Digital Commons Network^™

Redesign Of A Spatial Gear Pair Using Configuration Spaces, Elisha Sacks, Leo Joskowicz, Ralf Schulthesis, Uwe Hinze

Department of Computer Science Technical Reports

No abstract provided.

Nonlinear Kinematic Tolerance Analysis Of Planar Mechanical Systems, Min-Ho Kyung, Elisha Sacks

Department of Computer Science Technical Reports

No abstract provided.

Kinematic Analysis Of Spatial Fixed-Axis Higher Pairs Using Configuration Spaces, Ku-Jin Kim, Elisha P. Sacks, Leo Joskowicz

Department of Computer Science Technical Reports

No abstract provided.

The Evolution Of Cell Colonies In Volvocacean Algae : Investigation By Theoretical Analysis And Computer Simulation., Frank Noe

Theses

This thesis presents a mathematical analysis and computational simulation which is used to investigate the evolution of cell colonies. The evolutionary transition from unicellular to cell colony form is a prerequesite for multicellular life as it exists abundantly on earth. This transition has occured numerous times independently so that we expect a high selective advantage to be associated with it. The photosynthetic green algae order Volvocaceae is an appropriate set of model organisms for the study of the evolution of cell colonies since it comprises living unicellular organisms, cell colonies, and multicellular organisms of different shapes, sizes and levels of …

Design And Analysis Of Radio Frequency Deployment Algorithms For Gsm, Mónica Pérez-Carbonell

Theses

Due to the growth of the subscriber base and the introduction of new services, mobile communications networks’ demand for wireless resources is increasing. This has resulted in an increasing need to change the frequency allocation of a network in order to adapt the cellular network to new frequency demands.

Currently, a planning tool generates a new frequency plan, which is. then deployed to cell sites. The deployment should ideally be carried out with minimum disruption to network operation, which makes this deployment process a critical undertaking as any errors during or after the deployment can leave the network with poor …

My Library At Virginia Commonwealth University: Third Year Evaluation, Jimmy Ghaphery

VCU Libraries Faculty and Staff Publications

My Library is a personalization tool that allows the library user to consolidate frequently used library resources and services. Since 1998, My Library has been available as a web page to users of the Virginia Commonwealth University Libraries. An evaluation of My Library use at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) was completed and published in 2000. This article reports on a follow up study that took place between March 2000 and December 2001. The article also discusses the value of My Library as a teaching tool at VCU.

Using Real Options Analysis For Evaluating Uncertain Investments In Information Technology: Insights From The Icis 2001 Debate, Paul P. Tallon, Robert J. Kauffman, Henry C. Lucas, Andrew B. Whinston, Kevin Zhu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Business and information systems (IS) executives continue to grapple with issues of risk and uncertainty in evaluating investments in information technology (IT). Despite the use of net present value (NPV) and other investment appraisal techniques, executives are often forced to rely on instinct when finalizing IT investment decisions. Recognizing the shortcomings of NPV, real options analysis has been suggested as an alternative approach, one that considers the risks associated with an investment while recognizing the ability of corporations to defer an investment until a later period or to make a partial investment instead. Responding to a growing interest in real …

Adaptive Information Filtering: Concepts And Algorithms, Daniel R. Tauritz

Computer Science Faculty Research & Creative Works

Adaptive information filtering is concerned with filtering information streams in dynamic (changing) environments. The changes may occur both on the transmission side — the nature of the streams can change — and on the reception side — the interests of the user (or group of users) can change. While information filtering and information retrieval have a lot in common, this dissertation’s primary concern is with the differences. The temporal nature of information filtering necessitates more flexible document representation methods than does information retrieval where all the occurring terms are known in advance. Also, information filtering typically maintains user interest profiles …

A Comparison Of The Use Of Artificial Neural Networks, Fractal Time Series And Fractal Neural Networks In Financial Forecasts, Beverly A. Swisshelm

