Digital Commons Network^™

A Study Of The Approaches And Attitudes Of Information Systems Executives To Measuring Information Systems Effectiveness, Falantina Tjakra

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

The purpose of the research is to examine the attitudes of IS executives to the current and future importance of some of the approaches to measuring IS efficiency and IS effectiveness in large Australian organisations. The study identified the nature of IS effectiveness approaches along the lines of whether they are business-oriented, IS internal/operational, financial, quantitative or qualitative measures. It also examined whether the structure of the IS management and industry sector had an effect on attitudes towards these measures.

Software Metrics For Monitoring Software Engineering Projects, Edwin C. Lim

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

As part of the undergraduate course offered by Edith Cowan University, the Department of Computer Science has (as part of a year's study) a software engineering group project. The structure of this project was divided into two units, Software Engineering l and Software Engineering 2. ln Software Engineering 1, students were given the group project where they had to complete and submit the Functional Requirement and Detail System Design documentation. In Software Engineering 2, students commenced with the implementation of the software, testing and documentation. The software was then submitted for assessment and presented to the client. To aid the …

Merlin's Magic Square Enhanced, Gary R. Greenfield

Department of Math & Statistics Technical Report Series

This paper first considers questions about games related to Merlin's Magic Square from the point of view of group actions. At this juncture, little beyond the formal model is new, but the exposition sets the stage for considering certain "enhanced" versions of these games. The analysis of enhanced games, with the aid of semigroup actions, is carried out in complete detail for an ostensibly simpler (k = 3) game before turning to a Merlin ( k = 4) game. Concluding sections discuss various ways to generalize our games.

To review the solution to Merlin's Magic Square, we begin by introducing …

Skin Cancer Diagnosis Using Hierarchical Neural Networks And Fuzzy Logic, Hsi-Chieh Lee

Masters Theses

"Skin cancer, the most common cancer in the United States that affects about 600,000 Americans every year, accounts for 1 % of all cancer deaths. Among all, Malignant Melanoma is the most virulent form of skin cancer that is responsible for 75% of all deaths from skin cancer. In 1992, approximately 32,000 people are expected to develop melanoma and about 6,700 will die. However, even malignant melanoma can be treated successfully if detected in the early phase. Therefore, our research goal is to diagnose skin cancer, especially malignant melanoma.

In this study, only the digitized images obtained from color tumor …

Reconstruction Of Surfaces And Surfaces- On-Surfaces From Unorganized Weighted Points, Chandrajit L. Bajaj, Fausto Bernardini, Guoliang Xu

Department of Computer Science Technical Reports

No abstract provided.

Edge Weight Reduction Problems In Directed, Acyclic Graphs, Susanne E. Hambrusch, Hung-Yi Tu

Department of Computer Science Technical Reports

No abstract provided.

Sbl- The Structural Biology Language, Marius A. Cornea-Hasegan, Dan C. Marinescu

Department of Computer Science Technical Reports

No abstract provided.

Smooth Low Degree Approximations Of Polyhedra, Chandrajit L. Bajaj, Jindon Chen, Guoliang Xu

Department of Computer Science Technical Reports

No abstract provided.

On The Three Diumensionality Of Motion Correspondence, Anupam Joshi, Zygmunt Pizlo

Department of Computer Science Technical Reports

No abstract provided.

Maintaining Consistency In Multidatabase Systems: A Comprehensive Study, Aidong Zhang, Bharat K. Bhargava

Department of Computer Science Technical Reports

No abstract provided.

Principles And Realization Strategies Of Intregrating Autonomous Software Systems: Extension Of Multidatabase Transaction Management Techniques, Aidong Zhang, Bharat Bhargava

Department of Computer Science Technical Reports

No abstract provided.

General Interior Hermite Collocation Methods For Second Order Elliptic Partial Differential Equations, Yu-Ling Lai, Apostolos Hadjidimos, Elias N. Houstis, John R. Rice

Department of Computer Science Technical Reports

No abstract provided.

Recognizing Plants Using Stochastic L-Systems, Ashok K. Samal, Brian Peterson, David J. Holliday

School of Computing: Conference and Workshop Papers

Recognizing naturally occurring objects has been a difficult task in computer vision. One of the keys to recognizing objects is the development of a suitable model. One type of model, the fractal, has been used successfully to model complex natural objects. A class of fractals, the L-system, has not only been used to model natural plants, but has also aided in their recognition. This research extends the work in plant recognition using L-systems in two ways. Stochastic L-systems are used to model and generate more realistic plants. Furthermore, to handle the complexity of recognition, a learning system is used that …

Issues And Obstacles With Multimedia Authoring, Fillia Makedon, Samuel A. Rebelsky, Matthew Cheyney, Charles Owen, Peter Gloor

Dartmouth Scholarship

Unlike traditional authoring, multimedia authoring involves making hard choices, forecasting technological evolution and adapting to software and hardware technology changes. It is, perhaps, an unstable field of endeavor for an academic to be in. Yet, it is important that academics are, in fact, part of this process. This paper discusses some of the common threads shared by three dissimilar cases of multimedia authoring which we have experimented with, that of multimedia conference proceedings, multimedia courseware development and multimedia information kiosks. We consider these applications from an academic point of view and review the benefits and pitfalls of academic development while …

