Digital Commons Network^™

Almost Block Diagonal Linear Systems: Sequential And Parallel Solution Techniques, And Applications, P. Amodio, J.R. Cash, G. Roussos, R.W. Wright, G. Fairweather, I. Gladwell, G.L. Kraut, M. Paprzycki

Faculty Publications

Almost block diagonal (ABD) linear systems arise in a variety of contexts, specifically in numerical methods for two-point boundary value problems for ordinary differential equations and in related partial differential equation problems. The stable, efficient sequential solution of ABDs has received much attention over the last fifteen years and the parallel solution more recently. We survey the fields of application with emphasis on how ABDs and bordered ABDs (BABDs) arise. We outline most known direct solution techniques, both sequential and parallel, and discuss the comparative efficiency of the parallel methods. Finally, we examine parallel iterative methods for solving BABD systems. …

Roughening, Deroughening, And Nonuniversal Scaling Of The Interface Width In Electrophoretic Deposition Of Polymer Chains, Frank W. Bentrem, Ras B. Pandey, Fereydoon Family

Faculty Publications

Growth and roughness of the interface of deposited polymer chains driven by a field onto an impenetrable adsorbing surface are studied by computer simulations in (2 + 1) dimensions. The evolution of the interface width W shows a crossover from short-time growth described by the exponent beta(1) to a long-time growth with exponent beta(2) (>beta(1)) Tne saturated width increases, i.e., the interface roughens, with the molecular weight L-c, but the roughness exponent alpha (from W-s similar to L-alpha) becomes negative in contrast to models for particle deposition; cr depends on the chain length-a nonuniversal scaling with the substrate length …

Path Planning For Planar Articulated Robots Using Configuration Spaces And Compliant Motion, Elisha Sacks

Department of Computer Science Technical Reports

No abstract provided.

Routing Optimization Through Computer-Aided Simulation, Madhusudhan Akundi

Electrical & Computer Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Routing has always been a challenging field, and the various techniques of mathematics and operations research have been developed. For commercial organizations, routing has begun to receive extensive attention because of the savings gained in terms of time, money, personnel, and the transportation fleet by developing optimized routing networks. Until recently, it was difficult to develop optimized networks due to the computational difficulties of the problem. However, with the advancement in computer technology and processing speeds, it has become possible to simulate a large number of routing scenarios and determine optimal solutions for a given set of constraints. Not only …

Design Of Adaptive Sliding Mode Fuzzy Control For Robot Manipulator Based On Extended Kalman Filter, Abdelrahman Aledhaibi

Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering Theses & Dissertations

In this work, a new adaptive motion control scheme for robust performance control of robot manipulators is presented. The proposed scheme is designed by combining the fuzzy logic control with the sliding mode control based on extended Kalman filter. Fuzzy logic controllers have been used successfully in many applications and were shown to be superior to the classical controllers for some nonlinear systems. Sliding mode control is a powerful approach for controlling nonlinear and uncertain systems. It is a robust control method and can be applied in the presence of model uncertainties and parameter disturbances, provided that the bounds of …

A Flowchart Structure For Modification Of A Modsim Process Model, Murali K. Adatrao

Electrical & Computer Engineering Theses & Dissertations

There are many software processes and software development models that support the development of a software model prior to implementation. However, more often than not, these practices are not followed resulting in a lack of documentation of the intended functionality of the software. As a result, software often becomes a black box for later developers. Even a simple bug fix can turn into an exhaustive task for the developers, as they must attempt to infer the intended system behavior. New designers cannot make any changes to the software or extend the software behavior, as the underlying model within the software …

Trading Risk In Mobile-Agent Computational Markets, Jonathan Bredin, David Kotz, Daniela Rus

Dartmouth Scholarship

Mobile-agent systems allow user programs to autonomously relocate from one host site to another. This autonomy provides a powerful, flexible architecture on which to build distributed applications. The asynchronous, decentralized nature of mobile-agent systems makes them flexible, but also hinders their deployment. We argue that a market-based approach where agents buy computational resources from their hosts solves many problems faced by mobile-agent systems. \par In our earlier work, we propose a policy for allocating general computational priority among agents posed as a competitive game for which we derive a unique computable Nash equilibrium. Here we improve on our earlier approach …