CCAC Theses and Dissertations

Effective prediction of future financial states has been a major quest for groups ranging from national governments to individual investors. The size, diversity and complexity of financial markets make traditional statistical methods ineffective in predicting beyond a very short time frame. Alternative models using artificial neural networks and fractal time series have had better results in long-term predictions, but still do not work in all situations. This dissertation combined features of artificial neural networks and fractal time series to create a fractal neural network. Fractals exhibit repetitive patterns when a unit is broken down into its components. This similarity property …

Techniques To Explore Time-Related Correlation In Large Datasets, Sumeet Dua

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The next generation of database management and computing systems will be significantly complex with data distributed both in functionality and operation. The complexity arises, at least in part, due to data types involved and types of information request rendered by the database user. Time sequence databases are generated in many practical applications. Detecting similar sequences and subsequences within these databases is an important research area and has generated lot of interest recently. Previous studies in this area have concentrated on calculating similitude between (sub)sequences of equal sizes. The question of unequal sized (sub)sequence comparison to report similitude has been an …

Experience-Based Language Acquisition: A Computational Model Of Human Language Acquisition, Brian Edward Pangburn

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Almost from the very beginning of the digital age, people have sought better ways to communicate with computers. This research investigates how computers might be enabled to understand natural language in a more humanlike way. Based, in part, on cognitive development in infants, we introduce an open computational framework for visual perception and grounded language acquisition called Experience-Based Language Acquisition (EBLA). EBLA can “watch” a series of short videos and acquire a simple language of nouns and verbs corresponding to the objects and object-object relations in those videos. Upon acquiring this protolanguage, EBLA can perform basic scene analysis to generate …

Complexity And Heuristics In Ruled-Based Algorithmic Music Composition, Nigel Gwee

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Successful algorithmic music composition requires the efficient creation of works that reflect human preferences. In examining this key issue, we make two main contributions in this dissertation: analysis of the computational complexity of algorithmic music composition, and methods to produce music that approximates a commendable human effort. We use species counterpoint as our compositional model, wherein a set of stylistic and grammatical rules governs the search for suitable countermelodies to match a given melody. Our analysis of the complexity of rule-based music composition considers four different types of computational problems: decision, enumeration, number, and optimization. For restricted versions of the …

Fast Scalable Visualization Techniques For Interactive Billion-Particle Walkthrough, Xinlian Liu

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This research develops a comprehensive framework for interactive walkthrough involving one billion particles in an immersive virtual environment to enable interrogative visualization of large atomistic simulation data. As a mixture of scientific and engineering approaches, the framework is based on four key techniques: adaptive data compression based on space-filling curves, octree-based visibility and occlusion culling, predictive caching based on machine learning, and scalable data reduction based on parallel and distributed processing. In terms of parallel rendering, this system combines functional parallelism, data parallelism, and temporal parallelism to improve interactivity. The visualization framework will be applicable not only to material simulation, …

Efficient Parallel Computation On Multiprocessors With Optical Interconnection Networks, Min He

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation studies optical interconnection networks, their architecture, address schemes, and computation and communication capabilities. We focus on a simple but powerful optical interconnection network model - the Linear Array with Reconfigurable pipelined Bus System (LARPBS). We extend the LARPBS model to a simplified higher dimensional LAPRBS and provide a set of basic computation operations. We then study the following two groups of parallel computation problems on both one dimensional LARPBS's as well as multi-dimensional LARPBS's: parallel comparison problems, including sorting, merging, and selection; Boolean matrix multiplication, transitive closure and their applications to connected component problems. We implement an optimal …

A Power Scheduling Software Package For Planetary Habitats, Gary W. Huband

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations (1964–2006)

Mankind has established a permanent presence in space with the International Space Station. The next step is building habitats on the Moon or Mars. However, these habitats will have to be nearly self-sustaining because replenishment from Earth will be costly. Power for life support and other electrical devices will be limited and must be monitored and allocated. This thesis develops the framework for power scheduling software to perform these tasks.

