Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Seaway: A Multi-Agent Decision-Support System For Naval Expeditionary Logistic Operations, Anthony Wood, Kym Jason Pohl, Justin Crawford, Mark Lai, John Fanshier, Ken Cudworth, Tom Tate, Hisham Assal, Shawn Pan, Jens G. Pohl

Collaborative Agent Design (CAD) Research Center

This report describes work performed by CDM Technologies Inc. in conjunction with the Collaborative Agent Design (CAD) Research Center of California Polytechnic State University (Cal Poly), San Luis Obispo, for the Office of Naval Research (ONR), on the SEAWAY experimental system for planning, gaming and executing maritime logistic operations from a sea base. SEAWAY incorporates three fundamental concepts that distinguish it from existing (i.e., legacy) command and control applications. First, it is a collaborative system in which computer-based agents assist human operators by monitoring, analyzing and reasoning about events in near real-time. Second, SEAWAY includes an ontological model of the …

Combinatorial Approach To Planar Non-Colliding Robot Arm Motion Planning, Ileana Streinu

Computer Science: Faculty Publications

We propose a combinatorial approach to plan non-colliding motions for a polygonal bar-and-joint framework. Our approach yields very efficient deterministic algorithms for a category of robot arm motion planning problems with many degrees of freedom, where the known general roadmap techniques would give exponential complexity. It is based on a novel class of one-degree-of-freedom mechanisms induced by pseudo triangulations of planar point sets, for which we provide several equivalent characterization and exhibit rich combinatorial and rigidity theoretic properties. The main application is an efficient algorithm for the Carpenter's Rule Problem: convexify a simple bar-and-joint planar polygonal linkage using only non …

Bayes Optimal Metasearch: A Probabilistic Model For Combining The Results Of Multiple Retrieval Systems, Javed A. Aslam, Mark Montague

Computer Science Technical Reports

We introduce a new, probabilistic model for combining the outputs of an arbitrary number of query retrieval systems. By gathering simple statistics on the average performance of a given set of query retrieval systems, we construct a Bayes optimal mechanism for combining the outputs of these systems. Our construction yields a metasearch strategy whose empirical performance nearly always exceeds the performance of any of the constituent systems. Our construction is also robust in the sense that if ``good'' and ``bad'' systems are combined, the performance of the composite is still on par with, or exceeds, that of the best constituent …

Reconstructing Ancient Egyptian Tombs, Hany Farid

Computer Science Technical Reports

From the pyramids of Giza to the tombs of Thebes (modern Luxor), ancient Egypt's glorious history has produced remarkable architecture. Sadly, the nearly four million yearly tourists have taken a heavy toll on many of these ancient structures. Of particular concern are many of the tombs located opposite to Luxor on the western bank of the Nile. Digital reconstruction of these tombs has the potential to help document and preserve these important historical structures. Photographing and reconstruction of these tombs poses new and unique problems that this paper begins to address. Techniques for removing image distortions, recovering 3-D shape, and …

Simulation Of Instability Onset In A Gas Turbine, S. Fleeter, Elias N. Houstis, John R. Rice, C. Zhou

Department of Computer Science Technical Reports

No abstract provided.

A Proactive Approach To Distributed Dos Prevention Using Route-Based Packet Filtering, Kihong Park, Heejo Lee

Department of Computer Science Technical Reports

No abstract provided.

Impact Of Tile-Size Selection For Skewed Tiling, Yonghong Song, Zhiyuan Li

Department of Computer Science Technical Reports

No abstract provided.

