Digital Commons Network^™

Algebraic Methods For Computer Aided Geometric Design, Thomas W. Sederberg, Jianmin Zheng

Faculty Publications

CAGD draws from several branches of mathematics and computer science, such as approximation theory, differential geometry, and numerical analysis. This chapter reviews some of the tools of algebra and algebraic geometry that have been brought to bear on problems in CAGD.

Object-Oriented Modeling And Fauly Detection Of A Powder Feeder For A Laser Metal Deposition System, Robert G. Landers, Michael Gene Hilgers, Frank W. Liou, Bruce M. Mcmillin

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

One of the most critical components of a laser metal deposition system is the powder feeder unit. Techniques are required to efficiently design and analyze these systems and to ensure fault tolerance during the operation. In this paper, a model of the powder feeder unit, based on object- oriented abstractions of it components, is developed. This model is modular in that specific components can be efficiently updated or replaced with components that perform a similar function. In addition, the model can be used for simulation allowing for efficient design and analysis. Assurance of the correctness of the powder feeder system …

Object-Oriented Modeling And Fault Detection Of A Powder Feeder For A Laser Metal Deposition System, Robert G. Landers, Michael Gene Hilgers, Frank W. Liou, Bruce M. Mcmillin

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

One of the most critical components of a laser metal deposition system is the powder feeder unit. Techniques are required to efficiently design and analyze these systems and to ensure fault tolerance during the operation. In this paper, a model of the powder feeder unit, based on object-oriented abstractions of it components, is developed. This model is modular in that specific components can be efficiently updated or replaced with components that perform a similar function. In addition, the model can be used for simulation allowing for efficient design and analysis. Assurance of the correctness of the powder feeder system is …

Poet: The Online Preference Elicitation Tool, James Royalty, Robert Holland, Judy Goldsmith, Alex Dekhtyar

Computer Science and Software Engineering

If the goal of eliciting accurate user preferences over a complex value space is to be realized, the elicitation process must be through while at the same time not overly burdensome to the user. An ideal preference elicitation tool would maximize the information about preferences acquired from the user while minimizing the number of queries required. To this end, we present POET: the Online Preference Elicitation Tool.
POET is a graphical Java applet designed to elicit complex preference structures to form a utility function. Once the elicitation process is complete POET outputs the resulting utility function as an XML …

Analyzing Unified Modeling Language Using Concept Mapping, Keng Siau, Z. Shen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The Unified Modeling Language (UML) is a visual modeling language for object-oriented software development. Although the Object Management Group (OMG) adopted UML as its standard modeling language in 1997, the consensus in the academic community and the industry is that further research is needed to evaluate, enhance, extend, and formalize UML. A substantial amount of research has been conducted to this end, but most was based on common sense, informal observation, and intuition. Systematic and empirical studies to analyze, evaluate, and enhance UML have been lacking. This paper attempts to evaluate and study UML from a cognitive perspective. Specifically, the …

Integrated Software System For The Collection And Evaluation Of Wellness Information., Rebecca Elizabeth Sweeney

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

There is an absence of a complete, easy to use, software system that can evaluate all areas of wellness. Although there are software programs and equipment available to examine certain aspects of wellness, they are incomplete. The solution to the difficulties of assessing wellness is the design and development of a software system that can be used to collect and evaluate wellness information. The system allows for complete reporting as it entails the six major components to wellness: demographics, body composition, lab work, nutritional intake, physical activity, and body measures. The system allows for ease of use by providing a …

A Formal Method To Analyze Framework-Based Software, Trent N. Larson

Theses and Dissertations

Software systems are frequently designed using abstractions that make software verification tractable. Specifically, by choosing meaningful, formal abstractions for interfaces and then designing according to those interfaces, one can verify entire systems according to behavioral predicates. While impractical for systems in general, framework-based software architectures are a type of system for which formal analysis can be beneficial and practical over the life of the system. We present a method to formally analyze behavioral properties of framework-based software with higher-order logic and then demonstrate its utility for a significant, modern system.

