Digital Commons Network^™

Ber-Based Call Admission In Wavelength-Routed Optical Networks, Debasish Datta, Byrav Ramamurthy, Helena Feng, Jonathan P. Heritage, Biswanath Mukherjee

School of Computing: Conference and Workshop Papers

Consider a wavelength-routed optical network in which nodes, i.e., multiwave length cross-connect switches (XCSs), are connected by fiber to form an arbitrary physical topology. A new call is admitted into the network if an all-optical lightpath can be established between the call’s source and destination nodes. Wavelength converters are assumed absent in this work.

Development And Utilization Of Parallel Generic Algorithms For Scientific Computations, Atanas Radenski, Andrew Vann, Boyana Norris

Mathematics, Physics, and Computer Science Faculty Books and Book Chapters

We develop generic parallel algorithms as extensible modules that encapsulate related classes and parallel methods. Extensible modules define common parallel structures, such as meshes, pipelines, or master-server networks in problem-independent manner. Such modules can be extended with sequential domain-specific code in order to derive particular parallel applications. In this paper, we first outline the essence of extensible modules. Then, we focus on a case study of the cellular automaton, a message-parallel generic algorithm from which we derive diverse parallel scientific applications.

Interactive Gradebook: The Missing (Hyper)Link, Doug Blank, George Holmes, Ryan Wells, Pawel Wolinksi

Computer Science Faculty Research and Scholarship

This paper introduces the notion of the "interactive gradebook," a new niche where intelligent and interactive technologies can help educators teach and students learn.

Contributions To Supervised Learning Of Real-Valued Functions Using Neural Networks, Victor David Sanchez Aylas

CCAC Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation presents a new strategy for the automatic design of neural networks. The learning environment addressed is supervised learning from examples. Specifically, Radial Basis Functions (RBF) networks learning real-valued functions of real vectors as in non-linear regression applications are considered. The strategy is based upon the application of strong theoretical relationships between RBF networks and methods from approximation theory, robust statistics, and computational learning theory.

The complexity of the network design is examined in detail from the formal definition of the learning problem to the establishment of the corresponding optimization problem. A novel strategy for the systematic and automatic …

The Role Of The Einstein Library Of Nova Southeastern University In Meeting The Needs Of Distance Education Students, Anne K. Abate

CCAC Theses and Dissertations

The goal of this study was to evaluate the information needs of a selected segment of the distance learning graduate student population served by the Einstein Library at Nova Southeastern University and to propose a new model of library service based on the implementation of current and emerging technologies. Several survey instruments were developed and administered through electronic mail to students and faculty in the School of Computer and Information Sciences, the Center for Psychological Studies, and the School of Social and Systemic Studies, the Fischler Center for the Advancement of Education and the School of Business and Entrepreneurship at …

The Auditory Display In Interactive Courseware: Moving Human Factors Into Computer Education, David T. Lauret

CCAC Theses and Dissertations

The arrival of inexpensive high fidelity audio capabilities for personal computers has been accompanied by sweeping claims of enhanced educational effectiveness. Research has only served to confuse these claims with both significant and non-significant findings. This may be due partly to the single dimensional model which has been assumed when examining audio. When computer-based audio is examined as a multi-dimensional display analogous in capability and function to the more familiar visual display (computer screen), a different picture emerges. Although it is now clear that integrated audio can enhance learning, the instructional designer is still left with little guidance whether or …

Effect Of Electronic Portfolio Assessments On The Motivation And Computer Interest Of Fourth And Fifth Grade Students In A Massachusetts Suburban School, Paul V. Montesino

CCAC Theses and Dissertations

A preliminary causal-comparative study was conducted in an elementary suburban school in Massachusetts to investigate the impact of electronic portfolio assessments in student's intrinsic motivation and computer interest.

The target population were two groups of fourth grade and two groups of fifth grade students for a total of 77 subjects. They were trained and introduced to electronic portfolio assessments, a program which lasted for the entire school year. The students used Hyper Studio, a multimedia software program developed and marketed by Roger Wagner Publishing, Inc.

