Digital Commons Network^™

Tracking The Trochoid On Safari, Andrew Simoson

ACMS Conference Proceedings 1999

While on sabbatical in Dar es Salaam in 1997–98, I was tasked to be the department’s seminar director and discovered that a dearth of speakers roam about in east Africa; so I opted to set up a lecture tour for myself to include Zambia, Zimbabwe, and Botswana as well as Tanzania—and spoke about the envelope of curves generated by a series of line segments obtained when two runners attached by an ideal bungee cord (the line segments) proceed about a circular track. Herein we describe life in east Africa and show that those envelopes are trochoids.

The Exploration Of Artificial Intelligence Through The Analysis And Design Of Expert Systems, Avis R. Calvert

Electronic Dissertations and Theses

Expert systems are a rapidly developing area of research. A sub-area of artificial intelligence, the success of expert systems depends heavily on an expert of a particular subject matter and that expert's ability to make analytical inferences based upon the human capacity to reason and deduce. Because the broad and ultimate goal of artificial intelligence is to develop computers capable of emulating human behavioral and psychoanalytical patterns, there is much to discover about the learning component of a computer. This thesis focuses on the development and the complexity of expert systems. Included, is a brief history of expert systems, a …

An Investigation Into The Use Of The Virtual Reality Modelling Language (Vrml) As A Means Of Distribution Virtual Reality Tourist Information Across The World Wide Web, Hugh Mcatamney, Ciaran Mcdonnell

Conference papers

The purpose of the work described was to investigate the use of the Virtual Reality Modelling Language (VRML) as a tool to distribute tourist information across the web. This was done by the creation of a web site containing two Virtual Reality models of tourist interest. These were then valuated using a number of techniques both online and offline. This paper describes the methods used to create and evaluate these models as well as giving a overview of some of the results obtained.

Asymptotic Behavior Of The Height In A Digital Search Tree And The Longest Phrase Of The Lempel-Ziv Scheme, Charles Knessl, Wojciech Szpankowski

Department of Computer Science Technical Reports

No abstract provided.

An Agent-Based Design For Problem Solving Environments, Dan C. Marinescu

Department of Computer Science Technical Reports

No abstract provided.

Biological Metaphors In He Design Of Complex Software Systems, Dan C. Marinescu, Ladislau Bölöni

Department of Computer Science Technical Reports

No abstract provided.

Two Approaches To Critical Path Scheduling For A Heterogeneous Environment, Guangxia Liu

Computer Science Theses & Dissertations

Advances in computing and networking technologies are making large scale distributed heterogeneous computing a reality. Multi-Disciplinary Optimization (MDO) is a class of applications that is being addressed under this paradigm. It consists of multiple heterogeneous modules interacting with each other to solve an overall design problem. An efficient implementation of such an application requires scheduling heterogeneous modules (with different computing and disk 1/0 requirements) on a heterogeneous set of resources (with different CPU, memory, disk IO specifications).

Given a set of tasks and a set of resources, an optimal schedule of the tasks on the resources is very hard to …

Notepals: Lightweight Note Sharing By The Group, For The Group, Richard C. Davis, James A. Landay, Victor Chen, Jonathan Huang, Rebecca B. Lee, Francis Li, James Lin, Charles B. Morrey, Morgan N. Price, Bill N. Schilit

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

NotePals is a lightweight note sharing system that gives group members easy access to each others experiences through their personal notes. The system allows notes taken by group members in any context to be uploaded to a shared repository. Group members view these notes with browsers that allow them to retrieve all notes taken in a given context or to access notes from other related notes or documents. This is possible because NotePals records the context in which each note is created (e.g., its author, subject, and creation time). The system is lightweight because it fits easily into group members …

The Open Source Revolution: Transforming The Software Industry With Help From The Government, Mitchell L. Stoltz

Pomona Senior Theses

A new method for making software is stealthily gaining ground in the computer industry, offering a promise of better, cheaper software and the empowerment of the user. The open source movement could revolutionize the software industry...if it succeeds. Open source means software that you are allowed to copy, modify, and give to friends. Source code , the lists of instructions which tell computers how to run, is readily available, allowing you to look inside the workings of a program and change it to suit your needs. A group of programmers, companies, users, and activists have gathered in support of this …

Designing An Integrated Environment For Artificial Intelligence, Andrew B. Ritger '99

Honors Projects

The SHELLEY RESEARCH GROUP (part of the Illinois Wesleyan Intelligence Network on Knowledge -IWINK) has been in existence for several years, and has benefited immensely from various student contributors who have added such components as robotic arm control, cross platform networking, an artificially intelligent tic-tac-toe player, and an interactive teaching tool demonstrating the functionality of artificial neural networks. What is lacking, however, amidst these undergraduate contributions to the SHELLEY Project, is an effective means of integrating existing components into a single cohesive functional unit, let alone any easy means of making further contributions within a simple unified context. The focus …

How Proteins Fold, Flex, And Bind Other Molecules, Leslie A. Kuhn, Volker Schnecke, Michael L. Raymer, Paul C. Sanschagrin

Kno.e.sis Publications

No abstract provided.

