Digital Commons Network^™

The Photo-Realistic Afit Virtual Cockpit, Milton E. Diaz

Theses and Dissertations

The Air Force Institute of Technology (AFIT) has pursued research in virtual environments since 1988. This research expands the current capabilities of the AFIT Virtual Cockpit (VC) by increasing the realism of the cockpit environment and improving the pilot's command interface. Realism is improved creating console elements from texture maps and polygonal models; these elements include working dials, switches and circuit breakers. The pilot command interface is improved in part by adapting the AFIT Information Pod using a two-dimensional mouse input to the virtual three-dimensional environment. This immersive virtual environment is also improved by modifications to the Head Mounted Display …

Predicting Protein Structure Using Parallel Genetic Algorithms, George H. Gates Jr.

Theses and Dissertations

The protein folding problem is a biochemistry Grand Challenge problem. The challenge is to reliably predict natural three-dimensional structures of polypeptides. Genetic algorithms (GAs) are robust, semi-optimal search techniques modeling natural evolutionary processes. Fast messy GAs (fmGAs) are variants of messy GAs that reduce the exponential time complexity to polynomial. This investigation evaluates the merits of parallel SGAs and fmGAs for minimizing the potential energy of a pentapeptide, (Met)-enkephalin. AFIT's energy model is compared to a similar model in a commercial package called QUANTA. Differences between the two models are identified and resolved to enhance GAs' abilities to correctly fold …

Enhanced Visual User Interface Support For Domain-Oriented Application Composition Systems, Richard A. Guinto

Theses and Dissertations

This research refined the functionality and usability of a previously developed visual interface for a domain-oriented application composition system. The refinements incorporated more sophisticated user interface design concepts1 to reduce user workload. User workload was reduced through window reordering, menu redesign, and Human Computer Interaction techniques such as; combining repetitive procedures into single commands, reusing composition information whenever possible and deriving new information from existing information. The Software Refinery environment, including its visual interface tool INTERVISTA, was used to develop techniques for visualizing and manipulating objects contained in a formal knowledge base of objects. The interface was formally validated with …

1.1, Yolanda Jones

E-lert

No abstract provided.

A Data-Parallel Programming Library For Education (Dapple), David Kotz

Computer Science Technical Reports

In the context of our overall goal to bring the concepts of parallel computing into the undergraduate curriculum, we set out to find a parallel-programming language for student use. To make it accessible to students at all levels, and to be independent of any particular hardware platform, we chose to design our own language, based on a data-parallel model and on C++. The result, DAPPLE, is a C++ class library designed to provide the illusion of a data-parallel programming language on conventional hardware and with conventional compilers. DAPPLE defines Vectors and Matrices as basic classes, with all the usual C++ …

Multimedia Authoring, Development Environments, And Digital Video Editing, Fillia Makedon, James W. Matthews, Charles B. Owen, Samuel A. Rebelsky

Dartmouth Scholarship

Multimedia systems integrate text, audio, video, graphics, and other media and allow them to be utilized in a combined and interactive manner. Using this exciting and rapidly developing technology, multimedia applications can provide extensive benefits in a variety of arenas, including research, education, medicine, and commerce. While there are many commercial multimedia development packages, the easy and fast creation of a useful, full-featured multimedia document is not yet a straightforward task.

This paper addresses issues in the development of multimedia documents, ranging from user-interface tools that manipulate multimedia documents to multimedia communication technologies such as compression, digital video editing and …

Wright State University College Of Engineering And Computer Science Bits And Pcs Newsletter, Volume 10, Number 9, November 1994, College Of Engineering And Computer Science, Wright State University

BITs and PCs Newsletter

A fourteen page newsletter created by the Wright State University College of Engineering and Computer Science that addresses the current affairs of the college.

Design And Implementation Of Tools To Increase User Control And Knowledge Elicitation In A Virtual Battlespace, Jim J. Rohrer

Theses and Dissertations

AFIT's Synthetic BattleBridge is an immersive command observatory for viewing large-area activity within a virtual environment. Three basic areas for improvement are addressed: (1) an improved, immersive, user interface, (2) direct control of atmospheric effects, and (3) improved knowledge elicitation by means of remote viewers, a new space scope, and an enhanced RADAR scope. These requirements are analyzed and implemented. Some functionality was lost but the results show a general improvement of environmental control and knowledge elicitation.

An Office Document Retrieval System With The Capability Of Processing Incomplete And Vague Queries, Qianhong Liu

Dissertations

TEXPROS (TEXt PROcessing System) is an intelligent document processing system. The system is a combination of filing and retrieval systems, which supports storing, classifying, categorizing, retrieving and reproducing documents, as well as extracting, browsing, retrieving and synthesizing information from a variety of documents. This dissertation presents a retrieval system for TEXPROS, which is capable of processing incomplete or vague queries and providing semantically meaningful responses to the users. The design of the retrieval system is highly integrated with various mechanisms for achieving these goals. First, a system catalog including a thesaurus is used to store the knowledge about the database. …

1.0, Yolanda Jones

E-lert

No abstract provided.