Buckets: Smart Objects For Digital Libraries, Michael L. Nelson

Computer Science Theses & Dissertations

Discussion of digital libraries (DLs) is often dominated by the merits of various archives, repositories, search engines, search interfaces and database systems. While these technologies are necessary for information management, information content and information retrieval systems should progress on independent paths and each should make limited assumptions about the status or capabilities of the other. Information content is more important than the systems used for its storage and retrieval. Digital information should have the same long-term survivability prospects as traditional hardcopy information and should not be impacted by evolving search engine technologies or vendor vagaries in database management systems.

Digital …

The Complexity Of Planning With Partially-Observable Markov Decision Processes, Martin Mundhenk

Computer Science Technical Reports

This work surveys results on the complexity of planning under uncertainty. The planning model considered is the partially-observable Markov decision process. The general planning problems are, given such a process, (a) to calculate its performance under a given control policy, (b) to find an optimal or approximate optimal control policy, and (c) to decide whether a good policy exists. The complexity of this and related problems depend on a variety of factors, including the observability of the process state, the compactness of the process representation, the type of policy, or even the number of actions relative to the number of …

Personal Radio, John C. Artz Jr

Dartmouth College Undergraduate Theses

With the development of new technologies that allow the broadcast of digital data over radio signals, there are many possibilities for improving upon the traditional radio station model for content delivery. The idea of Personal Radio is a system that tailors content to meet the needs of each individual. Using Global Positioning System (GPS) technology to play location specific content, the listening history to play content an appropriate number of times, and user feedback to learn personal preferences, the Personal Radio provides the listener with the content that is the most useful/interesting to them. This paper will examine the general …

An Economic Cpu-Time Market For D'Agents, Ezra E.K. Cooper

Dartmouth College Undergraduate Theses

A usable and efficient resource-management system has been created for use with D'Agents. The software dynamically negotiates a price rate for CPU time, using the competitive bids of mobile agents that offer currency in return for fast computation. The system allows mobile agents to plan their expenditures across many hosts while minimizing the time needed for their tasks. The ability to price CPU time opens the door for service owners to be compensated for the computation consumed by agents and provides an incentive for servers to allow anonymous agents. We discuss the theoretical background which makes a CPU market system …

Registration Of Images With Dissimilar Contrast Using A Hybrid Method Employing Correlation And Mutual Information, Karolyn A. Abram

Dartmouth College Undergraduate Theses

The problem of fitting one image into another is commonly called "registration." Finding the best possible translation and rotation necessary to align two images is one approach to solving this problem. Registration is a crucial component of many remote sensing and medical image interpretation applications. Image alignment techniques aid in volumetric estimations of complicated structures and allow radiologists to accurately identify changes between sequential images. Radiologists require image alignment capabilities to correct for patient motion and/or content displacement between images. Numerous image registration techniques exist for correcting the alignment problems mentioned above. Unfortunately, most of these techniques, such as Correlation, …

Depth From Flash, David B. Martin

Dartmouth College Undergraduate Theses

Digital camera technology has recently seen substantial improvements in image quality while lower prices have made it affordable to the average consumer. Camera manufacturers, however, are not taking full advantage of this new medium for image capture. By filtering the already digitized image produced by these cameras through on-board image processing algorithms we can dramatically increase the power of digital cameras. For example, according to experts in the photographic industry, most people simply take bad pictures. Classic examples of this phenomenon are photographs taken indoors with a point-and-shoot style camera using its built-in flash. The subjects of these photographs often …

Hybrid Probabilistic Programs, Alex Dekhtyar, V. S. Subrahmanian

Computer Science and Software Engineering

The precise probability of a compound event (e.g. e1 V e2,e1 Ʌ e2) depends upon the known relationships (e.g. independence, mutual exclusion, ignorance of any relationship, etc.) between the primitive events that constitute the compound event. To date, most research on probabilistic logic programming has assumed that we are ignorant of the relationship between primitive events. Likewise, most research in AI (e.g. Bayesian approaches) has assumed that primitive events are independent. In this paper, we propose a hybrid probabilistic logic programming language in which the user can explicitly associate, with any given probabilistic strategy, a conjunction and disjunction operator, and …

