonal issues arise in the design and analysis of real-time systems: one is the specification of the system, and the semantic model describing the properties of real-time programs; the other is the scheduling and allocation of resources that may be shared by real-time program modules.

The problem of scheduling tasks with precedence and timing constraints onto a set of processors in a way that minimizes maximum tardiness is here considered. A new scheduling heuristic, Least …

Massively Parallel Reasoning In Transitive Relationship Hierarchies, Yugyung Lee

Dissertations

This research focuses on building a parallel knowledge representation and reasoning system for the purpose of making progress in realizing human-like intelligence. To achieve human-like intelligence, it is necessary to model human reasoning processes by programs. Knowledge in the real world is huge in size, complex in structure, and is also constantly changing even in limited domains. Unfortunately, reasoning algorithms are very often intractable, which means that they are too slow for any practical applications. One technique to deal with this problem is to design special-purpose reasoners. Many past Al systems have worked rather nicely for limited problem sizes, but …

Safe Code Transfromations For Speculative Execution In Real-Time Systems, Mohamed Mohamed Younis

Dissertations

Although compiler optimization techniques are standard and successful in non-real-time systems, if naively applied, they can destroy safety guarantees and deadlines in hard real-time systems. For this reason, real-time systems developers have tended to avoid automatic compiler optimization of their code. However, real-time applications in several areas have been growing substantially in size and complexity in recent years. This size and complexity makes it impossible for real-time programmers to write optimal code, and consequently indicates a need for compiler optimization. Recently researchers have developed or modified analyses and transformations to improve performance without degrading worst-case execution times. Moreover, these optimization …

Application Of Geometric Hashing Techniques To Retrieval Of High Dimensional Objects In Scientific Databases, Joyce Ye Lu

Theses

An approach to designing very fast algorithms for tackling the problem of approximate object matching in very large databases of high-dimensional objects is proposed. Given are a target object C and a database D containing information about a set of high-dimensional objects each of which is represented as a set of points. Our algorithms have an off-line object preprocessing (shape representation) phase and a recognition phase. The described algorithms determine those objects from D which are the closest to object C, according to delete or insert some points, move and rotation. All of these can be achieved very efficiently with …

Abstraction Of An Object-Oriented Vocabulary By Providing A Standardized Interface, Hemant Kothavade

Theses

Controlled vocabularies are ubiquitous in varied application fields. They are particularly helpful in the medical field since they can unify disparate terminologies and provide information in a compact, comprehensible manner. In this thesis, we present a mechanism to efficiently retrieve and update knowledge stored in a controlled vocabulary modeled as an Object-Oriented Database (OODB) system. We aim to provide a standardized interface to the vocabulary, such that the implementation details of the vocabulary are transparent to all users. The user of this standardized interface will typically be an application programmer who is trying to provide the vocabulary's knowledge-base to end …