Engineering Commons^™

An Ontology Tool For Distributed Information Environments, Kuhanandha Mahalingam, Michael N. Huhns

Faculty Publications

This paper describes how ontologies can be used for query formulation and semantic reconciliation in large distributed information environments. It presents a tool, written in Java, that can be used to create and browse ontologies, and construct ontology-based queries. The tool incorporates several abstraction mechanisms that enable users to manage large ontologies, which are typical of large information environments. The tool is being applied to an information system for healthcare administrators, which spans hospitals, clinics, and governmental health departments.

A Toolkit For Specializing Production Operating System Code, Crispin Cowan, Dylan Mcnamee, Andrew P. Black, Calton Pu, Jonathan Walpole, Charles Krasic, Perry Wagle, Qian Zhang

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

Specialization has been recognized as a powerful technique for optimizing operating systems. However, specialization has not been broadly applied beyond the research community because the current techniques, based on manual specialization, are time-consuming and error-prone. This paper describes a specialization toolkit that should help broaden the applicability of specializing operating systems by assisting in the automatic generation of specialized code, and {\em guarding} the specialized code to ensure the specialized system continues to be correct. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the toolkit by describing experiences we have had applying it in real, production environments. We report on our experiences with …

Predictable File Access Latency For Multimedia, Dan Revel, Crispin Cowan, Dylan Mcnamee, Calton Pu, Jonathan Walpole

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

Multimedia applications are sensitive to I/O latency and jitter when accessing data in secondary storage. Transparent adaptive prefetching (TAP) uses software feedback to provide multimedia applications with file system quality of service (QoS) guarantees. We are investigating how QoS requirements can be communicated and how they can be met by adaptive resource management. A preliminary test of adaptive prefetching is presented.

Soft Computing: Frontiers? A Case Study Of Hyper-Spectral Satellite Imaging, Scott A. Starks, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

Soft computing methods such as fuzzy control, neural networks, etc., often require lots of computations even for small amounts of data. It is, therefore, sometimes believed that for larger amounts of data, the required amount of computations will be so large that we will reach the frontiers of soft computing.

In this paper, we show, on the example of hyper-spectral satellite imaging, that this belief is often too pessimistic. We should not be afraid to use (or at least to try to use) soft computing methods even for large amounts of data.

An Adaptive Scheme For Admission Control In Atm Networks, Saragur M. Srinidhi, William H. Thesling, Vijaya K. Konangi

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

This paper presents a real time front-end admission control scheme for ATM networks. A call management scheme which uses the burstiness associated with traffic sources in a heterogeneous ATM environment to effect dynamic assignment of bandwidth is presented. In the proposed scheme, call acceptance is based on an on-line evaluation of the upper bound on cell loss probability which is derived from the estimated distribution of the number of calls arriving. Using this scheme, the negotiated quality of service will be assured when there is no estimation error. The control mechanism is effective when the number of …

Mlpq: A Linear Constraint Database System With Aggregate Operators, Yiming Li

Department of Computer Science and Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

In this project report, I will discuss a Multiple Linear Programming Query (MLPQ) system and the theoretical background of this system.The MPLQ system is developed to solve some realistic problems involving both linear programming (UP) techniques and linear constraint databases (LCDBs) theory. The MLPQ system is aimed at providing a mechanism of bridging these two important areas. system basically consists of three parts which are a linear constraint database, an LP solver, and an interface between the LCDB and the LP solver. The LCDB of the MLPQ system contains multiple linear programming problems. The LP solver used in the MPLQ …

Theoretical Study Of A Linear Accelerator Used As A Vuv/X-Ray Source Using The Inverse Compton Scattering Mechanism: Comparisons And Applications, Robert A. Schill Jr., Edward Mccrea

Electrical & Computer Engineering Faculty Research

A classical linear theory is used to compare large synchrotron sources to a rf linear accelerator employed as a VUV/X-ray source. Comparisons are made on a per-pulse basis. It is demonstrated that the linear accelerator as an X-ray source is comparable to large synchrotron accelerators with wiggler insertion devices at the experiment. Applications to lithography, X-ray microscopy, X-ray spectroscopy and detector calibration are examined. Excluding lithography, the linear accelerator with an appropriate laser source is a useful source of X rays for these applications. As verification, classical results are compared with quantum mechanical results and are shown to be in …