On-Line Bayesian Speaker Adaptation By Using Tree-Structured Transformation And Robust Priors, Shaojun Wang, Yunxin Zhao

Kno.e.sis Publications

This paper presents new results by using our previously proposed on-line Bayesian learning approach for affine transformation parameter estimation in speaker adaptation. The on-line Bayesian learning technique allows updating parameter estimates after each utterance and it can accommodate flexible forms of transformation functions as well as prior probability density functions. We show through experimental results the robustness of heavy tailed priors to mismatch in prior density estimation. We also show that by properly choosing the transformation matrices and depths of hierarchical trees, recognition performance improved significantly.

Aspects Of Information Flow, Andrew P. Black, Jonathan Walpole

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

Along with our colleagues at the Oregon Graduate Institute and Georgia Institute of Technology, we have recently been experimenting with real-rate systems, that is, systems that are required to move data from one place to another at defined rates, such as 30 items per second. Audio conferencing or streaming video systems are typical: they are required to deliver video or audio frames from a source (a server or file system) in one place to a sink (a display or a sound generator) in another; the frames must arrive periodically, with constrained latency and jitter. We have successfully built such systems …

Wright State University College Of Engineering And Computer Science Bits And Pcs Newsletter, Volume 16, Number 6, June 2000, 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.

Some Applications Of The Ultrapower Theorem To The Theory Of Compacta, Paul Bankston

Mathematics, Statistics and Computer Science Faculty Research and Publications

The ultrapower theorem of Keisler and Shelah allows such model-theoretic notions as elementary equivalence, elementary embedding and existential embedding to be couched in the language of categories (limits, morphism diagrams). This in turn allows analogs of these (and related) notions to be transported into unusual settings, chiefly those of Banach spaces and of compacta. Our interest here is the enrichment of the theory of compacta, especially the theory of continua, brought about by the importation of model-theoretic ideas and techniques.

Learning Languages And Functions By Erasing, Sanjay Jain, Efim Kinber, Steffen Lange, Rolf Wiehagen, Thomas Zeugmann

School of Computer Science & Engineering Faculty Publications

Learning by erasing means the process of eliminating potential hypotheses from further consideration thereby converging to the least hypothesis never eliminated. This hypothesis must be a solution to the actual learning problem. The capabilities of learning by erasing are investigated in relation to two factors: the choice of the overall hypothesis space itself and what sets of hypotheses must or may be erased. These learning capabilities are studied for two fundamental kinds of objects to be learned, namely languages and functions. For learning languages by erasing, the case of learning indexed families is investigated. A complete picture of all separations …

Equity Of Access: Adaptive Technology, Frances Grodzinsky

School of Computer Science & Engineering Faculty Publications

In this age of information technology, it is morally imperative that equal access to information via computer systems be afforded to people with disabilities. This paper addresses the problems that computer technology poses for students with disabilities and discusses what is needed to ensure equity of access, particularly in a university environment.

An Improved Algorithm For Translating Relational Schemas Into An Object Model, Joseph C. Pearson

Theses and Dissertations

Today's war fighter is inundated with data from numerous Command, Control, Communications and Computers and Intelligence systems. Integration of these systems is desirable, yet integration results in a static solution to a dynamic problem-by the time a global schema can be devised, it is out of date. Automating schema integration will mitigate this problem, but data model disparity must be addressed via translation to a common data model prior to integration. To address this requirement, this thesis presents an improved, relational to object-oriented schema translation algorithm, which is derived from a base algorithm proposed by another research effort. The improved …

Hiding Association Rules By Using Confidence And Support, Elena Dasseni, Vassilios S. Verkios, Ahmed K. Elmagarmid, Elisa Bertino

Department of Computer Science Technical Reports

No abstract provided.

