Digital Commons Network^™

Disseminating Usability Design Knowledge Through Ontology-Based Pattern Languages, Scott Henninger, Padmapriya Ashokkumar

School of Computing: Technical Reports

Usability patterns represent knowledge about known ways to design graphical user interfaces that are usable and meet the needs and expectations of users. There is currently a plethora of usability patterns published in books, private repositories and the World-Wide Web. The dominance of pattern discovery efforts has neglected the emerging need to organize the patterns so they can become a proactive resource for developing interfaces. This paper presents an approach using Semantic Web concepts that turns informal patterns into formal representations capable of supporting systematic design methods. Through this method, loosely coupled pattern collections can be turned into strongly coupled …

Dcdp: A Novel Data-Centric And Design-Pattern Based Approach To Automatic Loop Transformation And Parallelization For A Shared-Object Environment In Clusters, Xuli Liu, Hong Jiang, Leen-Kiat Soh

School of Computing: Technical Reports

Most of the parallelism associated with scientific/numeric applications exists in the form of loops, and thus transforming loops has been extensively studied in the past, especially in the areas of programming languages and compiler designs. Almost all the existing transformation approaches are control-centric, in which the transformation process starts from partitioning the iteration space, followed by the decomposition of the data space only as a side-effect. Originally designed for shared-memory multi-processors, these control-centric approaches might not be suitable under some circumstances for current loosely-coupled clusters and the Grid with physically distributed memories. In this paper, we introduce a novel data-centric …

Survivable Waveband Switching In Wdm Mesh Networks Under Dedicated Path-Protection, Mengke Li, Byrav Ramamurthy

School of Computing: Conference and Workshop Papers

This paper considers the problem of dedicated path-protection in wavelength-division multiplexed (WDM) mesh networks with waveband switching functionality under shared risk link group (SRLG) constraints. Two dedicated path protection schemes are proposed, namely the PBABL scheme and the MPABWL scheme. The PBABL scheme protects each working waveband-path through a backup waveband-path. The MPABWL scheme protects each working waveband-path by either a backup waveband-path or multiple backup lightpaths. Heuristic algorithms adopting random optimization technique are proposed for both the schemes. The performance of the two protection schemes is studied and compared. Simulation results show that both the heuristics can obtain optimum …

Terminator Or Super Mario: Human/Computer Hybrids, Actual And Virtual, Noreen L. Herzfeld

Theology Faculty Publications

Is a human/computer hybrid feasible: If so, in what ways would such hybridization affect our concept of what it means to be human? There are two forms of such hybridization, the actual and the virtual. Actual hybridization involves the implantation of mechanical devices in the human body. In actual hybridization the computer comes to us and to our body to enhance our functioning in our world. In virtual hybridization we go to the computer, projecting our minds into the world of cyberspace and being formed there. Perhaps the most common form of virtual hybridization is the immersion our children experience …

Gridbased Collaboration In Interactive Data Language Applications, Minjun Wang, Geoffrey C. Fox, Marlon Pierce

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science - All Scholarship

Interactive Data Language (IDL) is an array-oriented data analysis and visualization application, which is widely used in research, commerce, and education. It is meaningful to make user IDL applications collaborative between computers over networks, using a common message broker as the underlying communication system. In order to achieve the global collaboration, we have brought together in the research a Grid-based Collaboration paradigm, a Shared Event model, different implementing structures, methodologies and technologies. We have succeeded in our prototype codes, and we are currently working on a real life IDL application package to make it collaborative. At the same time, we …

Support For High Performance Real-Time Collaboration Within The Naradabrokering Substrate, Shrideep Pallickara, Hasan Bulut, Pete Burnap, Geoffrey C. Fox, Ahmet Uyar, David Walker

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science - All Scholarship

The requirements for collaborative services, especially pertaining to order and delivery, are quite different compared to traditional distributed applications. The NaradaBrokering messaging substrate enables scalable, fault-tolerant, distributed interactions between entities, and is based on the publish/subscribe paradigm. The substrate also incorporates support for Grid and Web Service. More recently, we have incorporated services within the substrate which enable us to facilitate richer collaborative interactions. In this paper, we outline our rationale for incorporating these services and how these services interact with each other. We have conducted experiments related to profiling these services, and also on the performance and scaling of …

The Edam Project: Mining Atmospheric Aerosol Datasets, Raghu Ramakrishnan, James J. Schauer, Lei Chen, Zheng Huang, Martin M. Shafer, Deborah S. Gross, David R. Musicant

