Digital Commons Network^™

Applications Of Advanced Software Techniques To Internet And Www Server Development, John A. Brosnan

Theses

We are living in an information age. Never before has so much data been globally available and instantaneously accessible. The main reason for this revolution is the arrival of the Internet; or perhaps more accurately, the World Wide Web(WWW). This thesis discusses the development of Internet and WWW servers and the latest Web technologies including Java, CORBA and Object Databases. It presents the fundamental concepts of server development and aims to study in particular dynamic WWW servers providing multimedia content. From the viewpoint of interoperability, the CORBA multimedia standard is reviewed. The various mechanisms of data storage and retrieval for …

Revenue Equivalence Of Leveled Commitment Contracts, Tuomas Sandholm, Yunhong Zhou

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

In automated negotiation systems consisting of self-interested agents, contracts have traditionally been binding. Leveled commitment contracts - i.e. contracts where each party can decommit by paying a predetermined penalty - were recently shown to improve expected social welfare even if agents decommit insincerely in Nash equilibrium. Such contracts differ based on whether agents have to declare their decommitting decisions sequentially or simultaneously, and whether or not agents have to pay the penalties if both decommit. For a given contract, these protocols lead to different decommitting thresholds and probabilities. However, this paper shows that, surprisingly, each protocol leads to the same …

Bargaining With Deadlines, Tuomas Sandholm, Nir Vulkan

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

This paper analyzes automated distributive negotiation where agents have firm deadlines that are private information. The agents are allowed to make and accept offers in any order in continuous time. We show that the only sequential equilibrum outcome is the one where the agents wait until the first deadline, at which point that agent concedes everything to the other. This holds for pure and mixed strategies. So, interestingly, rational agents can never agree to a nontrivial split because offers signal enough weakness of bargaining power (early deadline) so that the recipient should never accept. Similarly, the offerer knows that it …

Pattern Matching Techniques And Their Applications To Computational Molecular Biology - A Review, Eric C. Rouchka

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

Pattern matching techniques have been useful in solving many problems associated with computer science, including data compression (Chrochemore and Lecroq, 1996), data encryption (RSA Laboratories, 1993), and computer vision (Grimson and Huttenlocher, 1990). In recent years, developments in molecular biology have led to large scale sequencing of genomic DNA. Since this data is being produced in such rapid fasion, tools to analyze DNA segments are desired. The goal here is to discuss various techniques and tools for solving various pattern matching questions in computational biology, including optimal sequence alignment, multiple sequence alignment, and buidling models to describe sequence families using …

The Design And Performance Of A Pluggable Protocols Framework For Object Request Broker Middleware, Fred Kuhns, Carlos O'Ryan, Douglas C. Schmidt, Jeff Parsons

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

To be an effective platform for performance-sensitive real-time and embedded applications, off-the-shelf OO middleware like CORBA, DCOM, and Java RMI must preserve communication-layer quality of service (QoS) properties to applications end-to-end. However, conventional OO middleware interoperability protocols, such as CORBA's GIOP/IIOP or DCOM's MS-RPC, are not well suited for applications that cannot tolerate the message footprint size, latency, and jitter associated with general-purpose messaging and transport protocols. It is essential, therefore, to develop standard plugable protocols frameworks that allow custom messaging and transport protocols to be configured flexibly and used transparently by applications. This paper provides three contributions to research …

A Rapid Development Of Dependable Applications In Ad Hoc Mobility, Amy L. Murphy

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

Advances in wireless communication and network computing technologies make possible new kinds of applications involving transient interactions among physical components that move across a wide range of spaces, from the confines of a room to the airspace across an ocean, and require no fixed networking infrastructure to communicate with one another. Such components may come together to form ad hoc networks for the purpose of exchanging information or in order to engage in cooperative task-oriented behaviors. Ad hoc networks are assembled, reshaped and taken apart as components move in and out of communication range; all interactions are transient; computations become …

Optimal Flow Aggregation, Subhash Suri, Tuomas Sandholm, Priyank Warkhede

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

Current IP routers are stateless: they forward individual packets based on the destination address contained in the packet header, but maintain no information about the application or flow to which a packet belongs. This stateless service model works well for best effort datagram delivery, but is grossly inadequate for applications that require quality of service guarantees, such as audio, video, or IP telephony. Maintaining state for each flow is expensive because the number of concurrent flows at a router can be in the hundreds of thousands. Thus, stateful solutions such as Intserv (integrated services) have not been adopted for their …

