Digital Commons Network^™

Investigating Measures For Pairwise Document Similarity, Jeffrey D. Isaacs

Dartmouth College Undergraduate Theses

The need for a more effective similarity measure is growing as a result of the astonishing amount of information being placed online. Most existing similarity measures are defined by empirically derived formulas and cannot easily be extended to new applications. We present a pairwise document similarity measure based on Information Theory, and present corpus dependent and independent applications of this measure. When ranked with existing similarity measures over TREC FBIS data, our corpus dependent information theoretic similarity measure ranked first.

Considerations For An Effective Telecommunications-Use Policy, Michael E. Whitman, Anthony M. Townsend, Robert J. Aalberts

Faculty Articles

Recent changes in federal telecommunications legislation have underscored the importance of an up-to-date and effective telecommunications-use policy in business organizations. With the proliferation of the Internet, intranets, and email as commonplace business tools, the potential for misuse and subsequent liability has become an increasing concern. Even though the recent Supreme Court decision struck down the obscenity provisions of the Communications Decency Act (CDA), it left intact legislation that effectively mandates development of a sound telecommunications-use policy. In addition to potential liability for systems misuse, organizations have also had to address issues of individual employee privacy within the new systems.

This …

Sketch-Based Image Queries In Topographic Databases, James Carswell

Articles

In this paper we present the development of a system prototype for sketch-based queries for the content-based retrieval of digital images from topographic databases. We discuss our overall strategy and associated algorithmic and implementation aspects, and present associated database design issues. The query tools devised in this research are employing user-provided sketches of the shape and spatial configuration of the object(s) which should appear in the images to be retrieved. Our matching tool is inspired by least-squares matching (lsm), and represents an extension of lsm to function with a variety of raster representations. Our strategy makes use of a hierarchical …

Camera Break Detection By Partitioning Of 2d Spatio-Temporal Images In Mpeg Domain, Chong-Wah Ngo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we propose a new approach to detect camera cuts and wipes. The approach projects a video into two images representing the spatio-temporal continuity of a video life. Visually, these images are composed by regions of different patterns, each region represents the temporal location of a shot. The shape of a region boundary inherently classifies cut and wipe, and most importantly, marks the start and end of a wipe sequence. We hence formulate algorithms to locate the color and texture discontinuities occurring at the boundaries of image regions.

Automatic Document Classification And Extraction System (Adoces), Xuhong Li

Dissertations

Document processing is a critical element of office automation. Document image processing begins from the Optical Character Recognition (OCR) phase with complex processing for document classification and extraction. Document classification is a process that classifies an incoming document into a particular predefined document type. Document extraction is a process that extracts information pertinent to the users from the content of a document and assigns the information as the values of the “logical structure” of the document type. Therefore, after document classification and extraction, a paper document will be represented in its digital form instead of its original image file format, …

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.

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

Department of Computer Science Technical Reports

No abstract provided.

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 …

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.

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 …

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 …

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 …

2d-Pattern Matching Image And Video Compression: Theory, Algorithms, And Experiments, Marc Alzina, Wojciech Szpankowski, Ananth Y. Grama

Department of Computer Science Technical Reports

No abstract provided.

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 …

Analysis Of The Applicability Of Video Segmentation To Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Surveillance Video, Bradley L. Pyburn

Theses and Dissertations

The focus of this research is to determine if applying edge detection segmentation (proposed by Ramin Zabih, Justin Miller, and Kevin Mai) to Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) video footage can provide meaningful segments for database storage and retrieval. The edge detection segmentation algorithm is applied to fifty-four UAV video sequences containing visual effects such as abrupt camera changes, camera zooms, motion (rapid and gradual), and cloud cover while varying the frame rate from 5 fps to 30 fps. An analysis of the results is performed to compare actual versus expected outcomes, similar sequences, and scenes with motion, along with explaining …

Strategies For Steganalysis Of Bitmap Graphics Files, Christopher J. Fogle

Theses and Dissertations

Steganography is the art and science of communicating through covert channels. The goal of steganography is to hide the fact that a message is even being transmitted. In the context of today's digital world, this ancient practice is enjoying resurgence due to the plethora of hiding places made possible by modern information media. Of particular concern is the use of graphics image files to conceal both legitimate and criminal communications.