Chemistry Faculty Work

Data mining has been a very active area of research in the database, machine learning, and mathematical programming communities in recent years. EDAM (Exploratory Data Analysis and Management) is a joint project between researchers in Atmospheric Chemistry and Computer Science at Carleton College and the University of Wisconsin-Madison that aims to develop data mining techniques for advancing the state of the art in analyzing atmospheric aerosol datasets. There is a great need to better understand the sources, dynamics, and compositions of atmospheric aerosols. The traditional approach for particle measurement, which is the collection of bulk samples of particulates on filters, …

Optimal Scheduling In A Queue With Differentiated Impatient Users, Amy Csizmar Dalal, Scott Jordan

Computer Science Faculty Work

We consider a M/M/1 queue in which the average reward for servicing a job is an exponentially decaying function of the job’s sojourn time. The maximum reward and mean service times of a job are i.i.d. and chosen from arbitrary distributions. The scheduler is assumed to know the maximum reward, service rate, and age of each job. We prove that the scheduling policy that maximizes average reward serves the customer with the highest product of potential reward and service rate.

Geographic Routing In Social Networks, David Liben-Nowell, Jasmine Novak, Ravi Kumar, Prabhakar Raghavan, Andrew Tomkins

Computer Science Faculty Work

We live in a ‘‘small world,’’ where two arbitrary people are likely connected by a short chain of intermediate friends. With scant information about a target individual, people can successively forward a message along such a chain. Experimental studies have verified this property in real social networks, and theoretical models have been advanced to explain it. However, existing theoretical models have not been shown to capture behavior in real-world social networks. Here, we introduce a richer model relating geography and social-network friendship, in which the probability of befriending a particular person is inversely proportional to the number of closer people. …

Guest Editorial: Special Issue On Software, Maintenance And Evolution, Panos K. Linos

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

Software maintenance and evolution continues to play a vital role in the development of software systems. It is widely acknowledged that the majority of development effort, and thereby expenditure, is allocated to postinitial release activity. This activity, which takes place after the software has seen its first release, is known as software maintenance (or software evolution).

Epics: A Service Learning Program At Butler University, Jonathan P. Sorenson, Panos K. Linos

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

In this paper we present our experiences teaching EPICS (Engineering Projects In Community Service) at Butler University, a small, private university, from within the Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering. The EPICS program began at Purdue University in 1995. The idea behind EPICS is to have undergraduate students earn college credit for working on long-term, multi-semester projects to benefit charity and non-profit organizations. The projects are student-driven, under faculty supervision. There are many good reasons for having an EPICS program in an undergraduate computer science major. It is excellent for leveraging knowledge from other areas of computer science such …

Real-Time Realistic Rendering And High Dynamic Range Image Display And Compression, Ruifeng Xu

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation focuses on the many issues that arise from the visual rendering problem. Of primary consideration is light transport simulation, which is known to be computationally expensive. Monte Carlo methods represent a simple and general class of algorithms often used for light transport computation. Unfortunately, the images resulting from Monte Carlo approaches generally suffer from visually unacceptable noise artifacts. The result of any light transport simulation is, by its very nature, an image of high dynamic range (HDR). This leads to the issues of the display of such images on conventional low dynamic range devices and the development of …

Scene Monitoring With A Forest Of Cooperative Sensors, Omar Javed

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In this dissertation, we present vision based scene interpretation methods for monitoring of people and vehicles, in real-time, within a busy environment using a forest of co-operative electro-optical (EO) sensors. We have developed novel video understanding algorithms with learning capability, to detect and categorize people and vehicles, track them with in a camera and hand-off this information across multiple networked cameras for multi-camera tracking. The ability to learn prevents the need for extensive manual intervention, site models and camera calibration, and provides adaptability to changing environmental conditions. For object detection and categorization in the video stream, a two step detection …

Enhancing Message Privacy In Wired Equivalent Privacy., Darshan Purandare

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The 802.11 standard defines the Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) and encapsulation of data frames. It is intended to provide data privacy to the level of a wired network. WEP suffered threat of attacks from hackers owing to certain security shortcomings in the WEP protocol. Lately, many new protocols like WiFi Protected Access (WPA), WPA2, Robust Secure Network (RSN) and 802.11i have come into being, yet their implementation is fairly limited. Despite its shortcomings one cannot undermine the importance of WEP as it still remains the most widely used system and we chose to address certain security issues and propose some …