High-Bandwidth Attitude Jitter Determination For Pointing And Tracking Systems, Marcelo C. Algrain

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering: Faculty Publications

For many reasons smaller spacecraft are becoming more appealing. Because of their lower inertias, these spacecraft are more sensitive to disturbances and likely to have more attitude jitter than the larger units. These jitter levels are unacceptable for some scientific instruments and need to be compensated. In the case of line-of-sight type instruments, the attitude jitter can be mitigated by incorporating a fast steering mirror into the system. To take full advantage of these devices, the spacecraft attitude must be measured at sufficiently high bandwidth, well beyond what is commonly provided by inertial reference units. Various ways to obtain higher …

An Intercomparison Of Two Tunable Diode Laser Spectrometers Used For Eddy Correlation Measurements Of Methane Flux In A Prairie Wetland, David P. Billesbach, Joon Kim, R.J. Clement, S.B Verman, F.G. Ullman

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering: Faculty Publications

An intercomparison was made between two tunable diode laser spectrometers used to measure methane fluxes by the eddy correlation technique at a prairie wetland site. The spectrometers were built by Unisearch Associates Inc. of Concord, Ontario, Canada, and Campbell Scientific Inc. of Logan, Utah, and were models EMS-50 and TGA-100, respectively. The fluxes were found to agree very well with each other in the range of 0 to 42 mg 􏰑 m-2 h-1.

The TGA-100 was observed to exhibit offset drifts. Most of the time, when the offset was only slowly changing (as compared to the eddy correlation averaging time), …

School Of Computer And Information Sciences Master Of Science Degree Programs 1997, Nova Southeastern University

College of Engineering and Computing Course Catalogs

No abstract provided.

Multi-Criteria Optimization - An Important Foundation Of Fuzzy System Design, Hung T. Nguyen, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

In many real-life design situations, there are several different criteria that we want to optimize, and these criteria are often in conflict with each other. Traditionally, such multi-criteria optimization situations are handled in an ad hoc manner, when different conflicting criteria are artificially combined into a single combination objective that is then optimized. The use of unnatural ad hoc tools is clearly not the best way of describing a very natural aspect of human reasoning. Fuzzy logic describes a much more natural way of handling multi-criterion optimization problems: when we cannot maximize each of the original conflicting criteria 100%, we …

Computers Of Generation Omega, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

To make computers faster, we must take smaller and smaller processing elements, and to analyze these elements, we need to take into consideration more and more subtle quantum effects. A. Stern has shown a natural way to use quantum field theory for computing. It turns out that if we take into consideration all quantum effects, then this idea leads to an even faster performance.

Alchourron's Defeasible Conditionals And Defeasible Reasoning, Fernando Tohme, Ronald P. Loui

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

No abstract provided.

A Global Computing Environment For Networked Resources, Haluk Topcuoglu, Salim Hariri

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science - All Scholarship

Current advances in high-speed networks and WWW technologies have made network computing a cost-effective, high-performance computing alternative. New software tools are being developed to utilize efficiently the network computing environment. Our project, called Virtual Distributed Computing Environment (VDCE), is a high-performance computing environment that allows users to write and evaluate networked applications for different hardware and software configurations using a web interface. In this paper we present the software architecture of VDCE by emphasizing application development and specification, scheduling, and execution/runtime aspects.

Mobile Unity: A Language And Logic For Concurrent Mobile Systems, Peter J. Mccann, Gruia-Catalin Roman

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

Traditionally, a distributed system has been viewed as a collection of fixed computational elements connected by a static network. Prompted by recent advances in wireless communications rechnology, the emerging field of mobile computing is challenging these assumptions by providing mobile hosts with connectivity that may change over time, raising the possibility that hosts may be called upon to operate while only weakly connected to or while completely disconnected from other hosts. We define a concurrent mobile system as one where independently executing coponents may migrate through some space during the course of the computation, and where the pattern of connectivity …

Building Interactive Distributed Applications In C++ With The Programmers' Playground, Kenneth J. Goldman, Joe Hoffert, T. Paul Mccartney, Jerome Plun, Todd Rogers