Computation Of Scattering From Bodies Of Revolution Using An Entire-Domain Basis Implementation Of The Moment Method, Arthur P. Ford Iv

Theses and Dissertations

Research into improved calibration targets for measurement of radar cross-section has created a need for the ability to accurately compute the scattering from perfectly conducting bodies of revolution. Common computational techniques use Moment Method codes that employ subdomain basis functions to expand the unknown current density. This approach has its shortcomings. Large numbers of basis functions are required, and increasing the number of basis functions to improve accuracy after an initial computation requires re-computation of previous results and lost processing time. This research involves using basis functions that have as their domain the entire length of the surface. Entire-domain basis …

Trade-Off Analysis Of Communications Capabilities Of Inter-Satellite Links, Andrew J. Feltman

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis designs, develops, and uses software Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) to analyze the communications capabilities of Radio Frequency (RF) Inter-Satellite Links (ISLs). The GUIs are geared towards analyzing the proposed ISLs of the Discoverer II program, but are general enough to permit analysis of any free-space RF ISLs. Discoverer II is a demonstration program of low-earth orbiting satellites and is primarily focused on satellite-based sensor technology. This thesis shows RF ISLs can meet the program requirement to broadcast the sensor data back to CONUS in near-real-time. The GUIs operate in real-time and explore trade-offs in the communications capability by …

Structural Emergence And The Collaborative Behavior Of Autonomous Nano-Satellites, Daniel J. Petrovich

Theses and Dissertations

The collaborative behavior of nano-satellites in a zero-gravity environment is explored, and satellite characteristics are proposed that maximize constellation robustness and minimize manufacturing costs. Behavioral algorithms are proposed to facilitate both swarming and structural formation and are validated using the Structural Emergence Simulator (STEMS) Graphical User Interface (GUl). A payload of multiple satellites is placed in a zero-gravity environment and released to re-configure autonomously into a pre-designed structure. Data transmission between satellites is not permitted during the swarming phase of the structure formation mission. A binary behavior algorithm is invented that produces a direction and magnitude solution to the satellite …

Resource Scheduling In A High-Performance Multimedia Server, Hwee Hwa Pang, Bobby Jose, M. S. Krishnan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Supporting continuous media data-such as video and audio-imposes stringent demands on the retrieval performance of a multimedia server. In this paper, we propose and evaluate a set of data placement and retrieval algorithms to exploit the full capacity of the disks in a multimedia server. The data placement algorithm declusters every object over all of the disks in the server-using a time-based declustering unit-with the aim of balancing the disk load. As for runtime retrieval, the quintessence of the algorithm is to give each disk advance notification of the blocks that have to be fetched in the impending time periods, …

Comparison Of Dcom And Corba Distributed Computing, Reginald J. Reynolds

Theses

The movement of distributed applications from 2-tier to n-tier architectures have enabled systems to be scaled to meet the demands of an ever increasing population of users. Two middleware architectures have come to the forefront: Microsoft's DCOM and the OMG's CORBA. These are not the only possible architectures for n-tier distributed applications, but they are currently the only two which offer a degree of platform independence and the flexibility of using different programming languages for development.

CORBA provides platform independence because it provides a middle layer between the client and the server and services client requests using its internal naming …

Minitel Versus The Internet In France, Ruthie Kerr

Capstone Research Projects

No abstract provided.

Websearch: A Configurable Parallel Multi-Search Web Browser, Jason Lin

Theses Digitization Project

No abstract provided.

The Internet Instructional Aid, Dohyon Donte Kim

Theses Digitization Project

The development and use of this instructional software tool for the Internet contributes broadly to the increasing sophistication and practical nature of Internet interactive development and programming and specifically to the burgeoning of interactive instructional distance technologies made available by the unique nature of the Internet.

Internet Instructional Aid (IIA) is a software package that utilizes the WEB to teach educational courses online. The purpose of this software-package is to provide an environment in which students can have additional group and individual contact with the instructor and convenient access to prior class lectures and instructional materials. Utilizing Java, the newly …

Feedback Based Dynamic Proportion Allocation For Disk I/O, Dan Revel, Dylan Mcnamee, Calton Pu, David Steere, Jonathan Walpole

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

In this paper we propose to use feedback control to automatically allocate disk bandwidth in order to match the rate of disk I/O to the real-rate needs of applications. We describe a model for adaptive resource management based on measuring the relative progress of stages in a producer-consumer pipeline. We show how to use prefetching to transform a passive disk into an active data producer whose progress can be controlled via feedback. Our progress-based framework allows the integrated control of multiple resources. The resulting system automatically adapts to varying application rates as well as to varying device latencies.

Multivalued Mappings, Fixed-Point Theorems And Disjunctive Databases, Pascal Hitzler, Anthony K. Seda

Computer Science and Engineering Faculty Publications

In this paper, we discuss the semantics of disjunctive programs and databases and show how multivalued mappings and their fixed points arise naturally within this context. A number of fixed-point theorems for multivalued mappings are considered, some of which are already known and some of which are new. The notion of a normal derivative of a disjunctive program is introduced. Normal derivatives are normal logic programs which are determined by the disjunctive program. Thus, the well-known single-step operator associated with a normal derivative is single-valued, and its fixed points can be found by well-established means. It is shown how fixed …