Scalable Web Server Clustering Technologies, Trevor Schroeder, Steve Goddard, Byrav Ramamurthy

School of Computing: Faculty Publications

The exponential growth of the Internet, coupled with the increasing popularity of dynamically generated content on the World Wide Web, has created the need for more and faster Web servers capable of serving the over 100 million Internet users. Server clustering has emerged as a promising technique to build scalable Web servers. In this article we examine the seminal work, early products, and a sample of contemporary commercial offerings in the field of transparent Web server clustering. We broadly classify transparent server clustering into three categories.

Motion Characterization By Temporal Slices Analysis, Chong-Wah Ngo, Ting-Chuen Pong, Hong-Jiang Zhang, Roland T. Chin

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper describes an approach to characterize camera and object motions based on the analysis of spatio temporal image volumes. In the spatio-temporal slices of image volumes, motion is depicted as oriented patterns. We propose a tensor histogram computation algorithm to represent these oriented patterns. The motion trajectories in a histogram are tracked to describe both the camera and object motions. In addition, we exploit the similarity of the temporal slices in a volume to reliably partition a volume into motion tractable units.

Multicast Internet Protocol, X. K. Wang, Robert H. Deng, Feng Bao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we first review the existing IPv4 based multicast protocols and identify their shortcomings. We then proposed a new multicast protocol, called Multicast Internet Protocol (MIP), which is both scalable and flexible. The design principle of MIP is fundamentally different from the existing IPv4 based multicast protocols. The issues related to MIP routing and implementations are also studied in this paper.

Re-Engineering Structures From Web Documents, Moh Chuang Hue, Ee Peng Lim, Wee-Keong Ng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

To realize a wide range of applications (including digital libraries) on the Web, a more structured way of accessing the Web is required and such requirement can be facilitated by the use of XML standard. In this paper, we propose a general framework for reverse engineering (or re-engineering) the underlying structures i.e.,the DTD from a collection of similarly structured XML documents when they share some common but unknown DTDs. The essential data structures and algorithms for the DTD generation have been delveloped and experiments on real Web collections have been conducted to demonstrate their feasibilty. In addition, we also proposed …

Dtd-Miner: A Tool For Mining Dtds From Xml Documents, Moh Chuang Hue, Ee Peng Lim, Wee-Keong Ng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

XML documents are semistructured and the structure of the documents is embedded in the tags. Although XML documents can be accompanied by a DTD that defines the structure of the documents, the presence of a DTD is not mandatory. The difficulty in deriving the DTD for XML documents lies in the fact that DTDs are of different syntax as XML and that prior knowledge of the structure of the documents is required. In this paper, we introduce DTD-Miner, an automatic structure-mining tool for XML documents. Using a Web-based interface, the user will be able to submit a set of similarly …

Sisl: Several Interfaces, Single Logic, Thomas Ball, Christopher P. Colby, Peter Danielsen, Lalita Jategaonkar Jagadeesan, Radhakrishnan Jagadeesan, Konstantin Laufer, Peter Mataga, Kenneth Rehor

Computer Science: Faculty Publications and Other Works

Modern interactive services such as information and e-commerce services are becoming increasingly more flexible in the types of user interfaces they support. These interfaces incorporate automatic speech recognition and natural language understanding, and include graphical user interfaces on the desktop and web-based interfaces using applets and HTML forms. To what extent can the user interface software be decoupled from the service logic software (the code that defines the essential function of a service)? Decoupling of user interface from service logic directly impacts the flexibility of services, or, how easy they are to modify and extend. To explore these issues, we …

Intelligent Selection 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. This demonstration provides a means for participants to experience the dynamic nature of these tools.

Justifying Electronic Banking Network Expansion Using Real Option Pricing: An Empirical Illustration, Michel Benaroch, Robert J. Kauffman

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The application of real options analysis to information technology investment evaluation problems recently has been proposed in the IS literature (Chalasani et al. 1997; Dos Santos 1991; Kambil et al. 1993; Kumar 1996; Taudes 1998). The research reported on in this paper illustrates the value of applying real options analysis in the context of a case study involving the deployment of point-of-sale (POS) debit services by the Yankee 24 shared electronic banking network of New England. In the course of so doing, the paper also attempts to operationalize real options analysis concepts by examining claimed strengths of this analysis approach …