The software includes a graphical user interface (GUI) to allow the user to interact with the power schedule, a database and server, and a simulation for the effects of device …

A Study Of The Influences Of Computer Interfaces And Training Approaches On End User Training Outcomes, Raj Gururajan

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

Effective and efficient training is a key factor in determining the success of end user computing (EUC) in organisations. This study examines the influences of two application interfaces, namely icons and menus, on training outcomes. The training outcomes are measured in terms of effectiveness, efficiency and perceived ease of use. Effectiveness includes the keystrokes used to accomplish tasks, the accuracy of correct keystrokes, backtracks and errors committed. Efficiency includes the time taken to accomplish the given tasks. Perceived ease of use rates the ease of the training environment including training materials, operating system, application software and associated resources provided to …

The Use Of A Genetic Algorithm To Evolve Networks For A Natural Language Processing Task, Alexander E. Dimov '02

Honors Projects

In this project a novel approach was taken for performing a natural language task. The task requires a neural network to predict the grammatical category of the next word in a stream of sentences. There are two main reasons why this task is interesting. In natural language processing, it is sometimes very difficult to determine the grammatical category of a word in a sentence when that word could belong to different grammatical categories depending on the context. For example, the word "run" can either be a noun or a verb in a certain sentence. The ability to correctly determine the …

Object Persistence And Availability In Digital Libraries, Michael L. Nelson, B. Danette Allen

Computer Science Faculty Publications

We have studied object persistence and availability of 1,000 digital library (DL) objects. Twenty World Wide Web accessible DLs were chosen and from each DL, 50 objects were chosen at random. A script checked the availability of each object three times a week for just over 1 year for a total of 161 data samples. During this time span, we found 31 objects (3% of the total) that appear to no longer be available: 24 from PubMed Central, 5 from IDEAS, 1 from CogPrints, and 1 from ETD.

Federated Searching Interface Techniques For Heterogeneous Oai Repositories, Xiaoming Liu, Kurt Maly, Mohammad Zubair, Qiaoling Hong, Michael L. Nelson, Frances Knudson, Irma Holtkamp

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Federating repositories by harvesting heterogeneous collections with varying degrees of metadata richness poses a number of challenging issues: (1) how to address the lack of uniform control for various metadata fields in terms of building a rich unified search interface, and (2) how easily new collections and freshly harvested data in existing repositories can be incorporated into the federation supporting a unified interface? This paper focuses on the approaches taken to address these issues in Arc, an Open Archives Initiative compliant federated digital library. At present Arc contains over 1M metadata records from 75 data providers from various subject domains. …

Fast Inner Product Computation On Short Buses, R. Lin, S. Olariu

Computer Science Faculty Publications

We propose a VLSI inner product processor architecture involving broadcasting only over short buses (containing less than 64 switches). The architecture leads to an efficient algorithm for the inner product computation. Specifically, it takes 13 broadcasts, each over less than 64 switches, plus 2 carry-save additions (t_csa) and 2 carry-lookahead additions (t_cla) to compute the inner product of two arrays of N = 2⁹ elements, each consisting of m = 64 bits. Using the same order of VLSI area, our algorithm runs faster than the best known fast inner product algorithm of Smith and Torng …

A Scalable Architecture For Harvest-Based Digital Libraries, Xiaoming Liu, Tim Brody, Stevan Harnard, Les Carr, Kurt Maly, Mohammad Zubair, Michael L. Nelson

Computer Science Faculty Publications

This article discusses the requirements of current and emerging applications based on the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) and emphasizes the need for a common infrastructure to support them. Inspired by HTTP proxy, cache, gateway and web service concepts, a design for a scalable and reliable infrastructure that aims at satisfying these requirements is presented. Moreover, it is shown how various applications can exploit the services included in the proposed infrastructure. The article concludes by discussing the current status of several prototype implementations.