Disk-Directed I/O For Mimd Multiprocessors, David Kotz

Dartmouth Scholarship

Many scientific applications that run on today's multiprocessors are bottlenecked by their file I/O needs. Even if the multiprocessor is configured with sufficient I/O hardware, the file-system software often fails to provide the available bandwidth to the application. Although libraries and improved file-system interfaces can make a significant improvement, we believe that fundamental changes are needed in the file-server software. We propose a new technique, \em disk-directed I/O, that flips the usual relationship between server and client to allow the disks (actually, disk servers) to determine the flow of data for maximum performance. Our simulations show that tremendous performance gains …

Introducing Objects And Parallelism To An Imperative Programming Language, Atanas Radenski

Mathematics, Physics, and Computer Science Faculty Articles and Research

The problem of enhancing objects with parallelism has been in the focus of numerous research projects in the recent years, but a satisfactory and commonly accepted solution has not appeared yet. A major problematic point seems to be providing inheritance for parallel objects. The general objective of this paper is to contribute to a better understanding of the language design issues in the area of parallel object-oriented programming (OOP) and, in particular, to design a framework for parallel OOP with multiple inheritance. What makes our proposed framework different from the other parallel OOP languages is its easy to use and …

World Wide Web Implementation Of The Langley Technical Report Server, Michael L. Nelson, Gretchen L. Gottlich, David J. Bianco

Computer Science Faculty Publications

On January 14, 1993, NASA Langley Research Center (LaRC) made approximately 130 formal, 'unclassified, unlimited' technical reports available via the anonymous FTP Langley Technical Report Server (LTRS). LaRC was the first organization to provide a significant number of aerospace technical reports for open electronic dissemination. LTRS has been successful in its first 18 months of operation, with over 11,000 reports distributed and has helped lay the foundation for electronic document distribution for NASA. The availability of World Wide Web (WWW) technology has revolutionized the Internet-based information community. This paper describes the transition of LTRS from a centralized FTP site to …

Electronic Document Distribution: Design Of The Anonymous Ftp Langley Technical Report Server, Michael L. Nelson, Gretchen L. Gottlich

Computer Science Faculty Publications

An experimental electronic dissemination project, the Langley Technical Report Server (LTRS), has been undertaken to determine the feasibility of delivering Langley technical reports directly to the desktops of researchers worldwide. During the first six months, over 4700 accesses occurred and over 2400 technical reports were distributed. This usage indicates the high level of interest that researchers have in performing literature searches and retrieving technical reports at their desktops. The initial system was developed with existing resources and technology. The reports are stored as files on an inexpensive UNIX workstation and are accessible over the Internet. This project will serve as …

Distributed-Memo: Heterogeneously Concurrent Programming With A Shared Directory Of Unordered Queues, William T. O'Connell, George K. Thiruvathukal, Thomas W. Christopher

Computer Science: Faculty Publications and Other Works

Heterogeneously distributed and parallel computing environments are highly dependent on hardware, data migration, and protocols. The result is significant difficulty in software reuse, portability across platforms, and an increased overall development effort. The appearance of a shared directory of unordered queues can be provided by integrating heterogeneous computers transparently. This integration provides a conducive environment for parallel and distributed application development, by abstracting the issues of hardware and communication. Object oriented technology is exploited to provide this seamless environment.

Distributed Memo: A Heterogeneously Distributed And Parallel Software Development Environment, William T. O'Connell, George K. Thiruvathukal, Thomas W. Christopher

Computer Science: Faculty Publications and Other Works

Heterogeneously distributed and parallel computing environments are highly dependent on hardware, data migration, and protocols. The result is significant difficulty in software reuse, portability across platforms, and an increased overall development effort. The appearance of a shared directory of unordered queues can be provided by integrating heterogeneous computers transparently. This integration provides a conducive environment for parallel and distributed application development, by abstracting the issues of hardware and communication. Object oriented technology is exploited to provide this seamless environment.

A Generic Software Modeling Framework For Building Heterogeneous Distributed And Parallel Software Systems, William T. O'Connell, George K. Thiruvathukal, Thomas W. Christopher

Computer Science: Faculty Publications and Other Works

Heterogeneous distributed and parallel computing environments are highly dependent on hardware and communication protocols. The result is significant difficulty in software reuse, portability across platforms, interoperability, and an increased overall development effort. A new systems engineering approach is needed for parallel processing systems in heterogeneous environments. The generic modeling framework de-emphasizes platform- specific development while exploiting software reuse (and platform-specific capabilities) with a simple, well defined, and easily integrated set of abstractions providing a high level of heterogeneous interoperability.

