Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Icodes (Integrated Computerized Deployment System) Technical And Operational Description, Cesar Diaz, Billy Waiters, Jerry Pickard, Jason Naylor, Steven Gollery, Patrick Mcgraw, Michael Huffman, John Fanshier, Matt Parrott, Steve O'Driscoll-Packer, Boone Pendergrast, Evan Sylvester, Jens Pohl

Collaborative Agent Design (CAD) Research Center

Over the past decade CDM Technologies, Inc. (CDM) in conjunction with the Collaborative Agent Design Research Center (CADRC) at California Polytechnic State University (Cal Poly) in San Luis Obispo, has developed a suite of information-centric software tools in support of military deployment and distribution processes. All of these tools feature agents that are capable of reasoning about data in the context provided by an internal information model. Together they represent an evolving suite of adaptive Knowledge Management Enterprise Services (KMES) that can be readily configured into a net-centric planning and decision-support toolset for a particular application domain.

As a set …

A Decentralized Reinforcement Learning Controller For Collaborative Driving, Luke Ng, Christopher M. Clark, Jan P. Huissoon

Computer Science and Software Engineering

Research in the collaborative driving domain strives to create control systems that coordinate the motion of multiple vehicles in order to navigate traffic both efficiently and safely. In this paper a novel individual vehicle controller based on reinforcement learning is introduced. This controller is capable of both lateral and longitudinal control while driving in a multi-vehicle platoon. The design and development of this controller is discussed in detail and simulation results showing learning progress and performance are presented.

Complete And Scalable Multi-Robot Planning In Tunnel Environments, Mike Peasgood, John Mcphee, Christopher M. Clark

Computer Science and Software Engineering

This paper addresses the challenging problem of finding collision-free trajectories for many robots moving to individual goals within a common environment. Most popular algorithms for multi-robot planning manage the complexity of the problem by planning trajectories for robots sequentially; such decoupled methods may fail to find a solution even if one exists. In contrast, this paper describes a multi-phase approach to the planning problem that guarantees a solution by creating and maintaining obstacle-free paths through the environment as required for each robot to reach its goal. Using a topological graph and spanning tree representation of a tunnel or corridor environment, …

Development Of A Microscopic Traffic Simulator For Inter-Vehicle Communication Application Research, Keith Yu Kit Leung, Thanh-Son Dao, Christopher M. Clark, Jan Paul Huissoon

Computer Science and Software Engineering

This paper describes the development of a microscopic traffic simulator purposely designed for ITS researchers studying inter-vehicle communication (IVC) concepts and applications in large traffic networks. The simulator can represent real life vehicles within the simulation by using data from vehicle Global Positioning System (GPS) receivers, enabling validation of theories with real vehicle data. The software is developed on top of the existing microscopic traffic simulator VISSIM with the added flexibility of modelling and efficiently handling communication between large numbers of vehicles. This along with the software architecture was discussed in detail.

Co-Operative Lane-Level Positioning Using Markov Localization, Thanh-Son Dao, Keith Yu Kit Leung, Christopher M. Clark, Jan Paul Huissoon

Computer Science and Software Engineering

The majority of today's navigation techniques for intelligent transportation systems use Global Positioning Systems (GPS) that can provide position information with bounded errors. However, because of the low accuracy and multi-path problem, it is challenging to determine a vehicle's position at lane level. With Markov-based approach based on sharing information among a group of vehicles that are traveling close to each other, the lane positions of vehicles can be found. The algorithm shows its effectiveness in both simulations and experiments with real data.

Jigsaw: Solving The Puzzle Of Enterprise 802.11 Analysis, Yu-Chung Cheng, John M. Bellardo, Péter Benkö, Alex C. Snoeren, Geoffrey M. Voelker, Stefan Savage

Computer Science and Software Engineering

The combination of unlicensed spectrum, cheap wireless interfaces and the inherent convenience of untethered computing have made 802.11 based networks ubiquitous in the enterprise. Modern universities, corporate campuses and government offices routinely de-ploy scores of access points to blanket their sites with wireless Internet access. However, while the fine-grained behavior of the 802.11 protocol itself has been well studied, our understanding of how large 802.11 networks behave in their full empirical complex-ity is surprisingly limited. In this paper, we present a system called Jigsaw that uses multiple monitors to provide a single unified view of all physical, link, network and …

Good Benchmarks Are Hard To Find: Toward The Benchmark For Information Retrieval Applications In Software Engineering, Alex Dekhtyar, Jane Huffman Hayes

Computer Science and Software Engineering

Seven to eight years ago, the number of applications of Information Retrieval (IR) methods in Software Engineering was close to zero. These days, IR and text mining methods are accepted approaches to analysis of textual artifacts generated during the software lifcycle. The incentive to try IR methods in such analysis is strong: the field comes with a reputation for proven industrial and academic success, and some important Software Engineering problems related to textual artifacts, can be translated into an instance of a standard IR problem in a reasonably straightforward manner.