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

The objective of The Programmers' Playground, described in this manual, is to provide a development environment and underlying support for end-user construction of distributed multimedia applications from reusable self-describing software components. Playground provides a set of software tools and a methodology for simplifying the design and construction of applications that interact with each other and with people in a distributed computer system. This manual explains how to write interactive distributed applications using Playground. The only background necessary to get started is an understanding of basic data structures and control constructs in C++. If you already know C++, then with the …

Exact Learning Of Discretized Geometric Concepts, Nader H. Bshouty, Paul W. Goldberg, Sally A. Goldman, H. David Mathias

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

We first present an algorithm that uses membership and equivalence queries to exactly identify a discretized geometric concept defined by the unioin of m axis-parallel boxes in d-dimensional discretized Euclidean space where each coordinate can have n discrete values. This algorithm receives at most md counterexamples and uses time and membership queries polynomial in m and log(n) for any constant d. Furthermore, all equivalence queries can be formulated as the union of O(mdlog(m)) axis-parallel boxes. Next, we show how to extend our algorithm to efficiently learn, from only equivalence queries, any discretized geometric concept generated from any number of halfspaces …

Learning With Unreliable Boundary Queries, Avrim Blum, Prasad Chalasani, Sally A. Goldman, Donna K. Slonim

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

We introduce a model for learning from examples and membership queries in situations where the boundary between positive and negative examples is somewhat ill-defined. In our model, queries near the boundary of a target concept may receive incorrect or "don't care" responses, and the distribution of examples has zero probability mass on the boundary region. The motivation behind our model is that in many cases the boundary between positive and negative examples is complicated or "fuzzy." However, one may still hope to learn successfully, because the typical examples that one sees to not come from that region. We present several …

Reasoning About Code Mobility With Mobile Unity, Gian Pietro Picco, Gruia-Catalin Roman, Peter J. Mccann

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

Advancements in network technology have led to the emergence of new computing paradigms that challenge established programming practices by employing weak forms of consistency and dynamic forms of binding. Code mobility, for instance, allows for invocation-time binding between a code fragment and the location where it executes. Similarly, mobile computing allows hosts (and the software they execute) to alter their physical location. Despite apparent similarities, the two paradigms are distinct in their treatment of location and movement. This paper seeks to uncover a common foundation for the two paradigms by exploring the manner in which stereotypical forms of code mobility …

Sequence Assembly Validation By Restriction Digest Fingerprint Comparison, Eric C. Rouchka, David J. States

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

DNA sequence analysis depends on the accurate assembly of fragment reads for the determination of a consensus sequence. Genomic sequences frequently contain repeat elements that may confound the fragment assembly process, and errors in fragment assembly, and errors in fragment assembly may seriously impact the biological interpretation of the sequence data. Validating the fidelity of sequence assembly by experimental means is desirable. This report examines the use of restriction digest analysis as a method for testing the fidelity of sequence assembly. Restriction digest fingerprint matching is an established technology for high resolution physical map construction, but the requirements for assembly …

English-Chinese Bilingual Database And The Compilation Of Dictionary, Gan Ye, Nanjing University

Pepperdine University Libraries

No abstract provided.

Lyceum: A Multi-Protocol Digital Library Gateway, Ming-Hokng Maa, Michael L. Nelson, Sandra L. Esler

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Lyceum is a prototype scalable query gateway that provides a logically central interface to multi-protocol and physically distributed, digital libraries of scientific and technical information. Lyceum processes queries to multiple syntactically distinct search engines used by various distributed information servers from a single logically central interface without modification of the remote search engines. A working prototype (http://www.larc.nasa.gov/lyceum/) demonstrates the capabilities, potentials, and advantages of this type of meta-search engine by providing access to over 50 servers covering over 20 disciplines.

A Method To Partially Suppress Is1 And Ma1 For Ds Ss Cdma Wireless Networks, Beata J. Wysocki, Tadeusz A. Wysocki

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering: Faculty Publications (to 2015)

We propose a method to partially suppress ISI and MAI for US SS CDMA schemes in wireless LANs. The method can be regarded as an alternative approach to combat ISI and in particular MAI by the use of advanced multiuser detection. Instead of using very sophisticated detectors, we propose introduction of a simple modification to the carrier waveform which results in very substaiitial reduction in cross-correlation belween users and an off-peak auto-correlation. The method can be applied to any DS SS CDMA scheme, but should be particularly useful in the case of short spreading signatures, as is the case of …

A Self-Consistent Power Relation For An Inverse Compton Scattering Theory, Robert A. Schill Jr.