Managing Risks In Information Technology Projects, Boon Siong Neo, Kwong Sin Leong

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

The development and implementation of IT (Information Technology) projects are plagued with problems of cost and time overruns. technical inadequacy, inability to meet user requirements. lack of utilization. and failure to achieve anticipated benefits. These problems occur to some projects and not to others because I) IT projects have different profiles of risk. and 2) IT project risks have been managed more or less effectively. This paper synthesizes the literature into four classes of risks. and applies it to evaluate TradeNet. an EDLbased trading system implemented in Singapore in I989. Through a case study of TradeNet. we derived a typology …

Learning One-Dimensional Geometric Patterns Under One-Sided Random Misclassification Noise, Paul W. Goldberg, Sally A. Goldman

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

Developing the ability to recognize a landmark from a visual image of a robot's current location is a fundamental problem in robotics. We consider the problem of PAC-learning the concept class of geometric patterns where the target geometric pattern is a configuration of k points on the real line. Each instance is a configuration of n points on the real line, where it is labeled according to whether or not it visually resembles the target pattern. To capture the notion of visual resemblance we use the Hausdorff metric. Informally, two geometric patterns P and Q resemble each othe runder the …

Learning From A Consistently Ignorant Teacher, Michael Frazier, Sally Goldman, Nina Mishra, Leonard Pitt

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

One view of computational learning theory is that of a learner acquiring the knowledge of a teacher. We introduce a formal model of learning capturing the idea that teachers may have gaps in their knowledge. The goal of the learner is still to acquire the knowledge of the teacher, but now the learner must also identify the gaps. This is the notion of learning from a consistently ignorant teacher. We consider the impact of knowledge gaps on learning, for example, monoton DNF and d-dimensional boxes, and show that leraning is still possible. Negatively, we show that knowledge gaps make learning …

Production Quality Video Over Broadband Networks: A Description Of The System And Two Interactive Applications, William D. Richard, Jerome R. Cox Jr., A. Maynard Engebretson, Jason Fritts And Brian L. Gottlieb And Craig Horn

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

The Washington University MultiMedia eXplorer (MMX) is a complete, host-independent multimedia system capable of transmitting and receiving JPEG-compressed video, CD-quality audio, and high-resolution radiographic images over the Washington University broadband ATM network. If the host is equipped with an ATM interface card, normal network traffic can be supported via an ATM extension port on the MMX. The major components of the MMX are an ATMizer and three multimedia channels. The ATMizer implements the host interface, the interface to the ATM network, and hte interface to the three multimdeia channels. This paper describes the architecture of the MMX, the software used …

An Application-Oriented Error Control Scheme For High Speed Networks, Fengmin Gong, Gurudatta Parulkar

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

Many new network applications demand interprocess communication (IPC) services that are not supported by existing transport protocol mechanisms. Large bandwidth-delay products of high-speed networks also render the existing control mechanisms such as flow and error control less efficient. In particular, new error control schemes that can provide variable degrees of error recovery according to the applications requirements are needed. This paper presents the design, evaluation, and implementation of an application-oriented error control scheme that is aimed at supporting efficient IPC in high-speed networking environments. Our results show that the proposed error control scheme allows effective control of trade-off between the …

An Incremental Distributed Algorithm For Computing Biconnected Components, Bala Swaminathan, Kenneth J. Goldman

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

This paper describes a distributed algorithm for computing the biconnected components of a dynamically changing graph. Our algorithm has a worst case communication complexity of O(b + c) messages for an edge insertion and O(b' + c) messages for an edge removal, and a worst case time complexity of O(c) for both operations, where c is the maximum number of biconnected components in any of the connected components during the operation, b is the number of nodes in the biconnected component containing the new edge, and bprime is the number of nodes in the biconnected component in which the update …

Visual Presentation Of Software Specifications And Designs, Gruia-Catalin Roman, Delbert Hart, Charles Calkins

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

Formal methods hold the promise for high dependability in the design of critical software. However, software engineers who employ formal methods need to communicate their design decisions to users, customers, managers, and collegues who may not be in a position to acquire a full understanding of the formal notation being used. Visualizations derived from formal specifications and designs must be able to convey the required information precisely and reliably without the use of formal notation. This paper discusses a design methodology which attempts to integrate a design methodology based upon specification and program refinement with a state-of-the-art approach to rapid …

Distributed Multimedia Systems Research Prospectus, Jonathan Turner

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

Distributed multimedia computing and communiation systems combine computer systems, networks and distributed software to facilitate applications that enable and enhance collaborative work, direct interpersonal communication, remote access to information and real-time presentation of information from a variety of sources. Over the next decade, we expect such systems to become central to the infrastructure of our increasingly information-driven society. This prospectus describes a program of research being pursued within the Computer and Communications Research Center of Washington University and the Departments of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering. This program seeks to promote the creation of effective distributed multimedia systems and develop …

Connection Management In Reconfigurable Distributed Systems, Bala Swaminathan

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

The Programmer's Playground takes a new approach to simplifying and supporting the construction of distributed applications. The approach, called I/O abstraction, separates the description of a system's communication structure from the descriptions of its computational components so that software modules written in existing programming languages cna be integrated flexibly and dynamically by both programmers and end-users. This separation is achieved by estabishing logical connectinos among the data interfaces of independent software modules. The logical connections provide a uniform high-level view of communication for both discrete and continuous data. The I/O abstraction approach inherits ideas from the I/O automaton model, a …