Organizing And Personalizing Intelligence Gathering From The Web, Hwee-Leng Ong, Ah-Hwee Tan, Jamie Ng, Pan Hong, Qiu-Xiang Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we describe how an integrated web‐based application, code‐named FOCI (Flexible Organizer for Competitive Intelligence), can help the knowledge worker in the gathering, organizing, tracking and dissemination of competitive intelligence (CI). It combines the use of a novel user‐configurable clustering, trend analysis and visualization techniques to manage information gathered from the web. FOCI allows its users to define and personalize the organization of the information clusters according to their needs and preferences into portfolios. These personalized portfolios created are saved and can be subsequently tracked and shared with other users. The paper runs through an example to show …

Detection Of Slide Transition For Topic Indexing, Chong-Wah Ngo, Ting-Chuen Pong, Thomas S. Huang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper presents an automatic and novel approach in detecting the transitions of slides for video sequences of technical lectures. Our approach adopts a foreground vs background segmentation algorithm to separate a presenter from the projected electronic slides. Once a background template is generated, text captions are detected and analyzed. The segmented caption regions as well as background templates together provide salient visual cues to decide whether a slide is flipped and replaced. The partitioning of videos according to slide changes not only structure the content of video according to topics, but also facilitate the synchronization of video, audio and …

Hci Research Issues In Electronic Commerce, Fiona Fui-Hoon Nah, Sid Davis

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This article outlines a number of important research issues in human-computer interaction in the e-commerce environment. It highlights some of the challenges faced by users in browsing Web sites and conducting searches for information, and suggests several areas of research for promoting ease of navigation and search. Also, it discusses the importance of trust in the online environment, describing some of the antecedents and consequences of trust, and provides guidelines for integrating trust into Web site design. The issues discussed in this article are presented under three broad categories of human-computer interaction – Web usability, interface design, and trust – …

Hcl: A Specification Language For Hierarchical Text Classification, Aixin Sun, Ee Peng Lim, Wee-Keong Ng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Hierarchical text classification refers to assigning text documents to the categories in a given category tree based on their content. With large number of categories organized as a tree, hierarchical text classification helps users to find information more quickly and accurately. Nevertheless, hierarchical text classification methods in the past have often been constructed in a proprietary manner. The construction steps often involve human efforts and are not completely automated. In this paper, we therefore propose a specification language known as HCL (Hierarchical Classification Language) . HCL is designed to describe a hierarchical classification method including the definition of a category …

The Underlying Design Principles Of The Icdm Development Toolkit, Kym J. Pohl, Jens G. Pohl

Collaborative Agent Design (CAD) Research Center

For the past sixteen years the Collaborative Agent Design Research Center (CADRC) at the California Polytechnic State University (Cal Poly), San Luis Obispo has pursued the design and development of agent-based decision-support systems. Throughout this journey the CADRC has relied on a suite of development tools that greatly assist in the creation and management of such systems. This suite of tools is known as the Integrated Cooperative Decision-Making (ICDM) software development toolkit.

Not only does ICDM function as an accelerator (i.e., rapid development) and stabilizer (i.e., built-in robustness and fault tolerance) in the development of decision-support systems, but it also …

Integrating Local Search And Network Flow To Solve The Inventory Routing Problem, Hoong Chuin Lau, Q Liu, H. Ono

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The inventory routing problem is one of important and practical problems in logistics. It involves the integration of inventory management and vehicle routing, both of which are known to be NP-hard. In this paper, we combine local search and network flows to solve the inventory management problem, by utilizing the minimum cost flow sub-solutions as a guiding measure for local search. We then integrate with a standard VRPTW solver to present experimental results for the overall inventory routing problem, based on instances extended from the Solomon benchmark problems.

Design And Implementation Of An Online Database Panel, Frenny Thomas

Theses and Dissertations

There is a growing need for administrative panels such as the one described in this project. More and more website administrators wish to make changes to their online business without having to directly modify the database file. This project provides the perfect solution for this scenario by placing all database access on the World Wide Web. Administrators can now use this software to add, edit, and delete tables, fields, and records. Additionally, users will be able to generate queries without knowledge of Structured Query Language. This project acts as a summary of my computer science education at this university by …

The Future Of Cryptography Under Quantum Computers, Marco A. Barreno

Dartmouth College Undergraduate Theses

Cryptography is an ancient art that has passed through many paradigms, from simple letter substitutions to polyalphabetic substitutions to rotor machines to digital encryption to public-key cryptosystems. With the possible advent of quantum computers and the strange behaviors they exhibit, a new paradigm shift in cryptography may be on the horizon. Quantum computers could hold the potential to render most modern encryption useless against a quantum-enabled adversary. The aim of this thesis is to characterize this convergence of cryptography and quantum computation. We provide definitions for cryptographic primitives that frame them in general terms with respect to complexity. We explore …

Content Aware Request Distribution For High Performance Web Service: A Performance Study, Robert M. Jones