Generalized Tcp Congestion Avoidance And Its Effect On Bandwidth Sharing And Variability, Archan Misra, John Baras, Teunis Ott

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

To model possible suggested changes in TCP window adaptation in response to randomized feedback, such as ECN (explicit congestion notification), we formulate a generalized version of the TCP congestion avoidance algorithm. We first consider multiple such generalized TCP flows sharing a bottleneck buffer under the assured service model and use a fixed point technique to obtain the mean window sizes and throughputs for the TCP flows, To further study how changes in the adaptation algorithm affect the variability in the throughput, we use an analytical-cum-numerical technique to derive the window distribution (and related statistics) of a single generalized flow under …

An Efficient And Practical Scheme For Privacy Protection In E-Commerce Of Digital Goods, Feng Bao, Robert H. Deng, Peirong Feng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

It is commonly acknowledged that customers’ privacy in electronic commerce should be well protected. The solutions may come not only from the ethics education and legislation, but also from cryptographic technologies. In this paper we propose and analyze a privacy protection scheme for e-commerce of digital goods. The scheme takes cryptography as its technical means to realize privacy protection for online customers. It is efficient in both computational cost and communication cost. It is very practical for real e-commerce systems compared with previous solutions. The cryptographic technique presented in this paper is rather simple. But the scheme has great application …

Software Quality Function Deployment, Xiaoqing Frank Liu

Computer Science Faculty Research & Creative Works

Any product development involves projecting its potential success in achieving its functional and commercial goals. Better quality designs that match customer needs and preferences and integrate other lifecycle issues early in the software development process are more likely to be competitive. Thus, there is significant concern in industry about quality product design, which is addressed by quality function deployment (QFD). QFD uses matrices to organize and relate pieces of data to each other. These matrices are often combined to form a basic tool of QFD, called a House of Quality (HoQ). QFD was developed in the Kobe shipyards as a …

Collaborative Model And Algorithms For Supporting Real-Time Distribution Logistics Systems, Hoong Chuin Lau, Qi Zhang Liu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We study a complex optimization problem that arises due to an emerging trend in distribution logistics. The problem involves the integration of an inventory management problem and the vehicle routing problem with time windows, both of which are known to be NP-hard. We describe a collaborative approach to solve this problem in real-time. The novelty of our approach lies in the tight algorithmic integration between two sub-problems, and suggests an elegant scheme to deal with other integrated optimization problems of the same nature. For first sub-problem, we will present two algorithms: a complete mathematical model integrating integer programming with constraint …

Control Challenges In Multi-Level Adaptive Video Streaming, Dylan Mcnamee, Charles Krasic, Kang Li, Ashvin Goel, Erik Walthinsen, David Steere, Jonathan Walpole

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

Streaming video is one of the fastest-growing applications of the Internet. The Internet’s diversity and dynamism demands that video streams adapt to ensure maximum quality at all times. This paper describes the control challenges we have encountered in the Quasar project’s “multi-level” adaptive streaming video player. We first describe the framework and environment of the player. This framework uses software feedback to control resource allocation as well as the quality of media delivery. We present the control challenges raised by our framework, which include horizontal and vertical feedback composition, difficult to model systems, and unpredictable, non-linear actuators. We describe some …

Computational Geometry Column 40, Joseph O'Rourke

Computer Science: Faculty Publications

It has recently been established by Below, De Loera, and Richter-Gebert that finding a minimum size (or even just a small) triangulation of a convex polyhedron is NP-complete. Their 3SAT-reduction proof is discussed.

Java On Networks Of Workstations (Javanow): A Parallel Computing Framework Inspired By Linda And The Message Passing Interface (Mpi), George K. Thiruvathukal, Phil M. Dickens, Shahzad Bhatti

Computer Science: Faculty Publications and Other Works

Networks of workstations are a dominant force in the distributed computing arena, due primarily to the excellent price/performance ratio of such systems when compared to traditionally massively parallel architectures. It is therefore critical to develop programming languages and environments that can help harness the raw computational power available on these systems. In this article, we present JavaNOW (Java on Networks of Workstations), a Java‐based framework for parallel programming on networks of workstations. It creates a virtual parallel machine similar to the MPI (Message Passing Interface) model, and provides distributed associative shared memory similar to the Linda memory model but with …

Efficient Storage And Retrieval Of Georeferenced Objects In A Semantic Database For Web-Based Applications, Debra Lee Davis