Commbench - A Telecommunications Benchmark For Network Processors, Tilman Wolf, Mark Franklin

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

This paper presents a benchmark, CommBench, for use in evaluating and designing telecommunications network processors. The benchmark applications focus on small, computationally intense program kernels typical of the network processor environment. The benchmark is composed of eight programs, four of them oriented towards packet header processing and four oriented towards data stream procesing. The benchmark is defined and various characteristics of the benchmark are presented. These include instruction frequencies, computational complexity, and cache performance. These measured characteristics are compared to the SPEC benchmark which has traditionally been used in evaluating workstation processors. Three examples are presented indicating how CommBench can …

Tracking Mobile Units For Dependable Message Delivery, Amy L. Murphy, Gruia-Catalin Roman, George Varghese

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

As computing components get smaller and people become accustomed to having computational power at their disposal at any time, mobile computing is developing as an important research area. One of the fundamental problems in mobility is maintaining connectivity through message passing as the user moves through the network. An approach to this is to have a single home node constantly track the current location of the mobile unit and forward messages to this location. One problem with this approach is that during the update to the home agent after movement, messages are often dropped, especially in the case of frequent …

Performance Surface Prediction For Wan-Based Clusters, Mark J. Clement, J. Kelly Flanagan, Glenn M. Judd, Bryan S. Morse, Joy L. Peterson

Faculty Publications

The last five years have been a period of exponential growth in the number of machines connected to the Internet and the speed at which these machines communicate. The infrastructure is now in place to consider a nationwide cluster of workstations as a viable parallel processing platform. In order to achieve acceptable performance on this kind of a machine, performance prediction tools must provide information on where to place computational objects. Incorrect object placement can result in poor performance and congestion in the network. This research develops a new paradigm for predicting performance in the Wide Area Network (WAN) based …

Codes, Correlations And Power Control In Ofdm, James A. Davis, Jonathan Jedwab, Kenneth G. Paterson

Department of Math & Statistics Faculty Publications

Practical communications engineering is continually producing problems of interest to the coding theory community. A recent example is the power-control problem in Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM). We report recent work which gives a mathematical framework for generating solutions to this notorious problem that are suited to low-cost wireless applications. The key result is a connection between Golay complementary sequences and Reed-Muller codes. The former are almost ideal for OFDM transmissions because they have a very low peak-to-mean envelope power ratio (PMEPR), while the latter have efficient encoding and decoding algorithms and good error correction capability. This result is then …

Making Sharing Pervasive: Ubiquitous Computing For Shared Note Taking, James A. Landay, Richard C. Davis

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

As a variety of low-cost note-taking devices becomes pervasive, shared notes can help work groups better communicate ideas and information. To explore this idea further, we carried out three related case studies of how members of a large research group shared meeting notes. The group found value in combining personal notes and presentation slides with a single, unifying document, such as regular meeting minutes. The minutes provided structure when there were too many sources of notes. We used this insight in our design of NotePals, a note-sharing system with a lightweight process, an interface, and hardware that distinguish it from …

Determination Of The Lep Centre-Of-Mass Energy From Zγ Events, R. Barate, Manoj Thulasidas

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

A study of events with photons and missing energy has been performed with the data sample obtained with the ALEPH detector at centre-of-mass energies from 161 to 184 GeV, corresponding to a total integrated luminosity of about 80 pb−1. The measured distributions are in agreement with Standard Model predictions, leading to constraints on WWγ gauge coupling parameters ∆κγ and λγ. The results from the fit to the cross sections and to the energy and angular distributions of the photons are: ∆κγ = 0.05+1.15 −1.10(stat)±0.25(syst) λγ = −0.05+1.55 −1.45(stat)±0.30(syst).