Dissertations and Theses

The World Wide Web is becoming a basic infrastructure for a variety of services, and the increases in audience size and client network bandwidth create service demands that are outpacing server capacity. Web clusters are one solution to this need for high performance, highly available web server systems. We are interested in load distribution techniques, specifically Layer-7 algorithms that are content-aware. Layer-7 algorithms allow distribution control based on the specific content requested, which is advantageous for a system that offers highly heterogenous services. We examine the performance of the Client Aware Policy (CAP) on a Linux/Apache web cluster consisting of …

An Enterprise-Based Grid Resource Management System, Mark J. Clement, Joseph Ekstrom, Quinn O. Snell, Kevin B. Tew

Faculty Publications

As the Internet began its exponential growth into a global information environment, software was often unreliable, slow and had difficulty in interoperating with other systems. Supercomputing node counts also continue to follow high growth trends. Supercomputer and grid resource management software must mature into a reliable computational platform in much the same way that web services matured for the Internet. DOGMA The Next Generation (DOGMA-NG) improves on current resource management approaches by using tested off-the-shelf enterprise technologies to build a robust, scalable, and extensible resource management platform. Distributed web service technologies constitute the core of DOGMA-NG’s design and provide fault …

Applying Xml/Xslt Technology: A Case Study, Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan

Kno.e.sis Publications

Typically, paper-based semi-structured documents are used to communicate technical requirements in the industry. One approach to improving the efficiency and flexibility of searching and manipulating these documents is to obtain them in electronic form, and then make explicit the technical content in a form amenable to pattern matching and symbol manipulation. This paper explores the role of XML Technology for these purposes: the use of XML language to make explicit the content of a document in a standard fashion, and the use of XSLT to manipulate the content and mediate between applications that need this content. In order to recognize …

Leadership Antecedents Of Informal Knowledge Acquisition And Dissemination, Siu Loon Hoe, Steve Mcshane

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Knowledge management is emerging as one of the leading influences on an organisation’s survival and competitive advantage (Blumentritt & Johnston 1999). Knowledge management is concerned with the effective acquisition, sharing, storage and utilisation of knowledge (Huber 1991; Saffady 1998). Corporate leaders are increasingly aware of the notion that an organisation’s long-term survival depends on its ability to generate new knowledge and continuously learn from the environment. The importance of a superior organisational learning capability as a source of competitive advantage is a common refrain among both managers and scholars (e.g. Kohli & Jaworski 1990; Nonaka 1991; Quinn 1992; Slater & …

The Case For Cyber Foraging, Rajesh Balan, Jason Flinn, Mahadev Satyanarayanan, Shafeeq Sinnamohideen, Hen-I Yang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we propose cyber foraging: a mechanism to augment the computational and storage capabilities of mobile devices. Cyber foraging uses opportunistically discovered servers in the environment to improve the performance of interactive applications and distributed file systems on mobile clients. We show how the performance of distributed file systems can be improved by staging data at these servers even though the servers are not trusted. We also show how the performance of interactive applications can be improved via remote execution. Finally, we present VERSUDS: a virtual interface to heteregeneous service discovery protocols that can be used to discover …

G-Portal : A Map-Based Digital Library For Distributed Geospatial And Georeferenced Resources, Ee Peng Lim, Dion Hoe-Lian Goh

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

As the World Wide Web evolves into an immense information network, it is tempting to build new digital library services and expand existing digital library services to make use of web content. In this paper, we present the design and implementation of G-Portal, a web portal that aims to provide digital library services over geospatial and georeferenced content found on the World Wide Web. G-Portal adopts a map-based user interface to visualize and manipulate the distributed geospatial and georeferenced content. Annotation capabilities are supported, allowing users to contribute geospatial and georeferenced objects as well as their associated metadata. The other …

A Digital Library For Geography Examination Resources, Lian-Heong Chua, Dion Hoe-Lian Goh, Zehua Liu, Ee Peng Lim, Rebecca Pei-Hui Ang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We describe a Web-based application developed above a digital library of geographical resources for Singapore students preparing to take a national examination in geography. The application provides an interactive, non-sequential approach to learning that supplements textbooks.

Machine-Learned Contexts For Linguistic Operations In German Sentence Realization, Eric K. Ringger, Simon Corston-Oliver, Michael Gamon, Robert Moore

Faculty Publications

We show that it is possible to learn the contexts for linguistic operations which map a semantic representation to a surface syntactic tree in sentence realization with high accuracy. We cast the problem of learning the contexts for the linguistic operations as classification tasks, and apply straightforward machine learning techniques, such as decision tree learning. The training data consist of linguistic features extracted from syntactic and semantic representations produced by a linguistic analysis system. The target features are extracted from links to surface syntax trees. Our evidence consists of four examples from the German sentence realization system code-named Amalgam: case …

Data Management In Location-Dependent Information Services: Challenges And Issues, Dik Lun Lee, Jianliang Xu, Baihua Zheng, Wang-Chien Lee

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Location-dependent information services have great promise for mobile and pervasive computing environments. They can provide local and nonlocal news, weather, and traffic reports as well as directory services. Before they can be implemented on a large scale, however, several research issues must be addressed.