Qos In Cognitive Packet Networks: Adaptive Routing, Flow And Congestion Control, Pu Su

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

With the emergence of various applications that have different Quality of Service (QoS) requirements, the capability of a network to support QoS becomes more and more important and necessary. This dissertation explores QoS in Cognitive Packet Networks (CPN) by using adaptive routing, flow and congestion control. We present a detailed description and analysis of our proposed routing algorithms based on single and multiple QoS constraints. An online estimation of packet loss rate over a path is introduced. We implement and evaluate the adaptive routing scheme in an experimental CPN test-bed. Our experiments support our claims that the users can achieve …

Access Games: A Game Theoretic Framework For Fair Bandwidth Sharing In Distributed Systems, Sudipta Rakshit

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In this dissertation, the central objective is to achieve fairness in bandwidth sharing amongst selfish users in a distributed system. Because of the inherent contention-based nature of the distributed medium access and the selfishness of the users, the distributed medium access is modeled as a non-cooperative game; designated as the Access Game. A p-CSMA type medium access scenario is proposed for all the users. Therefore, in the Access Game, each user has two actions to choose from: "transmit" and "wait". The outcome of the Access Game and payoffs to each user depends on the actions taken by all the users. …

Resource Allocation Schemes And Performance Evaluation Models For Wavelength Division Multiplexed Optical Networks, Mounire El Houmaidi

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Wavelength division multiplexed (WDM) optical networks are rapidly becoming the technology of choice in network infrastructure and next-generation Internet architectures. WDM networks have the potential to provide unprecedented bandwidth, reduce processing cost, achieve protocol transparency, and enable efficient failure handling. This dissertation addresses the important issues of improving the performance and enhancing the reliability of WDM networks as well as modeling and evaluating the performance of these networks. Optical wavelength conversion is one of the emerging WDM enabling technologies that can significantly improve bandwidth utilization in optical networks. A new approach for the sparse placement of full wavelength converters based …

Srt Division Algorithms As Dynamical Systems, Mark Mccann, Nicholas Pippenger

All HMC Faculty Publications and Research

Sweeney--Robertson--Tocher (SRT) division, as it was discovered in the late 1950s, represented an important improvement in the speed of division algorithms for computers at the time. A variant of SRT division is still commonly implemented in computers today. Although some bounds on the performance of the original SRT division method were obtained, a great many questions remained unanswered. In this paper, the original version of SRT division is described as a dynamical system. This enables us to bring modern dynamical systems theory, a relatively new development in mathematics, to bear on an older problem. In doing so, we are able …

Efficient Test Compaction For Pseudo-Random Testing, Sheng Zhang, Sharad C. Seth, Bhargab B. Bhattacharya

School of Computing: Conference and Workshop Papers

Compact set of 3-valued test vectors for random pattern resistant faults are covered in multiple test passes. During a pass, its associated test cube specifies certain bits in the scan chain to be held fixed and others to change pseudo-randomly. We propose an algorithm to find a small number of cubes to cover all the test vectors, thus minimizing total test length. The test-cube finding algorithm repeatedly evaluates small perturbations of the current solution so as to maximize the expected test coverage of the cube. Experimental results show that our algorithm covers the test vectors by test cubes that are …

Face Recognition Using Landmark-Based Bidimensional Regression, Jiazheng Shi, Ashok Samal, David Marx

School of Computing: Conference and Workshop Papers

This paper studies how biologically meaningful landmarks extracted from face images can be exploited for face recognition using the bidimensional regression. Incorporating the correlation statistics of landmarks, this paper also proposes a new approach called eigenvalue weighted bidimensional regression. Complex principal component analysis is used for computing eigenvalues and removing correlation among landmarks. We evaluate our approach using two standard face databases: the Purdue AR and the NIST FERET. Experimental results show that the bidimensional regression is an efficient method to exploit geometry information of face images.

Ground Water Monitoring Using Smart Sensors, Srikanth Anumalla, Byrav Ramamurthy, David Gosselin

School of Computing: Conference and Workshop Papers

Groundwater resources are the principal source of drinking water for about 50 percent of the United States population. Groundwater resources in Nebraska are under increasing stress as there is a rapid growth in their usage. Water managers need more timely and accurate data to assess ground-water conditions to manage adverse situations such as drought and loss of pumpage in agriculture and domestic water supply. Currently groundwater researchers use stand-alone data logging equipment which is labor intensive and the method is not easily scalable if the number of logging locations increases. Commercially available real-time data monitoring solutions are either prohibitively costly …

Least-Cost Disjoint Paths With Dependent Cost Structure In Wavelength Continuous Optical Wdm Networks, Ajay Todimala, Byrav Ramamurthy

School of Computing: Conference and Workshop Papers

One of the important issues in establishing a fault tolerant connection in a wavelength division multiplexing optical network is computing a pair of disjoint working and protection paths and a free wavelength along the paths. While most of the earlier research focused only on computing disjoint paths, in this work we consider computing both disjoint paths and a free wavelength along the paths.