Electrical & Computer Engineering Faculty Research

In a self-consistent manner, the total power for linear inverse Compton scattering between a Gaussian electron beam colliding head on with a Gaussian laser beam is obtained. The theory is shown to agree with well-known limiting cases. Coupling among harmonic modes is explicitly shown in the resultant power relation. Even so, for the parameters of interest, harmonic modes are negligible compared to the fundamental mode. Total power calculations are of importance in detector calibration. The theory is applied using practical linear accelerator and laser parameters.

Internet-Based Agents: Applications And Infrastructure, Munindar P. Singh, Michael N. Huhns

Faculty Publications

Software agents are mitigating the complexity of modern information systems—technically by providing a locus for managing information subsets, and psychologically by providing an abstraction for human interaction with them.

Assessment Methods For Virtual Laboratories In Civil Engineering Technology, Carol L. Considine, Vernon W. Lewis Jr.

Engineering Technology Faculty Publications

Old Dominion University has developed an extensive distance learning system that includes 40 remote sites. A majority of the sites are located at community colleges. There are 30 sites in Virginia, three sites in North Carolina, one site in Washington State and one site in Arizona. In addition, there are four sites at Higher Education Centers in Virginia and one site at a local industrial facility. The Civil Engineering Technology curriculum requires three laboratory courses, which are a challenge in the distance learning environment because of the lack of laboratory equipment and computers at the broadcast sites. The three courses …

Measurement Of The Spectral Functions Of Vector Current Hadronic Tau Decays, R. Barate, M. Thulasidas

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

A measurement of the spectral functions of non-strange τ vector current final states is presented, using 124 358 τ pairs recorded by the ALEPH detector at LEP during the years 1991 to 1994. The spectral functions of the dominant two- and four-pion τ decay channels are compared to published results of e + e - annihilation experiments via isospin rotation. A combined fit of the pion form factor from τ decays and e + e - data is performed using different parametrizations. The mass and the width of the ρ ±(770) and the ρ 0(770) are separately determined in order …

Dialogue And Deliberation, Ronald P. Loui, Diana M. Moore

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

Formal accounts of negotiation tend to invoke the strategic models of conflict which have been impressively developed by game theorists in this half-century. For two decades, however, research on artificial intelligence (AI) has produced a different formal picture of the agent and of the rational deliberations of agents. AI's models are not based simply on intensities of preference and quantities of probability. AI's models consider that agents use language in various ways, that agents use and convey knowledge, that agents plan, search, focus, and argue. Agents can choose their language, apply their knowledge, change their plans, continue their search, shift …

Noise-Tolerant Parallel Learning Of Geometric Concepts, Nader H. Bshouty, Sally A. Goldman, H. David Mathias

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

We present several efficient parallel algorithms for PAC-learning geometric concepts in a constant-dimensional space. The algorithms are robust even against malicious classification noise of any rate less than 1/2. We first give an efficient noise-tolerant parallel algorithm to PAC-learn the class of geometric concepts defined by a polynomial number of (d-1)-dimensional hyperplanes against an arbitrary distribution where each hyperplane has a slope from a set of known slopes. We then describe how boosting techniques can be used so that our algorithms' dependence on {GREEK LETTER} and {DELTA} does not depend on d. Next we give an efficient noise-tolerant parallel algorithm …

A Theoretical And Empirical Study Of A Noise-Tolerant Algorithm To Learn Geometric Patterns, Sally A. Goldman, Stephen D. Scott

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

Developing the ability to recognize a landmark from a visual image of a robot's current location is a fundamental problem in robotics. We describe a way in which the landmark matching problem can be mapped to that of learning a one-dimensional geometric pattern. The first contribution of our work is an efficient noise-tolerant algorithm (designed using the statistical query model) to PAC-learn the class of one-dimensional geometric patterns. The second contribution of our work is an empirical study of our algorithm that provides at least some evidence that statistical query algorithms may be valuable for use in practice for handling …