It was the intention of the elementary school program directors and teachers that students would …

A Simplified Faceted Approach To Information Retrieval For Reusable Software Classification, Victor Allen Nguyen

CCAC Theses and Dissertations

Software Reuse is widely recognized as the most promising technique presently available in reducing the cost of software production. It is the adaptation or incorporation of previously developed software components, designs or other software-related artifacts (i.e. test plans) into new software or software development regimes. Researchers and vendors are doubling their efforts and devoting their time primarily to the topic of software reuse. Most have focused on mechanisms to construct reusable software but few have focused on the problem of discovering components or designs to meet specific needs. In order for software reuse to be successful, it must be perceived …

Fdtd Evaluation Of The Sar Distribution In A Human Head Near A Mobile Cellular Phone, Selçuk Paker, Levent Sevgi̇

Turkish Journal of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences

In this study, Finite-Difference Time-Domain (FDTD) method is used to calculate the Specific Absorbtion Rate (SAR; defined as the power absorbed by unit mass of the tissue) distribution in a human head near a hand-held cellular phone. A three dimensional FDTD algorithm is built in cartesian coordinates. A discrete human head model, derived from a Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) image by semi-automatic algorithm, is located within FDTD volume together with a discrete hand-held receiver model. FDTD simulations are carried out for both european GSM (operating at 900MHz) and DECT (operating at 1.8GHz) systems with a quarter-wavelength antenna, mounted on top …

Java/Corba Based Real-Time Infrastructure To Integrate Event-Driven Simulations, Collaboration And Distributed Object/Componentware Computing, Geoffrey C. Fox, Wojtek Furmanski, Hasan T. Ozdemir

Northeast Parallel Architecture Center

We are discussing the four major standard candidates for distributed object/componentware computing: Java, CORBA, COM and WOM within our proposed coordination framework we call Pragmatic Object Web (POW). We describe our integration approach based on multi-protocol middleware server JWORB (Java Web Object Request Broker) that currently integrates HTTP and IIOP and which we now further develop to also support COM and WOM core functionalities. We are also experimenting with visual data ow authoring front-ends using NPAC WebFlow system on top of JWORB based software bus. Finally, we illustrate our technologies in one major application domain- DoD Modeling and Simulation- where …

Integrating Security Into The Curriculum, Cynthia E. Irvine, Shiu-Kai Chin, Deborah Frincke

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science - All Scholarship

The number of skilled practitioners of computer security who are able to address the complexities of modern technology and are familiar with successful approaches to system security is very small. People want security but are faced with two difficulties. First, they do not know how to achieve it in the context of their enterprises. They may not even know of a way to translate organizational procedures into policies, much less implement a set of mechanisms to enforce those policies. Second, they have no way of knowing whether their chosen mechanisms are effective. The recent US Presidential Commission on Critical Infrastructure …

Secure Delegation For Distributed Object Environments, Nataraj Nagaratnam, Doug Lea

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science - All Scholarship

SDM is a Secure Delegation Model for Java-based distributed object environments. SDM extends current Java security features to support secure remote method invocations that may involve chains of delegated calls across distributed objects. The framework supports a control API for application developers to specify mechanisms and security policies surrounding simple or cascaded delegation. Delegation may also be disabled and optionally revoked. These policies may be controlled explicitly in application code, or implicitly via administrative tools.

A Java Implementation Of A Portable Desktop Manager, Scott J. Griswold

UNF Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Computers equipped with a Graphical User Interface (GUI) and connected to the Internet are common in both the business and educational communities. These computers, using a web browser, easily share programs written in the Java programming language that are able to execute on a variety of heterogeneous machines.

While programs written in many languages will not execute unmodified on different computing platforms because of portability restrictions, Java has overcome these limitations and provides a platform independent language. However, every programming language is limited, and no language provides all the features required for every program. Therefore, creation of any portable program …

Object-Oriented Programming And Parallelism, Atanas Radenski

Mathematics, Physics, and Computer Science Faculty Articles and Research

Initially, object-orientation and parallelism originated and developed as separate and relatively independent areas. During the last decade, however, more and more researchers were attracted by the benefits from a potential marriage of the two powerful paradigms. Numerous research projects and an increasing number of practical applications were aimed at different forms of amalgamation of parallelism with object-orientation. It has been realized that parallelism is a inherently needed enhancement for the traditional object-oriented programming (OOP) paradigm, and that object orientation can add significant flexibility to the parallel programming paradigm.

On Circulant Weighing Matrices, K. T. Arasu, Jennifer Seberry

Mathematics and Statistics Faculty Publications

Algebraic techniques are employed to obtain necessary conditions for the existence of certain circulant weighing matrices. As an application we rule out the existence of many circulant weighing matrices. We study orders n = 82 +8+1, for 10 ~ 8 ~ 25. These orders correspond to the number of points in a projective plane of order 8.