In this position paper, we observe that part of the …

Pre-Conference Proceedings Of The Focus Symposium On Advances In Intelligent Software Systems, Collaborative Agent Design Research Center

Collaborative Agent Design (CAD) Research Center

A very powerful new type of information systems technology is rapidly emerging, driven by government and commercial needs for expert decision-support and knowledge management. One very apparent result of this technology is increasingly intelligent software systems. Computer programs with collaborative agents that are capable of automatically reasoning about data and the dynamic changes in data that occur in real world decision-making situations are already in use by the military and are now transitioning to the commercial world.

Tabu Search For Optimization Of Military Supply Distribution, Ben Weber, Brett Bojduj, Jens G. Pohl

Collaborative Agent Design (CAD) Research Center

The dynamic and non-hierarchical nature of the military domain presents a challenge for traditional supply chain optimization. Flow networks and simulation techniques have been applied to the military distribution problem, but are unable to provide time-definite delivery to customers. Recently, optimization approaches have been independently applied towards strategic and operational levels of planning. However, decomposing military distribution into separate problems forces optimization techniques to utilize imprecise data. The size of the military distribution problem has prevented optimization techniques from providing end-to-end planning capabilities. This paper presents a Tabu Search algorithm for simultaneously solving strategic and operational levels of planning. The …

Elements Of Human Decision-Making, Jens G. Pohl

Collaborative Agent Design (CAD) Research Center

The purpose of this paper is to present some understandings of the human problem-solving activity that we have gained in the Collaborative Agent Design Research Center (CADRC) over the past two decades. Since we feel strongly that the human decision-maker should be an integral component of any computer-based decision-support system, it follows that we would have endeavored to incorporate many of the elements that appear to be important to the user in the design of these systems. The complexity of the human cognitive system is evidenced by the large body of literature that describes problem-solving behavior and the relatively fewer …

Transway®: Planning With The Tabu Search Algorithm, Joshua Nibecker, Dennis Taylor, Robert Chambers, Harmony Larsen, Ken Cudworth, Clay Warren, Mark Porczak, Jens G. Pohl

Collaborative Agent Design (CAD) Research Center

Military deployment and distribution responsibilities call for intelligent collaborative tools in support of strategic and operational planning functions involving the sustainment and movement of military forces. The sustainment requirement is generated at the operational level and is dynamic. It is composed of shifting priorities responding to changes in commander’s intent and changes in the operational situation.

The TRANSWAY software application is designed as a set of intelligent collaborative tools supporting operators performing planning and re-planning tasks in a dynamically changing decision-making environment. TRANSWAY includes several agents with strategic and operational planning and re-planning capabilities. The principal agent is based on …

A Genetic Algorithm Approach To Solve For Multiple Solutions Of Inverse Kinematics Using Adaptive Niching And Clustering, Saleh Tabandeh, Christopher M. Clark, William Melek

Computer Science and Software Engineering

Inverse kinematics is a nonlinear problem that may have multiple solutions. A Genetic Algorithm(GA) for solving the inverse kinematics of a serial robotic manipulator is presented. The algorithm is capable of finding multiple solutions of the inverse kinematics through niching methods. Despite the fact that the number and position of solutions in the search space depends on the the position and orientation of the end-effector as well as the configuration of the robot, the number of GA parameters that must be set by a user are limited to a minimum through the use of an adaptive niching method. The only …

Factored Mdp Elicitation And Plan Display, Krol Kevin Mathias, Casey Lengacher, Derek Williams, Austin Cornett, Alex Dekhtyar, Judy Goldsmith

Computer Science and Software Engineering

The software suite we will demonstrate at AAAI ’06 was designed around planning with factored Markov decision processes (MDPs). It is a user-friendly suite that facilitates domain elicitation, preference elicitation, planning, and MDP policy display. The demo will concentrate on user interactions for domain experts and those for whom plans are made.

When Domains Require Modeling Adaptations, Krol Kevin Mathias, Cynthia Isenhour, Alex Dekhtyar, Judy Goldsmtih, Beth Goldstein

Computer Science and Software Engineering

The project described in this paper originated with an observation by the AI group at the University of Kentucky, that, individually, stochastic planning and constraint satisfaction are well-studied topics that resulted in efficient software, but stochastic planning in the presence of constraints on the domains and actions is an open area of investigation.

