Computer Engineering Commons^™

The Prospect For Answer Sets Computation By A Genetic Model, A. Bertoni, G. Grossi, A. Provetti, Vladik Kreinovich, L. Tari

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

We combine recent results from both Logic Programming and Genetic Algorithms to design a new method for the efficent computation of Answer Sets of logic programs. First of all the problem is reduced to the problem of finding a suitable coloring on directed graphs. Then the problem of finding a suitable coloring is relaxed to a combinatorial optimization problem and solved (in an approximate way) by a continuous discrete time system derived by a genetic model.

"Conversational" Dialogues In Direct-Manipulation Interfaces, David G. Novick

Departmental Papers (CS)

This paper reports ongoing research in extending direct-manipulation interfaces by incorporating, via the direct-manipulation modality itself, interaction techniques that add kinds of language features associated with spoken conversation. The paper proposes means of implementing ways for a user of a direct-manipulation system to define new kinds of relations among objects in the interface.

Users And Uses Of Synchronous Business Communications Software, David G. Novick, Eleanor Wynn

Departmental Papers (CS)

To help designers and authors understand users' intentions and work practices for synchronous business communications in a systematic way, we used ethnographic and task-analytic techniques to collect, analyze and classify evidence of the activities of potential users as they conducted their work lives. The interactions we observed among our users took place through a variety of modalities. We found eight categories of tasks for the collaborative or interactive work in which our subjects engaged. Based on these data, we were able to classify roles of potential users of synchronous business communications software into a set of "archetypes" that characterize their …

Accounting For Domain Context In Evaluation, Meriem Chater, David G. Novick

Departmental Papers (CS)

Work is situated activity. Taking into account human factors in evaluation involves considering not only users but also their contexts of use. Consequently, the evaluation of systems — from video-games to safetycritical interfaces — requires analysis of context to understand not only the effect of context on usability but also the impact of artifacts' usability on users' environments. In the case of safety-critical systems (SCS), errors (by users or designers) may threaten human lives.
To assess the degree to which interface evaluation methods currently account for context, we have used the research strategy taxonomy of McGrath as a framework for …

Fuzzycast: Media Broadcasting For Multiple Asynchronous Receivers, Marcel Waldvogel, Wei Deng, Ramaprabhu Janakiraman

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

When using an on-demand media streaming system on top of a network with Multicast support, it is sometimes more efficient to use broadcast to distribute popular content. There has been a lot of research in broadcasting on-demand content to multiple, asynchronous receivers. In this paper, we propose a family of novel, practical techniques for broadcasting on-demand media, which achieve lowest known server/network bandwidth usage and I/O efficient client buffer management, while retaining the simplicity of a frame-based single channel scheme.

A Scalable Durable Grid Event Service, Geoffrey C. Fox, Shrideep Pallickara

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science - All Scholarship

It is interesting to study the system and software architecture of environments, which integrate the evolving ideas of computational grids, distributed objects, web services, peer-to-peer networks and message oriented middleware. Such peer-to-peer (P2P) Grids should seamlessly integrate users to themselves and to resources, which are also linked to each other. We can abstract such environments as a distributed system of "clients" which consist either of "users" or "resources" or proxies thereto. These clients must be linked together in a flexible fault tolerant efficient high performance fashion. In this paper, we study the messaging or event system -- termed GES or …

Local Search And Encoding Schemes For Soft Constraint Minimization Problems, Michael P. Moran, Weixiong Zhang

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

Soft constraint minimization problems (SCMPs) contain hard constraints that cannot be violated and soft constraints that may be violated but carry penalties if not satisfied. In this paper, we first extend local search, WalkSAT in particular, to SCMPs and study the existing SAT encoding schemes for SCMPs. We propose a general encoding method called k-encoding. We then investigate the effects of local search neiborhood structures introduced by encoding schemes and analyze the anytime performance of extended WalkSAT using different encoding methods. Our experimental results on various graph coloring problems show that a direct extension of WalkSAT is most effective, and …

Formal Specification And Design Of Mobile Systems, Gruia-Catalin Roman, Christine Julien, Qingfeng Huang

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

Termination detection, a classical problem in distributed computing, is revisited in the new setting provided by the emerging mobile computing technology. A simple solution tailored for use in ad hoc networks is employed as a vehicle for demonstrating the applicability of formal requirements and design strategies to the new field of mobile computing. The approach is based on well understood techniquest in specification refinement, but the methodology is tailored to mobile applications and helps designers address novel concerns such as the mobility of hosts, transient interactions, and specific coordination constructs. The proof logic and programming notation of Mobile UNITY provide …

Obiwan - An Internet Protocol Router In Reconfigurable Hardware, Florian Braun, Marcel Waldvogel, John Lockwood

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

The ongoing exponential increase of line speed in the Internet and combined with the uncountable requests for increased functionality of network devices presents a major challenge. These demands call for the use of reprogrammable hardware to provide the required flexible high-speed functionaltiy. The Field Programmable Port Extender (FPX) provides such an environment for development of networking components in reprogrammable hardware. We present the high-speed IP routing components in reprogrammable hardware. We present the high-speed IP routing module "OBIWAN" (Optimal Binary search IP lookup for Wide Area Networks) built on top of an IP processing framework.