Search For Charginos And Neutralinos In E+E- Collisions At Centre-Of-Mass Energies Near 183 Gev And Constraints On The Mssm Parameter Space, R. Barate, M. Thulasidas

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Searches for charginos and neutralinos are performed with the data collected by the ALEPH detector at LEP at centre-of-mass energies near 183 GeV. In these searches, it is assumed that R-parity is conserved and that the lightest neutralino is the LSP. No evidence of a signal is observed in the 57 pb−1−1 accumulated, which excludes chargino and associated neutralino production up to the kinematic limit over large regions of the MSSM parameter space. Under the assumptions of common gaugino and common sfermion masses at the unification scale, the interplay between the chargino, neutralino and slepton exclusion limits allows a lower …

Electronic Data Interchange : Its Benefits In Trade Activities For Developing Countries, Luis E. Nova [Morel]

World Maritime University Dissertations

No abstract provided.

Hey, You Got Your Language In My Operating System!, Jon Howell, Mark Montague

Computer Science Technical Reports

Several projects in the operating systems research community suggest a trend of convergence among features once divided between operating systems and languages. We describe how partial evaluation and transformational programming systems apply to this trend by providing a general framework for application support, from compilation to run-time services. We contend that the community will no longer think of implementing a static collection of services and calling it an operating system; instead, this general framework will allow applications to be flexibly configured, and the ``operating system'' will simply be the application support that is supplied at run-time.

Snowflake: Spanning Administrative Domains, Jon Howell, David Kotz

Computer Science Technical Reports

Many distributed systems provide a ``single-system image'' to their users, so the user has the illusion that they are using a single system when in fact they are using many distributed resources. It is a powerful abstraction that helps users to manage the complexity of using distributed resources. The goal of the Snowflake project is to discover how single-system images can be made to span administrative domains. Our current prototype organizes resources in namespaces and distributes them using Java Remote Method Invocation. Challenging issues include how much flexibility should be built into the namespace interface, and how transparent the network …

Optimizing Amplifier Placements In A Multiwavelength Optical Lan/Man: The Unequally Powered Wavelengths Case, Byrav Ramamurthy, Jason Iness, Biswanath Mukherjee

School of Computing: Faculty Publications

Optical networks based on passive-star couplers and employing WDM have been proposed for deployment in local and metropolitan areas. These networks suffer from splitting, coupling, and attenuation losses. Since there is an upper bound on transmitter power and a lower bound on receiver sensitivity, optical amplifiers are usually required to compensate for the power losses mentioned above. Due to the high cost of amplifiers, it is desirable to minimize their total number in the network. However, an optical amplifier has constraints on the maximum gain and the maximum output power it can supply; thus, optical amplifier placement becomes a challenging …

Fan-Type Conditions For Collapsible Graphs, Zhi-Hong Chen

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

No abstract provided.

A Portable, Object-Oriented Library For Neural Network Simulation, Martin P. Franz

Masters Theses

A portable, object-oriented library for simulation of general Multi-layer Feedforward Neural Networks (MLFNs) is described. Unlike all-encompassing neural network simulation environments, the library was designed to allow convenient use in existing programs and in applications where training and testing data are generated using separate, often complex simulations.

The library' s design goals include modularity, portability, efficiency, correctness, compactness, and type-safety. To demonstrate how these objectives are met, competing architectural choices are presented, along with the criteria used for determining the strategy actually implemented. Sample applications using the library are presented, showing how the library' s class files are used in …

Closed-Loop Object Recognition Using Reinforcement Learning, Jing Peng, Bir Bhanu

Department of Computer Science Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Current computer vision systems whose basic methodology is open-loop or fi'/tertype typically use image segmentation followed by object recognition algorithms. These systems are not robust for most real-world applications. In contrast the system presented here achieves robust performance by using reinforcement learning to induce a mapping from input images to corresponding segmentation parameters. This is accomplished by using the confidence level of model matching as a reinforcement signal for a team of learning automata to search for segmentation parameters during training. The use of the recognition algorithm as part of the evaluation function for image segmentation gives rise to significant …

Wright State University College Of Engineering And Computer Science Bits And Pcs Newsletter, Volume 14, Number 9, December 1998, 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.