A Comparison Of Evolutionary And Coevolutionary Search, Ludo Pagie, Melanie Mitchell

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

Previous work on coevolutionary search has demonstrated both successful and unsuccessful applications. As a step in explaining what factors lead to success or failure, we present a comparative study of an evolutionary and a coevolutionary search model. In the latter model, strategies for solving a problem coevolve with training cases. We find that the coevolutionary model has a relatively large efficacy: 86 out of 100 (86%) of the simulations produce high quality strategies. In contrast, the evolutionary model has a very low efficacy: a high quality strategy is found in only two out of 100 runs (2%). We show that …

Automated Ontology Learning For A Semantic Web, Christopher N. Hammack, Qingfeng Lin, Hai Huang, Stephen Scott, Sharad C. Seth

School of Computing: Technical Reports

By expressing web page content in a format that machines can understand, the semantic web provides huge possibilities for the Internet and for machine reasoning. Unfortunately, there is a considerable distance between the present-day World Wide Web and the semantic web of the future. The process of annotating the Web to make it semantic web-ready is quite long and not without resistance. In this paper one mechanism for semanticizing the Web is presented. This system is known as AutoSHOE, and it is capable of categorizing pages according to one of the present HTML semantic representations (Simple HTML Ontology Extensions) by …

Federating Heterogeneous Digital Libraries By Metadata Harvesting, Xiaoming Liu

Computer Science Theses & Dissertations

This dissertation studies the challenges and issues faced in federating heterogeneous digital libraries (DLs) by metadata harvesting. The objective of federation is to provide high-level services (e.g. transparent search across all DLs) on the collective metadata from different digital libraries. There are two main approaches to federate DLs: distributed searching approach and harvesting approach. As the distributed searching approach replies on executing queries to digital libraries in real time, it has problems with scalability. The difficulty of creating a distributed searching service for a large federation is the motivation behind Open Archives Initiatives Protocols for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH). OAI-PMH supports …

Topological Sweep In Degenerate Cases, Eynat Rafalin, Diane Souvaine, Ileana Streinu

Computer Science: Faculty Publications

Topological sweep can contribute to efficient implementations of various algorithms for data analysis. Real data, however, has degeneracies. The modification of the topological sweep algorithm presented here handles degenerate cases such as parallel or multiply concurrent lines without requiring numerical perturbations to achieve general position. Our method maintains the 0(n2) and 0(n) time and space complexities of the original algorithm, and is robust and easy to implement. We present experimental results.

Enhancing Profiles For Anomaly Detection Using Time Granularities, Yingjiu Li, Ningning Wu, X. Sean Wang, Sushil Jajodia

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Recently, association rules have been used to generate profiles of normal behavior for anomaly detection. However, the time factor (especially in terms of multiple time granularities) has not been utilized extensively in generation of these profiles. In reality, user behavior during different time intervals may be very different. For example, the normal number and duration of FTP connections may vary from working hours to midnight, from business day to weekend or holiday. Furthermore, these variations may depend on the day of the month or the week. This paper proposes to build profiles using temporal association rules in terms of multiple …

Peppering Knowledge Sources With Salt: Boosting Conceptual Content For Ontology Generation, Deryle W. Lonsdale, Yihong Ding, David W. Embley, Alan Melby

Faculty Publications

This paper describes work done to explore the common ground between two different ongoing research projects: the standardization of lexical and terminological resources, and the use of conceptual ontologies for information extraction and data integration. Specifically, this paper explores improving the generation of extraction ontologies through use of a comprehensive terminology database that has been represented in a standardized format for easy tool-based implementation. We show how, via the successful integration of these two distinct efforts, it is possible to leverage large-scale terminological and conceptual information having relationship-rich semantic resources in order to reformulate, match, and merge retrieved information of …

Java At Middle Age: Enabling Java For Computational Science, George K. Thiruvathukal

Computer Science: Faculty Publications and Other Works

Not long after the Mosaic Web browser appeared and Netscape communications formed, Sun Microsystems launched Java in a way that will be forever known as a marketing success story. All across the US, there were many Java Day events. I still have my t-shirts as proof of having been there.

Multimedia Tools For The Creation Of Online Learning Materials : A Critique, Victor Augustine Udosen

World Maritime University Dissertations

No abstract provided.

Application Of Extensive Markup Language (Xml) For Shipping Companies, Bala Vithoba Meshram

World Maritime University Dissertations

No abstract provided.