Cognitive Engineering For Intelligent Man-Machine Systems, Erika Rogers

Computer Science and Software Engineering

This paper discusses a methodology for cognitive engineering which provides a framework for the cognitive studies→intelligent system development→cognitive studies cycle. The methodology has been developed to address the problem of providing knowledge-based cooperative assistance in visual reasoning tasks, and is discussed in terms of its impact on three different application domains: diagnostic radiology, geographical information systems, and tele-assisted robot supervision.

The "Infoharness" Information Integration Platform, Leon Shklar, Satish Thatte, Howard Marcus, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

The "InfoHarness" information integration platform, tools, and services being developed at Bellcore are aimed at providing integrated and rapid access to huge amounts of heterogeneous information independent of the type, representation, and location of information. InfoHarness provides advanced search and browsing capabilities without imposing the burden of restructuring, reformatting or relocating information on information suppliers or creators. This is achieved through object-oriented encapsulation of information and the associated meta-information (e.g., type, location, access rights, owner, creation date, etc.). The meta-information extraction methods ensure rapid and largely automatic creation of information repositories. A gateway that supports access to InfoHarness repositories from …

Wright State University College Of Engineering And Computer Science Bits And Pcs Newsletter, Volume 10, Number 8, October 1994, College Of Engineering And Computer Science, Wright State University

BITs and PCs Newsletter

An eight page newsletter created by the Wright State University College of Engineering and Computer Science that addresses the current affairs of the college.

Does Pedagogy Make A Difference?: An Experimental Study Of Unethical Behavior In Information Systems, Deepak Khazanchi

Information Systems and Quantitative Analysis Faculty Publications

Jn the past few years ethics education has received increasing attention from the business and academic communities. Many have instituted pedagogical programs for increasing awareness of ethical issues, ethical norms and codes of conduct in different professions. It appears that both researchers and practitioners are in agreement about the need for providing adequate ethics education to managers (13, 20, 9). This has become especially important in the context of the information systems (IS) discipline. Proliferation of information and communication technologies has raised many questions on what constitutes ethical managerial behavior. Researchers have reported that the existence of a computer-based information …

Improved Algorithms For Bipartite Network Flow, Ravindra K. Ahuja, James B. B. Orlin, Clifford Stein, Robert E. Tarjan

Dartmouth Scholarship

In this paper, network flow algorithms for bipartite networks are studied. A network G = (V,E) is called bipartite if its vertex set V can be partitioned into two subsets V_1 and V_2 such that all edges have one endpoint in V_1 and the other in $V_2 $. Let $n = |V|, n_1 = |V_1 | , n_2 = |V_2 |, m = |E| and assume without loss of generality that n_1 \leqslant n_2. A bipartite network is called unbalanced if n_1 \ll n_2 $ and balanced otherwise. (This notion is necessarily imprecise.) It is shown that several maximum flow …

Wright State University College Of Engineering And Computer Science Bits And Pcs Newsletter, Volume 10, Number 7, September 1994, College Of Engineering And Computer Science, Wright State University

BITs and PCs Newsletter

An eight page newsletter created by the Wright State University College of Engineering and Computer Science that addresses the current affairs of the college.

Science Pad: An Intelligent Electronic Notepad For Ubiquitous Scientific Computing, Anupam Joshi, Sanjiva Weerawarana, Tzvetan T. Drashansky, Elias N. Houstis

Department of Computer Science Technical Reports

No abstract provided.

Problem Solving Environments For Partial Differential Equation Based Applications (Ph.D. Thesis), Sanjiva Weerawarana

Department of Computer Science Technical Reports

No abstract provided.

Optimum Symbol-By-Symbol Detection Of Uncoded Digital Data Over The Gaussian Channel With Unknown Carrier Phase, Pooi Yuen Kam, Seng Siew Ng, Tock Soon Ng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

A theory of optimum receiver design for symbol-by-symbol detection of an uncoded digital data sequence received over the Gaussian channel with unknown carrier phase is presented. Linear suppressed-carrier modulation is assumed. The work here aims at laying a conceptual foundation for optimum symbol-by-symbol detection, and rectifies existing approaches to the problem. The optimum receiver structure is obtained explicitly for an arbitrary carrier phase model, but its computational requirements are too heavy in general for any practical implementation. In one important special case, namely, the case in which the carrier phase can be treated as a constant over some K+1 symbol …

Metrics To Evaluate Academic Departments, John R. Rice

Department of Computer Science Technical Reports

No abstract provided.