The concept of dependent cost structure (DCS) of protection paths to enhance their resource sharing ability was proposed in our earlier work. In this work we extend the concept of DCS of protection paths to wavelength continuous …

Assessing The Cost-Benefits Of Using Type Inference Algorithms To Improve The Representation Of Exceptional Control Flow In Java, Alex Kinneer, Gregg Rothermel

School of Computing: Technical Reports

Accurate representations of program control flow are important to the soundness and efficiency of program analysis and testing techniques. The Java programming language has introduced structured exception handling features that complicate the task of constructing safe and precise representations of the possible control flow in Java programs. Prior work has considered applying various type inference algorithms to exceptions, but has not yet investigated whether the use of higher cost algorithms is necessarily justified. It is important to understand and assess the tradeoffs associated with the use of more powerful yet costly algorithms, thus we conducted an empirical study to evaluate …

Methods For Approximate Reasoning, Perry Groot, Pascal Hitzler, Ian Horrocks, Boris Motik, Jeff Z. Pan, Heiner Stuckenschmidt, Daniele Turi, Holger Wache

Computer Science and Engineering Faculty Publications

This deliverable shows examples about approximating symbolic inference engines in a Semantic Web environment. Approaches of language weakening, knowledge compilation, and approximated deduction are presented. The last one is evaluated in practical applications with mixed results.

Visualizing Very Large-Scale Vascular Structures Interactively, Thomas Wischgoll, Joerg Meyer, Benjamin Kaimovitz, Yoram Lanir, Ghassan S. Kassab

Computer Science and Engineering Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

An Explorational Exhibit Of A Pig's Heart, Thomas Wischgoll, Joerg Meyer

Computer Science and Engineering Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The "Best K" For Entropy-Based Categorical Data Clustering, Keke Chen, Ling Liu

Kno.e.sis Publications

With the growing demand on cluster analysis for categorical data, a handful of categorical clustering algorithms have been developed. Surprisingly, to our knowledge, none has satisfactorily addressed the important problem for categorical clustering – how can we determine the best K number of clusters for a categorical dataset? Since categorical data does not have the inherent distance function as the similarity measure, traditional cluster validation techniques based on the geometry shape and density distribution cannot be applied to answer this question. In this paper, we investigate the entropy property of the categorical data and propose a BkPlot method for determining …

Configuring A Multi-Course Lab For System-Level Projects, Joel C. Adams, David W. Laverell

University Faculty Publications and Creative Works

Having students modify an actual operating system kernel or network protocol stack opens their eyes to what is going on "beneath the hood" of a computer. However student modifications to a system may result in an unstable computer. Because of this, giving students such experience has in the past required a lab and/or computers dedicated to the students in the system-level course, and computer science departments without such dedicated facilities have been unable to provide their students with system-level experience. In this paper, we present two ways of giving students system-level experience in a non-dedicated lab; one using commercial software …

Numerical Modelling Of Sediments In Cork Harbour, Jérémy Pingon

Theses

In recent years there have been considerable developments in the new and emerging field of hydroinformatics. This relatively new discipline is concerned with the application of computer and networking technology for the planning, management and protection of water bodies.

Environmental issues in estuaries require accurate and detailed knowledge of cohesive sediment transport processes to assess different issues including water quality, pollutant dispersion, and dredging and maintenance of navigation channels.

This thesis presents a review of the main sediment properties and processes required for modelling the behaviour and transport of sediments. It also introduces a new approach to sediment properties using …

Building A Declarative Workflow Engine, Patrick Rushe

Theses

In the last two decades, technology has become available that not only allows certain activities of a business process to be automated, but also allows a business process itself to be automatically managed. A Workflow Management System assigns the work, passes it on, and tracks its progress. This technology is called Workflow. Workflow is the automation and formal management of a business process.

Many commercial and open-source Workflow Management Systems are available. However, the cost and technical difficulty in implementing either can be excessively high. The primary contribution of this work is to prove that building a workflow engine is …