Observation Of Doubly-Charmed B Decays At Lep, R. Barate, M. Thulasidas

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

A search for doubly-charmed B decays with both charmed mesons reconstructed is performed, using about 3.8 million hadronic Z decays recorded with the ALEPH detector at LEP. A clear signal is observed in the channels B→DsD¯(X)B→DsD¯(X) and B→DD¯(X)B→DD¯(X) (where D can be either a D00, a D++ or a D∗+∗+), providing the first direct evidence for doubly-charmed B decays involving no DsDs production. Evidence for associated K0SKS0 and K±K± production in the decays B→DD¯(X)B→DD¯(X) is also presented and some candidates for completely reconstructed decays B→DsD¯(nπ)B→DsD¯(nπ), B→DD¯K0SB→DD¯KS0 and B→DD¯K±B→DD¯K± are observed. Furthermore, candidates for the two-body Cabibbo suppressed decays B0→D∗−D∗+B0→D∗−D∗+ and …

Imaging Tissue Conductivity Via Contactless Measurements: A Feasibility Study, Nevzat G. Gençer, M. Nejat Tek

Turkish Journal of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences

The feasibility of a new imaging system is investigated. This system will be used to image electrical conductivity distribution of biological tissues via contactless measurements. This will be achieved by introducing currents in the conductive medium using time-varying magnetic fields and measuring the magnetic fields of the induced currents. Consequently, the imaging system consists of transmitter and receiver coils placed nearby the conductive body. In this study, the basic features of the coplanar and coaxial coils are studied. The validity of the simplifying assumptions for the governing field equations is investigated. It is found that, for operating frequency of 100 …

Reflective Remote Method Invocation, George K. Thiruvathukal, Lovely S. Thomas, Andy T. Korczynski

Computer Science: Faculty Publications and Other Works

Remote Method Invocation (RMI) is available in the current Java language design and implementation, providing the much-needed capability of allowing objects running in different Java processes to collaborate using a variation on the popular Remote Procedure Call (RPC).

Although RMI provides features which are desirable for high-performance distributed computing, its design and implementation are deficient in key areas of importance to the high-performance computing community in general. This paper addresses the key deficiencies of RMI and how these deficiencies affect the design and implementation of distributed object applications.

Reflective RMI (RRMI) is an open RMI implementation which makes better use …

Java Grande Forum Report: Making Java Work For High-End Computing, George K. Thiruvathukal

Computer Science: Faculty Publications and Other Works

This document describes the Java Grande Forum and includes its initial deliverables.Theseare reports that convey a succinct set of recommendations from this forum to SunMicrosystems and other purveyors of Java™ technology that will enable GrandeApplications to be developed with the Java programming language.

Wide-Area Implementation Of The Message Passing Interface, Ian Foster, Jonathan Geisler, William Gropp, Nicholas Karonis, Ewing Lusk, George K. Thiruvathukal, Steven Tuecke

Computer Science: Faculty Publications and Other Works

The Message Passing Interface (MPI) can be used as a portable, high-performance programming model for wide-area computing systems. The wide-area environment introduces challenging problems for the MPI implementor, due to the heterogeneity of both the underlying physical infrastructure and the software environment at different sites. In this article, we describe an MPI implementation that incorporates solutions to these problems. This implementation has beenconstructed by extending the Argonne MPICH implementation of MPI to use communicationservices provided by the Nexus communication library and authentication, resource allocation, process creation/management, and information services provided by the I-Soft system (initially) and the Globus metacomputing toolkit …

A Transaction Model For Mobile Computing, Sanjay Kumar Madria, Bharat Bhargava

Computer Science Faculty Research & Creative Works

We introduce a prewrite operation before a write operation in a mobile transaction to improve data availability. A prewrite operation does not update the state of a data object but only makes visible the value that the data object will have after the commit of the transaction. Once the transaction has read all the values and declares all the prewrites, it can precommit at a mobile host. The remaining transaction's execution is shifted to the stationary host. Writes on a database consume both time and resources at the stationary host and are therefore delayed. A pre-committed transaction's prewrite values are …

An Interlibrary Loan System On The World Wide Web, Schubert Shou Boon Foo, Ee Peng Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Inter-Library Loan (ILL) service is one of the services provided by libraries that offers users a way to access library resources beyond their affiliated libraries. Additionally, it allows participating libraries to share and maximize their resources. This work examines the ILL process used by libraries in Singapore and proposes that the existing paper-based manual system be replaced by a Web-based ILL system. Such a Web-based system has been successfully designed and implemented at the Nanyang Technological University. The paper presents an overview of the system requirements and architecture, implementation details and demonstrates the feasibility and advantages of the new system.