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The use and dissemination of remotely-sensed data is an important resource that can be used for environmental, commercial and educational purposes. Because of this, the use and availability of remotely-sensed data has increased dramatically in recent years. This usefulness, however, is often overshadowed by the difficulty encountered with trying to deal with this type of data. The amount of data available is immense. Storing, searching and retrieving the data of interest is often difficult, time consuming and inefficient. This is particularly true when these types of data need to be rapidly and continually accessed via the Internet, or combined with …

Covert Shells, John Christian Smith

John Christian Smith

The potential for covert communications exist anywhere that legitimate communication channels are in use. In order to maintain control of the channel once exploited, the insertion of a backdoor Trojan horse server, to be used with a client that provides shell access, is often a necessary prerequisite to establishing and using a covert channel long term.

We discuss covert channel communications methods ranging from embedded channels to disguised protocols. What follows is a review of available covert shell tools. The underground, historical evolution of covert shells is reviewed, focusing on selected, available tools, which range from simple encapsulation methods to …

Parallel Phylogenetic Inference, Mark J. Clement, David Mclaughlin, Quinn O. Snell, Michael Whiting

Faculty Publications

Recent advances in DNA sequencing technology have created large data sets upon which phylogenetic inference can be performed. However, current research is limited by the prohibitive time necessary to perform tree search on even a reasonably sized data set. Some parallel algorithms have been developed but the biological research community does not use them because they don’t trust the results from newly developed parallel software. This paper presents a new phylogenetic algorithm that allows existing, trusted phylogenetic software packages to be executed in parallel using the DOGMA parallel processing system. The results presented here indicate that data sets that currently …

Wright State University College Of Engineering And Computer Science Bits And Pcs Newsletter, Volume 17, Number 3, November 2000, College Of Engineering And Computer Science, Wright State University

BITs and PCs Newsletter

A ten page newsletter created by the Wright State University College of Engineering and Computer Science that addresses the current affairs of the college.

A Survey Of Context-Aware Mobile Computing Research, Guanling Chen, David Kotz

Computer Science Technical Reports

Context-aware computing is a mobile computing paradigm in which applications can discover and take advantage of contextual information (such as user location, time of day, nearby people and devices, and user activity). Since it was proposed about a decade ago, many researchers have studied this topic and built several context-aware applications to demonstrate the usefulness of this new technology. Context-aware applications (or the system infrastructure to support them), however, have never been widely available to everyday users. In this survey of research on context-aware systems and applications, we looked in depth at the types of context used and models of …

Traffic Conditioner Design For Assured Forwarding In Differentiated Services Network, Ahsan Habib, Sonja Fahmy, Bharat Bhargava

Department of Computer Science Technical Reports

No abstract provided.

Performance Enhancement By Memory Reduction, Yonghong Song, Rong Xu, Cheng Wang, Zhiyuan Li

Department of Computer Science Technical Reports

No abstract provided.

Gasturbnlab Simulation Of Instability In A Gas Turbine, A. C. Catlin, S. Fleeter, Elias N. Houstis, John R. Rice, C. Zhou

Department of Computer Science Technical Reports

No abstract provided.

The Computational Complexity Of N-K Fitness Functions, Alden H. Wright, Richard K. Thompson, Jian Zhang

Computer Science Faculty Publications

N-K fitness landscapes have been widely used as examples and test functions in the field of evolutionary computation. Thus, the computational complexity of these landscapes as optimization problems is of interest. We investigate the computational complexity of the problem of optimizing the N-K fitness functions and related fitness functions. We give an algorithm to optimize adjacent-model N-K fitness functions which is polynomial in N. We show that the decision problem corresponding to optimizing random-model N-K fitness functions is NP-complete for K > 1 and is polynomial for K = 1. If the restriction that the ith component function depends …

Using 'Drop-Biasing' To Stabilize The Occupancy Of Random-Drop Queues With Tcp Traffic, Archan Misra, Teunis Ott, John Baras