We were interested in an advising scenario, and chose the US social welfare system, a.k.a. “Welfare to Work” as our test domain. This required computer scientists to learn more than expected about social science as well as the local welfare system. This paper discusses the discipline specific …

Geotorrent: Optimizing Gis Web Services For Interactive Educational Use, Jeffrey A. Bergamini, Michael Haungs

Computer Science and Software Engineering

Large online geospatial datasets for use with GIS are increasingly available and have many uses, including study in numerous academic and scientific fields. Access to this data in real time for pedagogical purposes would be immensely useful to educators. The academic lab environment presents unique requirements for data access: Its exploratory, multiplicative, and connective nature provides challenges and opportunities that have gone unexplored. Currently, these challenges make interactive educational use impractical. Also, student training requirements have been a noted problem. We present “GeoTorrent”, a system that enables such use for K-20 educational institutions. GeoTorrent provides a client-side proxy server that …

Autonomous Fish Tracking By Rov Using Monocular Camera, Jun Zhou, Christopher M. Clark

Computer Science and Software Engineering

This paper concerns the autonomous tracking of fish using a Remotely Operated Vehicle (ROV) equipped with a single camera. An efficient image processing algorithm is presented that enables pose estimation of a particular species of fish - a Large Mouth Bass. The algorithm uses a series of filters including the Gabor filter for texture, projection segmentation, and geometrical shape feature extraction to find the fishes distinctive dark lines that mark the body and tail. Feature based scaling then produces the position and orientation of the fish relative to the ROV. By implementing this algorithm on each frame of a series …

Multihierarchical Xquery For Document-Centric Xml, Ionut E. Iacob, Alex Dekhtyar

Computer Science and Software Engineering

Text has a non-hierarchical structure. Not surprisingly, searching for information in the content of a document often yields results that overlap the structure within the document. It is often of a great interest to relate such results to the embedded document structure. In this work we present an extension of the XQuery language over multihierarchical document-centric XML documents. We illustrate the benefits of using multihierarchical XQuery for text-and-structure searches in document-centric XML documents More specifically, multihierarchical XQuery allows representing relationships between textsearch results and document structure even for cases wheresuch search results overlap markup boundaries and even incases when only …

Structured Queries For Semistructured Probabilistic Data, Alex Dekhtyar, Krol Kevin Mathias, Praveen Gutti

Computer Science and Software Engineering

We present SPOQL, a structured query language for Semistructured Probabilistic Object (SPO) model [4]. The original querylanguage—SP-Algebra [4], has traditional limitations like terse functional notation and unfamiliarity to application programmers. SPOQL alleviates these problems by providing familiar SQL-like declarative syntax. We show that parsing SPOQL queries is a more involving task than parsing SQL queries. We also present an eagerevaluation algorithm for SPOQL queries

Xml Views For Electronic Editions, Ionut E. Iacob, Alex Dekhtyar

Computer Science and Software Engineering

In this paper we discuss the implementation of user-defined views over multihierarchical document-centric XML documents.

Modeling And Simulation Of The Videoray Pro Iii Underwater Vehicle, Wei Wang, Christopher M. Clark

Computer Science and Software Engineering

Accurate modeling and simulation of underwater vehicles is essential for autonomous control. In this paper, we present a dynamic model of the VideoRay Pro III microROV, in which the hydrodynamic derivatives are determined both theoretically and experimentally, based on the assumption that the motions in different directions are decoupled. The experiments show that this assumption is reasonable within operating conditions of the VideoRay Pro III. A computer simulation with 3D graphics is also developed to help user to visualize the vehicle's motion.

Houston, We Have A Success Story: Technology Transfer At The Nasa Iv&V Facility, Ken Mcgill, Wes Deadrick, Jane Huffman Hayes, Alex Dekhtyar

Computer Science and Software Engineering

This paper details, from the point of view of researchers and from the point of view of program managers, the development of and technology transfer from NASA’s research program in Independent Verification and Validation (IV&V).

On The Influence Of Test-Driven Development On Software Design, David S. Janzen, Hossein Saiedian

Computer Science and Software Engineering

Test-driven development (TDD) is an agile software development strategy that addresses both design and testing. This paper describes a controlled experiment that examines the effects of TDD on internal software design quality. The experiment was conducted with undergraduate students in a software engineering course. Students in three groups completed semester-long programming projects using either an iterative Test-First (TDD), iterative Test-Last, or linear Test-Last approach. Results from this study indicate that TDD can be an effective software design approach improving both code-centric aspects such as object decomposition, test coverage, and external quality, and developer-centric aspects including productivity and confidence. In addition, …

Will Johnny/Joanie Make A Good Software Engineer?: Are Course Grades Showing The Whole Picture?, Jane Huffman Hayes, Alex Dekhtyar, Ashlee Holbrook, Olga Dekhtyar, Senthil Sundaram

Computer Science and Software Engineering

Predicting future success of students as software engineers is an open research area. We posit that current grading means do not capture all the information that may predict whether students will become good software engineers. We use one such piece of information, traceability of project artifacts, to illustrate our argument. Traceability has been shown to be an indicator of software project quality in industry. We present the results of a case study of a University of Waterloo graduate-level software engineering course where traceability was examined as well as course grades (such as mid-term, project grade, etc.). We found no correlation …