Shout With The Largest Mob : Toward A Model For Primitive Communication In Mobile Automata, Rebecca A. Weber

Honors Theses

We consider the problem of simulating communication between independent, autonomous agents, or machines, using only local rules with no global control over the agents' behavior. First, we construct an algorithm by which the machines will avoid collisions with each other and with boundaries or obstacles. Noting that collision avoidance alone will not result in higher-level behavior, and with the goal of creating agents which would self-organize, we begin to develop a signalling system by which agents can communicate. This leads to a new method for modeling agent motion in the plane. Throughout, we are motivated by possible linkages between our …

Proceedings Of The 1999 Onr Decision-Support Workshop Series: A Decision-Making Tools Workshop, Collaborative Agent Design Research Center

Collaborative Agent Design (CAD) Research Center

The rationale of the Workshop rests on some very simple observations. It is well known that every situation encountered by individuals and organizations demands an appropriate response. The choice of such a response from among a multitude of options is the decision-making process. Simple situations that give rise to a small number of options allow the decision maker to decide on a course of action without great effort. This state of affairs changes dramatically when the situations are complex and involve a large number of factors. In this case, an extensive field of options is engendered that makes it impossible …

Collaborative Decision-Support And The Human-Machine Relationship, Jens G. Pohl

Collaborative Agent Design (CAD) Research Center

Human beings are inquisitive creatures who seek explanations for all that they observe and experience in their living environment. While this quest for understanding is central to our success in adapting to a changing environment, it is also a major cause of our willingness to accept partial understandings and superficial explanations when the degree of complexity of the problem situation confounds our current cognitive capabilities. In other words, a superficial or partial explanation is considered better than no explanation at all. As flawed as this approach may be, it has helped us to solve difficult problems in stages. By first …

An Interview With Sadie Plant, Switch Staffs

SWITCH

The interview is conducted with Sadie Plant in a variety of subjects. Plant discusses the topic of centralized and distributed organizational structures. Practical implementation of organizations will tend to have elements of both centralized and distributed structures. Additionally, it is beneficial to mainstream organizations to incorporate or recuperate activist or grassroots distributed elements in order to bring in new energies, thoughts, and ideas. The discussion then shifts to drugs and information control. Plant argues that drugs and information have similar characteristics in that both have the ability to change perception and thoughts. The tools that governments use to control and …

Evaluation Of Real-Time Fiber Communications For Parallel Collective Operations, Amy Apon, Parvathi Rajagopal

Publications

Real-Time Fiber Communications (RTFC) is a gigabit speed network that has been designed for damage tolerant local area networks. In addition to its damage tolerant characteristics, it has several features that make it attractive as a possible interconnection technology for parallel applications in a cluster of workstations. These characteristics include support for broadcast and multicast messaging, memory cache in the network interface card, and support for very fine grain writes to the network cache. Broadcast data is captured in network cache of all workstations in the network providing a distributed shared memory capability. In this paper, RTFC is introduced. The …

The Rate-Based Execution Model, Kevin Jeffay, Steve Goddard

School of Computing: Technical Reports

We present a new task model for the real-time execution of event-driven tasks in which no a priori characterization of the actual arrival rates of events is known; only the expected arrival rates of events is known. We call this new task model rate-based execution (RBE), and it is a generalization of the common sporadic task model. The RBE model is motivated naturally by distributed multimedia and digital signal processing applications.
We identify necessary and sufficient conditions for determining the feasibility of an RBE task set, and an optimal scheduling algorithm (based on preemptive earliest-deadline-first (EDF) scheduling) for scheduling the …

Graphical Display And Data Structure For Virtual Prototyping, David William Manry

Doctoral Dissertations

One of the goals of engineering firms is to bring better products to market faster. Although concurrent engineering can aid in this endeavor, it requires that all areas of an organization work simultaneously. Thus, current product data must be accessible to everyone.

Virtual prototyping allows this simultaneous exchange of information. Virtual prototyping not only replaces the physical model in product development with a virtual model, but also it goes further by allowing data associated with each part of the model to be accessed. This data is not limited to just geometric properties but could contain other quantifiable properties, such as …

Efficiency Of Distributed Priority Queues In Parallel Adaptive Integration, Rodger Zanny

Masters Theses

The adaptive integration algorithm is· effective in numerically solving integration problems. It is able to focus the application of integration rules on the portion of the integration region where the integrand is the least well-behaved. Parallel implementations must use dynamic load balancing or performance suffers.