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The paper describes how the use of ‘drop-biasing’, a technique to control the distribution of the gap between consecutive packet losses in random drop queues (such as RED) can be used to reduce the variability of the queue occupancy with TCP traffic. Reducing the variance of the queue occupancy reduces delay jitter for buffered packets, as well as decreases the likelihood of buffer underflow. We find that modifying the packet drop probabilities to ensure a minimum separation between consecutive packet drops serves to decrease the variability in the queue occupancy. This is really achieved as a result of the increased …

Automated Systematic Testing For Constraint-Based Interactive Services, Patrice Godefroid, Lalita Jategaonkar Jagadeesan, Radha Jagadeesan, Konstantin Laufer

Computer Science: Faculty Publications and Other Works

Constraint-based languages can express in a concise way the complex logic of a new generation of interactive services for applications such as banking or stock trading, that must support multiple types of interfaces for accessing the same data. These include automatic speech-recognition interfaces where inputs may be provided in any order by users of the service. We study in this paper how to systematically test event-driven applications developed using such languages. We show how such applications can be tested automatically, without the need for any manually-written test cases, and effi- ciently, by taking advantage of their capability of taking unordered …

Toward Automated Abstraction For Protocols On Branching Networks, Michael D. Jones, Ganesh Gopalakrishnan

Faculty Publications

We have used various manual abstraction techniques to formally verify a transaction ordering property for an IO protocol over bus/bridge networks. In the context of network protocol verification, an abstraction is needed to reduce the unbounded number of network configurations to a small number of representative networks that can be checked using algorithmic methods. The manually derived abstraction was both brittle and difficult to validate. In this report, we discuss the need for abstraction techniques in the formal verification of protocols over networks and present our recent efforts to create an automatic abstraction technique for network protocols using predicate abstraction …

Extensible Mpeg-4 Textual Format (Xmt), Michelle Kim, Steve Wood, Lai-Tee Cheok

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper describes the Extensible MPEG-4 Textual format (XMT), a framework for representing MPEG-4 scene description using a textual syntax. The XMT allows the content authors to exchange their content with other authors, tools or service providers, and facilitates interoperability with both the X3D, developed by the Web3D consortium, and the Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language (SM1L) from the W3C consortium.

Information Retrieval And Mining In High Dimensional Databases, Xiong Wang

Dissertations

This dissertation is composed of two parts. In the first part, we present a framework for finding information (more precisely, active patterns) in three dimensional (3D) graphs. Each node in a graph is an undecoraposable or atomic unit and has a label. Edges are links between the atomic units. Patterns are rigid substructures that may occur in a graph after allowing for an arbitrary number of whole-structure rotations and translations as well as a small number (specified by the user) of edit operations in the patterns or in the graph. (When a pattern appears in a graph only after the …

Immaccs: An Experimental Multi-Agent C2 System, Jens G. Pohl, Anthony A. Wood, Kym Jason Pohl

Collaborative Agent Design (CAD) Research Center

The Integrated Marine Multi-Agent Command and Control System (IMMACCS) is a multi-agent, distributed software system, designed to provide a Common Tactical Picture (CTP) with integrated and meaningful decision-support facilities to authorized operators at any access node. IMMACCS has been implemented as a three-tier architecture that distinguishes between information, logic and presentation. It utilizes an object-serving communication facility with subscription and multi-casting capabilities that is based on the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA). With an emphasis on application, IMMACCS was designed and implemented in concert with its military users as an integral component of experiments conceived by the Marine Corps …

Semi-Regular Mesh Extraction From Volumes, Z. J. Wood, M. Desbrun, P. Schroder, D. Breen

Computer Science and Software Engineering

We present a novel method to extract iso-surfaces from distance volumes. It generates high quality semi-regular multiresolution meshes of arbitrary topology. Our technique proceeds in two stages. First, a very coarse mesh with guaranteed topology is extracted. Subsequently an iterative multi-scale force-based solver refines the initial mesh into a semi-regular mesh with geometrically adaptive sampling rate and good aspect ratio triangles. The coarse mesh extraction is performed using a new approach we call surface wavefront propagation. A set of discrete iso-distance ribbons are rapidly built and connected while respecting the topology of the iso-surface implied by the data. Subsequent multi-scale …