On Potential Validity Of Document-Centric Xml Documents, Ionut E. Iacob, Alex Dekhtyar, Michael I. Dekhtyar

Computer Science and Software Engineering

Document-centric XML document creation is a process of marking up textual content rather than typing text in a predefined structure. It turns out that, although the final document has to be valid with respect to the DTD/Schema used for the encoding, the "in-progress" document is almost never valid. At the same time, it is important to ensure that at each moment of time, the editor is working with an XML document that can be enriched with further markup to become valid. In this paper we explain the notion of potential validity of XML documents, which allows us to distinguish between …

Post Register Allocation Spill Code Optimization, Christopher Lupo, Kent Wilken

Computer Science and Software Engineering

A highly optimized register allocator should provide an efficient placement of save/restore code for procedures that contain calls. This paper presents a new approach to placing callee-saved save and restore instructions that generalizes Chow's shrink-wrapping technique (Chow 1988). An efficient, profile-guided, hierarchical spill code placement algorithm is used to analyze the structure of a procedure to calculate the minimum dynamic execution count locations to place callee-saved save and restore code. The algorithm is implemented in the Gnu Compiler Collection and has been tested on the SPEC CPU2000 Integer Benchmark suite. Results show that the technique reduces the number of dynamic …

Discrete Shells Origami, Rob Burgoon, Zoë J. Wood, Eitan Grinspun

Computer Science and Software Engineering

We introduce a way of simulating the creation of simple Origami (paper folding). The Origami is created in a thin shell simulation that realistically models the behavior and physical properties of paper. We demonstrate how to fold and crease the simulated paper wherever the user desires. This work employs cutting-edge advances in the field of discrete shell modeling to meet the challenge of simulating Origami. We found that the discrete shell model is capable of creating simple Origami that does not involve paper to paper collisions. For more advanced origami, however, some kind of collision detection and resolution scheme is …

Perspective Models As A Means For Achieving True Representational Accuracy, Kym Jason Pohl

Collaborative Agent Design (CAD) Research Center

Accurate and expressive representation of the subject matter over which a context-oriented, decision-support system operates is fundamental to the effectiveness and longevity of the resulting solution. Often taking the form of an ontology, such extensive representational models, by their very nature, are rich in both relationships and fine-grained objects. It is, however, these two strengths that can significantly increase complexity for its users in addition to adversely affecting system performance. Further, due to the multitude of compartmentalized facets (i.e., populations of distinct, reasoning agents) inherent in such software solutions, it is important to recognize that a single-minded omniscient set of …

Test-Driven Learning: Intrinsic Integration Of Testing Into The Cs/Se Curriculum, David S. Janzen, Hossein Saiedian

Computer Science and Software Engineering

Test-driven learning (TDL) is an approach to teaching computer programming that involves introducing and exploring new concepts through automated unit tests. TDL offers the potential of teaching testing for free, of improving programmer comprehension and ability, and of improving software quality both in terms of design quality and reduced defect density.This paper introduces test-driven learning as a pedagogical tool. It will provide examples of how TDL can be incorporated at multiple levels in computer science and software engineering curriculum for beginning through professional programmers. In addition, the relationships between TDL and test-driven development will be explored.Initial evidence indicates that TDL …

Support For Xml Markup Of Image-Based Electronic Editions, Alex Dekhtyar, Ionut E. Iacob, Jerzy W. Jaromczyk, Kevin Kiernan, Neil Moore, Dorothy Carr Porter

Computer Science and Software Engineering

Image-based electronic editions enable researchers to view and study in an electronic environment historical manuscript images intricately linked to edition, transcript, glossary and apparatus files. Building image-based electronic editions poses a two-fold challenge. For humanities scholars, it is important to be able to use image and text to successfully encode the desired features of the manuscripts. Computer Scientists must find mechanisms for representing markup in its association both with the images, text and other auxiliary files and for making the representation available for efficient querying. This paper addresses the architecture of one such solution, that uses efficient data structures to …

Energetically Optimal Travel Across Terrain: Visualizations And A New Metric Of Geographic Distance With Archaeological Applications, Brian M. Wood, Zoë J. Wood

Computer Science and Software Engineering

We present a visualization and computation tool for modeling the caloric cost of pedestrian travel across three dimensional terrains. This tool is being used in ongoing archaeological research that analyzes how costs of locomotion affect the spatial distribution of trails and artifacts across archaeological landscapes. Throughout human history, traveling by foot has been the most common form of transportation, and therefore analyses of pedestrian travel costs are important for understanding prehistoric patterns of resource acquisition, migration, trade, and political interaction. Traditionally, archaeologists have measured geographic proximity based on "as the crow flies" distance. We propose new methods for terrain visualization …