Dynamic local load-balancing techniques allow each processor to maintain its own pool of work in a local priority queue and balance the workload based on local criteria. However, the use of locally controlled priority queues is known to be inefficient (in terms of the number of integration rule applications needed to reach an answer) as …

The Dynamics Of Cyberspace: Examining And Modelling Online Social Structure, Brian S. Butler '89

Doctoral Dissertations

It has been proposed that online social structures represent new forms of organizing which are fundamentally different from traditional social structures. However, while there is a growing body of empirical research that considers behavioral aspects of online activity, research on online social structure structural remains largely anecdotal. This work consists of three papers that combine previous studies of traditional social structures, empirical analysis of longitudinal data from a sample of Internet listservs, and computational modeling to examine the dynamics of social structure development in networked environments.

The first paper (Title: When is a Group not a Group: An Empirical Examination …

The Design Of Software Agents For A Network Of Pde Solvers, Panagiota Tsompanoupoulou, Ladislau Bölöni, Dan C. Marinescu, John R. Rice

Department of Computer Science Technical Reports

No abstract provided.

Automated Estimation Of Relaxation Parameters For Interface Relaxation, John R. Rice, P. Tsompanopoulou, E. Vavalis

Department of Computer Science Technical Reports

No abstract provided.

Limit Laws For Heights In Generalized Tries And Patricia Tries, Charles Knessl, Wojciech Szpankowski

Department of Computer Science Technical Reports

No abstract provided.

Pythia-Ii: A Knowledge/Data Base System For Testing And Recommending Scientific, Elias N. Houstis, Vassilios S. Verykios, Ann C. Caitlin, Naren Ramakrishnan, John R. Rice

Department of Computer Science Technical Reports

No abstract provided.

Information Modeling And Method Engineering: A Psychological Perspective, Keng Siau

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Information modeling is the cornerstone of information systems analysis and design. Information models, the products of information modeling, not only provide the abstractions required to facilitate communication between the analysts and end users, but they also provide a formal basis for developing tools and techniques used in information systems development. The process of designing, constructing, and adapting information modeling methods for information systems development is known as method engineering. Despite the pivotal role of modeling methods in successful information systems development, most modeling methods are designed based on common sense and intuition of the method designers with little or no …

Monitoring Distributed Processes With Intelligent Agents, Franz J. Kurfess, Klaus Holthaus, Dhaval P. Shah, Felip Miralles

Computer Science and Software Engineering

This paper describes a platform-independent application for the monitoring of distributed applications. The tool is intended for system administrators to properly distribute the components of a distributed application onto particular machines. An essential part of this tool is based on intelligent mobile agent technology used to access the target systems. Although a full implementation turned out to be infeasible due to security considerations, the implementation and experimentation indicate the suitability of intelligent agents technology for such purposes.

Wright State University College Of Engineering And Computer Science Bits And Pcs Newsletter, Volume 15, Number 3, March 1999, 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.

Data Integration By Describing Sources With Constraint Databases, Xun Cheng, Guozhu Dong, Tzekwan Lau, Jianwen Su

Kno.e.sis Publications

We develop a data integration approach for the efficient evaluation of queries over autonomous source databases. The approach is based on some novel applications and extensions of constraint database techniques. We assume the existence of a global database schema. The contents of each data source are described using a set of constraint tuples over the global schema; each such tuple indicates possible contributions from the source. The “source description catalog” (SDC) of a global relation consists of its associated constraint tuples. Such a method of description is advantageous since it is flexible to add new sources and to modify existing …

Efficient Mining Of Partial Periodic Patterns In Time Series Database, Jiawei Han, Guozhu Dong, Yiwen Yin

Kno.e.sis Publications

Partial periodicity search, i.e., search for partial periodic patterns in time-series databases, is an interesting data mining problem. Previous studies on periodicity search mainly consider finding full periodic patterns, where every point in time contributes (precisely or approximately) to the periodicity. However, partial periodicity is very common in practice since it is more likely that only some of the time episodes may exhibit periodic patterns.

We present several algorithms for efficient mining of partial periodic patterns, by exploring some interesting properties related to partial periodicity, such as the Apriori property and the max-subpattern hit set property, and by shared mining …

Analysis Of Usaf Battlelabs' Communication Infrastructure Over Various Protocols, Rocky A. Favorito, David M. Mcillece

Theses and Dissertations

As a result of the doctrines exposed in the Air Force's "Global Engagement: A Vision for the 21st Century Air Force," the concept of a "Battlelab" was devised to support and develop the key warfighting capabilities needed in the next century. Although geographically separated, these labs must have the capability to exchange information with each other in a "Virtual Battlelab Environment" (VBE). Although many types of data will be exchanged, only variable-bit-rate (VBR) video and distributed interactive simulation (DIS) traffic are modeled in the VBE. The research described in this thesis utilizes a systems engineering approach to investigate the performance …