Phase Transitions And Backbones Of Constraint Minimization Problems, Weixiong Zhang

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

Many real-world problems involve constraints that cannot be all satisfied. The goal toward an overconstrained problem is to find solutions minimizing the total number of constraints violated. We call such a problem constraint minimization problem (CMP). We study the behavior of the phase transitions and backbones of CMP. We first investigate the relationship between the phase transitions of Boolean satisfiability, or precisely 3-SAT (a well-studied NP-complete decision problem), and the phase transitions of MAX 3-SAT (an NP-hard optimization problem). To bridge the gap between the easy-hard-easy phase transitions of 3-SAT, in which solutions of bounded quality, e.g., solutions with at …

Parbit: A Tool To Transform Bitfiles To Implement Partial Reconfiguration Of Field Programmable Gate Arrays (Fpgas), Edson L. Horta, John W. Lockwood

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) can be partially reconfigured to implement Dynamically loadable Hardware Plugin (DHP) modules. A tool called PARBIT has been developed that transforms FPGA configuration bitfiles to enable DHP modules. With this tool it is possible to define a partial reconfigurable area inside the FPGA and download it into a specified region of the FPGA device. One or more DHPs, with different sizes can be implemented using PARBIT.

Network Abstractions For Context-Aware Mobile Computing, Gruia-Catalin Roman, Christine Julien, Qingfeng Huang

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

Context-Aware computing is characterized by the ability of a software system to continuously adapt its behavior to a changing environment over which it has little or no control. Previous work along these lines presumed a rather narrow definition of context, one that was centered on resources immediately available to the component in question, e.g., communication bandwidth, physical location, etc. This paper explores context-aware computing in the setting of ad hoc networks consisting of numerous mobile hosts that interact with each other opportunistically via transient wireless interconnections. We extend the context to encompass awareness of an entire neighborhood within the ad …

Synthesizable Design Of A Multi-Module Memory Controller, Sarang Dharmapurikar, John W. Lockwood

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

Random Access Memory (RAM) is a common resources needed by networking hardware modules. Synchronous Dynamic RAM (SDRAM) provides a cost effective solution for such data storage. As the packet processing speeds in the hardware increase memory throughput can be a bottleneck to achieve overall high performance. Typically there are multiple hardware modules which perform different operations on the packet payload and hence all try to access the common packet buffer simultaneously. This gives rise to a need for a memory controller which arbitrates between the memory requests made by different modules and maximizes the memory throughput. This paper discusses the …

Embedding Images In Non-Flat Spaces, Robert Pless

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

Multi-dimensional scaling is an analysis tool which transforms pairwise distances between points to an embedding of points in space which are consistent with those distances. Two recent techniques in statistical patter recognition, locally linear embedding (LLE) and Isomap, give a mechanism for finding the structure underlying point sets for which comparisons or distances are only meaningful between nearby points. We give a direct method to extend the embedding algorithm to new topologies, finding the optimal embedding of points whose geodesic distance on a surface mathes the given pairwise distance measurements. Surfaces considered include spheres, cylinders, tori, and their higher dimensional …

Graduate Catalog 2001-2002 The Graduate School Of Computer And Information Sciences, Nova Southeastern University

College of Engineering and Computing Course Catalogs

No abstract provided.

Virtual Design Office: A Collaborative Unified Modeling Language Tool, Hara Totapally

Theses Digitization Project

Real-time conferencing and collaborative computing is a great way to make developers more effective. This project is a collaborative framework development comprising configurable client and server components.

Associating Nodes With Routers In K-Ary M-Way Interconnection Networks, Aya Hassan Saad

Archived Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.

Translucent Optical Wdm Networks For The Next-Generation Backbone Networks, Byrav Ramamurthy, Srinath Yaragorla, Xi Yang

CSE Conference and Workshop Papers

This paper proposes an alternate approach to fully transparent and fully opaque optical networks for operating a wavelength routed optical network. In this paper, the architecture of the regeneration node that performs sparse regeneration (or translucency) is discussed. The regeneration demands generated from call blocking and signal quality requirements are addressed. Two implementation strategies for incorporating sparse regeneration are introduced and their relative merits are studied.

Optimization Of Orthogonal Polyphase Spreading Sequences For Wireless Data Applications, B. J. Wysocki, Tadeusz Wysocki

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

In this paper, we propose a simple but efficient method for optimizing correlation properties of polyphase spreading sequences for asynchronous DS CDMA applications. The proposed method can be used to minimize the mean square value of aperiodic crosscorrelation or the mean square value of aperiodic autocorrelation, the maximum value of aperiodic crosscorrelation functions, merit factor or other properties of the sequence set. The important feature of the method is that when applied to orthogonal sequences, it modifies correlation properties of the sequence set, while preserves their orthogonality for perfect synchronization.