Automated Manpower Rostering: Techniques And Experience, C. M. Khoong, Hoong Chuin Lau, L. W. Chew

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We present ROMAN, a comprehensive, generic manpower rostering toolkit that successfully handles a wide spectrum of work policies found in service organizations. We review the use of various techniques and methodologies in the toolkit that contribute to its robustness and efficiency, and relate experience gained in addressing manpower rostering problems in industry.

Wright State University College Of Engineering And Computer Science Bits And Pcs Newsletter, Volume 10, Number 6, June 1994, 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.

Feature And Model Selection In Feedforward Neural Networks, Jean M. Steppe

Theses and Dissertations

This research advances feature and model selection for feedforward neural networks. Feature selection involves determining a good feature subset given a set of candidate features. Model selection involves determining an appropriate architecture number of middle nodes for the neural network. Specific advances are made in neural network feature saliency metrics used for evaluating or ranking features, statistical identification of irrelevant noisy features, and statistical investigation of reduced neural network architectures and reduced feature subsets. New feature saliency metrics are presented which provide a more succinct quantitative measure of a features importance than other similar metrics. A catalogue of feature saliency …

Searching For Plans Using A Hierarchy Of Learned Macros And Selective Reuse, Douglas E. Dyer

Theses and Dissertations

This research presents a new approach to improving the performance of a macro planner: selective reuse. In macro planning, reuse can result in poorer performance than when planning with only primitive operators, a phenomenon that has been called the utility problem. The utility problem arises because the benefits of reuse are outweighed by the cost of retrieving a macro to reuse and the cost of searching through the larger search space caused by considering reuse candidates. Selective reuse contains the expansion of the search space by limiting the number of reuse candidates considered and limits the search required by considering …

Extracting Parallelism At Compile-Time Through Dependence Analysis & Cloning Techniques In An Object-Based Paradigm, Binoy Ravindran

Theses

The construct of Abstract Data Type (ADT) modules and Abstract Data Object (ADO) modules supported by most object-based languages are a great source for developing reusable code. To improve the run time performance of such object-based programs, we consider the asynchronous remote procedure call (ARPC) model of parallel execution, in which concurrency is achieved by having the caller and the callee (which are module instances) running on different processors. Frequently, an ADT module is needed simultaneously by other modules, thus causing contention. To resolve this, we clone the module instance in demand and distribute the copies across different processors, so …

Wright State University College Of Engineering And Computer Science Bits And Pcs Newsletter, Volume 10, Number 5, May 1994, College Of Engineering And Computer Science, Wright State University

BITs and PCs Newsletter

A twelve page newsletter created by the Wright State University College of Engineering and Computer Science that addresses the current affairs of the college.

Creation And Simulation Of A Model For A Discrete Time Buffer System With Interrupted Poisson Arrivals And Uncorrelated Server Interruptions, Susanne Naegele-Jackson

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

A mathematical model for a discrete-time buffer system with both arrival and server interruptions is developed. In this model fixed-size packets arrive at the buffer according to a Poisson distribution and are stored there until they can be transmitted over the output channel. Service times are constant and the buffer is assumed to be of infinite size. Both arrival stream as well as the service of the packets are subjected to random interruptions described by Bernoulli processes, where the interruption process of the Poisson input stream is uncorrelated to the interruptions of the output line. Expressions are derived for the …

A Software Platform For Integrating Symbolic Computation With A Pde Solving Environment, Sanjiva Weerawarana, Elias N. Houstis, John R. Rice

Department of Computer Science Technical Reports

No abstract provided.

Classification Characteristics Of Som And Art2, J. Aleshunas, D. St. Clair, W. Bond

Computer Science Technical Reports

Artificial neural network algorithms were originally designed to model human neural activities. They attempt to recreate the processes involved in such activities as learning, short term memory, and long term memory. Two widely used artificial neural network algorithms are the Self-Organizing Map (SOM) and the Adaptive Resonance Theory (ART2). Each was designed to simulate a particular biological neural activity. Both can be used as unsupervised data classifiers.

This paper compares performance characteristics of two unsupervised artificial neural network architectures; the SOM and the ART2 networks. The primary factors analyzed were classification accuracy, sensitivity to data noise, and sensitivity to the …

Managing Memory For Real-Time Queries, Hwee Hwa Pang, Michael J. Carey, Miron Livny

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The demanding performance objectives that real-time database systems (RTDBS) face necessitate the use of priority resource scheduling. This paper introduces a Priority Memory Management (PMM) algorithm that is designed to schedule queries in RTDBS. PMM attempts to minimize the number of missed deadlines by adapting both its multiprogramming level and its memory allocation strategy to the characteristics of the offered workload. A series of simulation experiments confirms that PMM's admission control and memory allocation mechanisms are very effective for real-time query scheduling.