A Web-Based Prototype For Afit Edplan Administration, Tien-Chen Lee

Theses and Dissertations

This document details the design, development, and evaluation of a prototype course registration and reporting system for the students and faculty of the United States Air Force Institute of Technology. The web-based system provides HTML-based client interfaces and Active Server Page server processes for interaction with the relational databases used to manage course and personnel data. The system prototype was developed following the "Engineering Software Components for Web-Database Access" methodology of Dipiro. A survey of modern web-based database access techniques is first provided and Dipiro's methodology is reviewed as background. The remainder of the document details the application of the …

Measurement Of Triple Gauge Wwγ Couplings At Lep2 Using Photonic Events, R. Barate, Manoj Thulasidas

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

A study of events with photons and missing energy has been performed with the data sample obtained with the ALEPH detector at centre-of-mass energies from 161 to 184 GeV, corresponding to a total integrated luminosity of about 80 pb−1. The measured distributions are in agreement with Standard Model predictions, leading to constraints on WWγ gauge coupling parameters Δκγ and λγ. The results from the fit to the cross sections and to the energy and angular distributions of the photons are: Δκγ=0.05+1.15−1.10(stat)±0.25(syst), λγ=−0.05+1.55−1.45(stat)±0.30(syst).

Tuple Source Relational Model: A Source-Aware Data Model For Multidatabases, Ee Peng Lim, Roger Hsiang-Li Chiang, Yinyan Cao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In some integration projects, complete integration of database instances may not be necessary. It may also be too costly and impossible to do so due to poor local data quality and insufficient instance-level knowledge. In this research, we study how multidatabases with global schemas should be represented and manipulated when the data instances from the local databases do not require to be fully integrated. We propose the tuple source (TS) relational model to represent multidatabases under such an integration requirement. This model extends the classical relational model by augmenting every relation with a source attribute to identify the local database …

Xcert Software, Inc., Keng Siau

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The case on Xcert Software, Inc., illustrates the operational and strategic issues encountered by a startup IT company in the Internet security business. Xcert faces difficulty in a number of areas: (1) finances, (2) future direction and leadership, (3) organizational structure, experience and size, and (4) marketing. This is a discussion case that introduces students to the competitive world of Internet business and provides them an opportunity to discuss and debate the myriad issues facing the founders of Xcert.

Methodology And Theory Building In Mis Research, Nancy Lightner, Fiona Fui-Hoon Nah

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper reports on the stage of maturity of MIS research according to the McGrath (1979) model, as evidenced by the theory building occurring in two top MIS research journals. While MIS as a discipline continues to grow, its development depends on establishing a cumulative tradition of good research (Keen 1980). Of the published papers surveyed that are relevant to theory building, 81% of them relate to theory development, while 18% address theory testing. Of the papers involving data collection, more than half use field studies as the methodology. In order to advance MIS as a mature field, it is …

Development Of An Operations Research Software Package For Army Divisions, Blane C. Wilson

Theses and Dissertations

There exists great potential for applying operations research techniques to solve specific problems in the areas of operations, installation support, and training at the Army division level. Because of the operational tempo of today's active-duty and reserve component units, command must focus on accomplishing the daily missions. Also, due their limited knowledge of the field, planners may not be aware of how operations research can be used to enhance planning and operations. Time, training funds, resources, safety, personnel, and equipment are all critical factors in this process. Operations research techniques could be used to improve division-level operations by saving time, …

The Simulation, Modeling And Analysis Of Wireless Local Area Networks Supporting The Ieee 802.11 Standard, Jaikwan Joo

Theses and Dissertations

Research to improve the performance of the IEEE 802.11 has been ongoing since 1990. The focus of this research has investigated the use of the MAC and Physical layers for improving throughput. An adaptive MAC protocol, CATER (Code Adapts To Enhance Reliability) is based on the proposed MAC standard for wireless local area networks (WLAN)-802. 11. IEEE 802.11 uses a fixed Pseudo-Noise (PN) code for spreading the information signal, implying a fixed process gain at the receiver. When the channel degrades, IEEE 802.11 offers only retransmissions at the MAC layer to contend with the corrupted medium. However, CATER allows communicating …

A Work Minimization Approach To Image Morphing, Peisheng Gao, Thomas W. Sederberg

Faculty Publications

An algorithm is presented for morphing two images, often with little or no user interaction. For two similar images (such as different faces against a neutral background) the algorithm generally can create a pleasing morph completely automatically. The algorithm seeks the minimum work to deform one image into the other, where work is a function of the amount of warping and recoloration. A hierarchical method for finding a minimal work solution is invoked. Anchor point constraints are satisfied by imposing penalties on deformations that disobey these constraints. Good results can be obtained in less than ten seconds for 256 x …