Applying E-Commerce Techniques To Public School Software, Michael Lapke

UNF Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Applying e-commerce technology to public school software is a process that involves an extensive and thorough analysis. There are typically three groups of users who would use such a system: teachers, administrators and parents. Teachers need a system that nearly duplicates the software that they are currently using to enter, store, and calculate their grades, while school administrators and parents need to student and teacher's information. This is where the use of e-commerce technology comes in very nicely.

The analysis performed for this project involved extensive interviews with the expert user set and a walk-through of the current system. The …

Rules For A Cellular Automaton To Model Quantum-Dot Cellular Automata, Teresa Cole, John C. Lusth

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

Quantum-dot cellular automata are one of several new device architectures whose operation is based on local interactions, much like cellular automata. We have implemented several rule sets for a cellular automaton that could be used to model the behavior of quantum-dot cellular automata and used them to test most of the wire and gate configurations proposed for these devices. Arrangements of cells for which any particular cell has neighbors which are not adjacent to each other generally behave as expected. Unfavorable arrangements of cells such as those with bends and crosses tend to either have incorrect outputs or be unstable …

Design And Implementation Of Car Rental System, Fadi Fayez Abdel-Jaber

Theses Digitization Project

When someone wants to rent a car, the customer will usually think twice about the company from which they want to rent. The decision will be based on factors such as good rates, quality and customer service. The service the company representative offers the client should be fast, clear and accurate. This goal cannot be achieved without an informative system that will enable the customer representative to answer the various questions the client might have.

A Study And Implementation Of An Electronic Commerce Website Using Active Server Pages, Soumaya Boutkhil

Theses Digitization Project

The purpose of this project is to design an electronic commerce site for MarocMart company. MarocMart.com is an one-stop shopping company for a number of high quality products: carpets, jewelry, pottery, wood, leather, metals, and fashion items, etc... Each article is unique, hand-made by Moroccan craftsmen.

Presentations World Wide Systems, Sandra Marie Hengstebeck

Theses Digitization Project

The purpose of Presentations World Wide System (PWWS) is to allow students to view a live presentation through an Internet browser and allow the instructor to have control over the presentation.

Implementation Business-To-Business Electronic Commercial Website Using Coldfusion 4.5, Teerapong Euawatana

Theses Digitization Project

This project was created using ColdFusion 4.5 to build and implement a commercial web site to present a real picture of electronic commerce. This project is intended to provide enough information for other students who are looking for a guideline for further study and to improve their skills in business from an information management aspect.

World Wide Graphics, Alysha Marie Timmons

Theses Digitization Project

The scope of this project describes World Wide Graphics (WWG) a software package that provides instructors with the tools needed to present a web-based presentation to a group of students while having the ability of enhancing the prepared HTML slide with userdrawn graphics and highlighting.

Gene Expression Data Analysis Using Fuzzy Logic, Robert Reynolds

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

DNA microarray technology allows for the parallel analysis of the expression of genes in an organism. The wealth of spatio-temporal data provided by the technology allows us to attempt to reverse engineer the genetic network. Fuzzy logic has been proposed as a method of analyzing the relationships between genes as well as their corresponding proteins. Combinations of genes are entered into a fuzzy model of gene interaction and evaluated on the basis of how well the combination fits the model. Those combinations of genes that fit the model are likely to be related. However, current analysis algorithms are slow and …

Scanner Parameter Estimation Using Bilevel Scans Of Star Charts, Elisa H. Barney Smith

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

Scanning a high contrast image in bilevel mode results in image degradation. This is caused by two primary effects: blurring and thresholding. This paper expands on a method of estimating a joint distortion parameter, called the edge spread, from a star sector test chart in order to calculate the values of the point spread function width and binarization threshold. This theory is also described for variations in the source pattern which can represent degradations caused by repetition of the bilevel process as would be seen in printing then scanning, or in repeated photocopying. Estimation results are shown for the basic …

Design And Implementation Of An Intranet-Solution Especially With Workflow Aspects, Robert Loew

Theses

An Intranet support a new or simply an easier information system for all the workers within a company using internet technology. On the one hand, employees can use Web technology and very simple tools to provide and navigate information. On the other hand, the costly and time-consuming business of installing and maintaining software on local PCs can be avoided by using Browser-based Intranet applications. Ideally, it would be possible to access all forms of information processing using one and the same Web browser. This is the aim of the Intranet Project upon which this thesis is based.

Various technologies for …

A Proposal For A Scalable Internet Multicast Architecture, Sherlia Shi

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

We propose a new network and system architecture for multicast in the Internet. Our main objectives are to find a cost-effective way to scale to a large number of multicast groups whose members are geographically dispersed, and to enable small and less capable devices to participate in group communications. In order to preserve the efficiency of data distribution gained by multicast, while avoiding the control complexity previously exhibited by IP multicast, we propose the use of an overlay network for multicast services. We construct "virtual" multicast trees, which consist of unicast connections joining multicast servers in the network. These servers …