Fast Filter-And-Refine Algorithms For Subsequence Selection, Beng-Chin Ooi, Hwee Hwa Pang, Hao Wang, Limsoon Wong, Cui Yu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Large sequence databases, such as protein, DNA and gene sequences in biology, are becoming increasingly common. An important operation on a sequence database is approximate subsequence matching, where all subsequences that are within some distance from a given query string are retrieved. This paper proposes a filter-and-refine algorithm that enables efficient approximate subsequence matching in large DNA sequence databases. It employs a bitmap indexing structure to condense and encode each data sequence into a shorter index sequence. During query processing, the bitmap index is used to filter out most of the irrelevant subsequences, and false positives are removed in the …

Intelligent Segmentation Tools, William A. Barrett, Eric N. Mortensen, L. Jack Reese

Faculty Publications

Intelligent Scissors and Intelligent Paint are complementary interactive image segmentation tools that allow a user to quickly and accurately select objects of interest using simple gesture motions with a mouse. With Intelligent Scissors. when the cursor position comes in proximity to an object edge, a live-wire boundary “snaps” to, and wraps around the object of interest. The Intelligent Paint tool uses the cursor position to sample the image data interior to the object and grows the current region, in discrete, snapping increments, to include similar neighboring regions. Both techniques make use of a watershed algorithm called toboganning. Wth Intelligent Scissors, …

Digital Libraries To Knowledge Portals: Towards A Global Knowledge Portal For Secondary Schools In Singapore, Yin-Leng Theng, Dion Hoe-Lian Goh, Chu Keong Lee, Ee Peng Lim, Zehua Liu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

For digital libraries to remain relevant in the new millennium where the ability to manage knowledge is critical, this paper explores how digital libraries could strategically be evolved into knowledge portals to encapsulate knowledge creation, management, sharing and reusability, features evidently lacking in most conventional digital libraries. Two digital library scenarios of use in education are described and implemented as knowledge portals using G-Portal and the Greenstone software. We hope that the initial work carried out on these two portal-like DLs will eventually form part of a Global Knowledge Portal for Secondary Schools in Singapore. Keywords Digital libraries, information portals, …

Security Analysis And Improvement Of The Global Key Recovery System, Yanjiang Yang, Feng Bao, Robert H. Deng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Key recovery is a technology that allows the owner of encrypted data or a trusted third party to recover encrypted data, mostly by reconstructing lost decryption key. In [HLG99], Harn et al proposed a Global Key Recovery System (GKRS) that combines the functions of the key recovery authorities and the public key certification authorities (CAs). Among other features, user-dominance, i.e., a user is allowed to select his own public-private key pair and especially a public element for verifying the validity of the public-private key pair, is considered extremely important by [HLG99] for wide acceptance of GKRS. In this paper, we …

Combining Two Heuristics To Solve A Supply Chain Optimization Problem, Hoong Chuin Lau, Yuyue Song

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we consider a real-life supply chain optimization problem concerned with supplying a product from multiple warehouses to multiple geographically dispersed retailers. Each retailer faces a deterministic and period-dependent demand over some finite planning horizon. The demand of each retailer is satisfied by the supply from some predetermined warehouse through a fleet of vehicles which are only available within certain time windows at each period. Our goal is to identify a combined inventory and routing schedule such that the system-wide total cost over the planning horizon is minimised. This problem in essence is an amalgamation of two classical …

Anatomy Of The Coupling Query In A Web Warehouse, Sourav S. Bhowmick, Wee Keong Ng, Sanjay Kumar Madria, Ee Peng Lim

Computer Science Faculty Research & Creative Works

To populate a data warehouse specifically designed for Web data, i.e. web warehouse, it is imperative to harness relevant documents from the Web. In this paper, we describe a query mechanism called coupling query to glean relevant Web data in the context of our web warehousing system called Warehouse of Web Data (WHOWEDA). Coupling query may be used for querying both HTML and XML documents. Some of the important features of our query mechanism are ability to query metadata, content, internal and external (hyperlink) structure of Web documents based on partial knowledge, ability to express constraints on tag attributes and …