Java, Java, Java, Chaman Sabharwal

Computer Science Faculty Research & Creative Works

Everyone is talking about Java. The driving force for this chatter is Java''s simplicity and potential power. Java is programming language, and a language for the intranet and the World Wide Web (WWW). Java is a Write On one platform and Run on Many platforms (WORM) language. For network-friendly, platform-independent applications, Java (originally Oak) is an object oriented programming language. Java source code is compiled into a virtual machine code or bytecode. This makes the Java platform independent. It can be placed on a Web site, and executed on the client side on a PC-Intel, Mac, Motorola or UNIX-Solaris machine …

Database Security: Evaluation Of A Multi-Policy Access Control Model, Fei Dong

Dissertations and Theses @ UNI

As an increasing number of organizations become dependent on access to their data stored in the database, the need for adequate security measures is becoming more and more critical. Enforcing data protection means safeguarding data from unauthorized or improper disclosures or modifications. Access control policies should be independent of the mechanisms that will implement the physical control of access: this allows control mechanism to be available for different policies. Although considerable work was done on access control models and related mechanisms for databases (Castano & Fugini, 1994), current access control models and mechanisms are not flexible enough to meet the …

Network Security: An Evaluation Of Security Policies And Firewall Implementations, Melanie L. Abbas

Dissertations and Theses @ UNI

This paper begins focusing on network security issues. The areas of physical security, access security, and connection security are explored. Connection security provides the biggest need for improvement in the entire security field. This type of security is managed best with firewall implementations. Various firewall models are discussed.

Software evaluations were performed on three different commercial Internet security tools. The software was compared on the basis of ease of installation, functionality, level of security provided, and output available. In summary, the value of the firewall is dependent on the need to implement a firewall in an organization.

However, a security …

User Response And Organisational Fit For Information Systems In Earth Observation, Jeff Kingwell

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

A group of seventy six scientists and data managers in the Australian research agency CSIRO were surveyed to establish their needs and preferences in relation to information systems for Earth observation data. After study of available alternatives, three prototype Earth observation information management systems were installed and the user response was evaluated through interview of fifteen of the group. The prototypes consisted of web-based client servers which permitted users to interrogate databases of Earth observation datasets; to search for information about sensor or satellite performance, and to retrieve data and information products. The chosen systems were CILS, the CEOS (Committee …

An Alternative Method For Determining Adjusted Function Points As The Basis For Software Cost Estimating, William Alexander Eldred

Engineering Management & Systems Engineering Theses & Dissertations

As software costs become an increasingly higher percentage of total computer system costs, it becomes increasingly more important for software development managers to have the ability to predict development costs with reasonable accuracy early in the software development cycle. Software development cost estimates are based in large measure on software size. Function points are considered by many to be a de facto industry standard as a size metric. The function points technique, unlike lines-of-code, can be applied early in the software development cycle and is language independent. Critics claim that the function point “value adjustment factor,” which purports to capture …

Buckets: Aggregative, Intelligent Agents For Publishing, Michael L. Nelson, Kurt Maly, Stewart N. T. Shen, Mohammad Zubair

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Buckets are an aggregative, intelligent construct for publishing in digital libraries. The goal of research projects is to produce information. This information is often instantiated in several forms, differentiated by semantic types (report, software, video, datasets, etc.). A given semantic type can be further differentiated by syntactic representations as well (PostScript version, PDF version, Word version, etc.). Although the information was created together and subtle relationships can exist between them, different semantic instantiations are generally segregated along currently obsolete media boundaries. Reports are placed in report archives, software might go into a software archive, but most of the data and …

Creating A Canonical Scientific And Technical Information Classification System For Ncstrl+, Melissa E. Tiffany, Michael L. Nelson

Computer Science Faculty Publications

The purpose of this paper is to describe the new subject classification system for the NCSTRL+ project. NCSTRL+ is a canonical digital library (DL) based on the Networked Computer Science Technical Report Library (NCSTRL). The current NCSTRL+ classification system uses the NASA Scientific and Technical (STI) subject classifications, which has a bias towards the aerospace, aeronautics, and engineering disciplines. Examination of other scientific and technical information classification systems showed similar discipline-centric weaknesses. Traditional, library-oriented classification systems represented all disciplines, but were too generalized to serve the needs of a scientific and technically oriented digital library. Lack of a suitable existing …

Parametric Software Project Estimating: An Analysis Of Current Practice, Stuart Hope

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

As society and the world economy moves into the second millennium. the service industries involving knowledge workers will continue to increase. Software is the enabling technology that is driving the knowledge industry. As the development of software is mostly a design process, where new artefacts are conceived and built, the prediction of outcomes in the process is fraught with difficulties. Software project estimating is one of the essential Software Engineering techniques that will enable the rationalisation of decision-making regarding software development. Estimates that are more accurate will increase the probability of success and lower the risk. This thesis analyses the …