Business Commons^™

An Integrated Environment For Problem Solving And Program Development, Fadi Pierre Deek

Dissertations

A framework for an integrated problem solving and program development environment that addresses the needs of students learning programming is proposed. Several objectives have been accomplished: defining the tasks required for program development and a literature review to determine the actual difficulties involved in learning those tasks. A comprehensive Study of environments and tools developed to support the learning of problem solving and programming was then performed, covering programming environments, debugging aids, intelligent tutoring systems, and intelligent programming environments. This was followed by a careful analysis and critique of these systems, which uncovered the limitations that have prevented them from …

The Socio-Economic Role Of Crude Oil In The United States And Finland, Judith Deak Kallo

Theses

Running a company requires daily assessment of opportunities, risks and trends which involve socio-economic changes and scientific uncertainties. Technical-material resources play a major role in the uncertainty of corporate economics. Overproduction combined with increasing efficiencies have resulted in accelerated use and misuse of resources, accompanied by socio-ecological abuses related to wars and pollution. A significant current threat is global warming. As a result of this global challenge several companies have moved towards a more comprehensive environmental business management model. This is seen in corporate management initiating life cycle assessment and risk analysis of their products.

The socio-economic role of crude …

Multi-Wavelength Infrared Imaging Computer Systems And Applications, Jun Li

Dissertations

This dissertation presents the development of three computer systems for multi-wavelength thermal imaging.

Two computer systems were developed for the multi-wavelength imaging pyrometers (M-WIPs) that yield non-contact temperature measurements by remotely sensing the surface of objects with unknown wavelength-dependent emissivity. These M-WIP computer systems represent the state-of-art development in remote temperature measurement system based on the multi-wavelength approach. The dissertation research includes M-WIP computer system integration, software development, performance evaluation, and also applications in monitoring and control of temperature distribution of silicon wafers in a rapid thermal process system.

The two M-WIPs are capable of data acquisition, signal processing, system …

High Speed Protocols For Dual Bus And Dual Ring Network Architectures, Yaling Zhou

Dissertations

In this dissertation, two channel access mechanisms providing fair and bandwidth efficient transmission on dual bus and dual ring networks with high bandwidth-latency product are proposed. In addition, two effective priority mechanisms are introduced to meet the throughput and delay requirements of the diverse arrays of applications that future high speed networks must support.

For dual bus architectures, the Buffer Insertion Bandwidth Balancing (BI_BWB) mechanism and the Preemptive priority Bandwidth Balancing (P_BI_BWB) mechanism are proposed. BI_BWB can significantly improve the delay performance of remote stations. It achieves that by providing each station with a shift register into which the station …

Evaluation Of Sale Forecasting Methods : A Case Study, Susan J. Canavan

Theses

This study investigated forecasting accuracy for sales. Three quantitative and one qualitative forecasting techniques were tested and two combinational models were generated and evaluated.

Three data sets, obtained from a market leader were used to forecast sales. The series represented monthly sales for three years. Three accuracy levels were employed in this study, these are: Mean Absolute Error (MAE), Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE), and Root Mean Square Error (RMSE). Results indicated that the quantitative method outperformed the qualitative method; that combining two or more quantitative methods provide better forecasts than the individual methods; and that combining quantitative and qualitative …

Massively Parallel Reasoning In Transitive Relationship Hierarchies, Yugyung Lee

Dissertations

This research focuses on building a parallel knowledge representation and reasoning system for the purpose of making progress in realizing human-like intelligence. To achieve human-like intelligence, it is necessary to model human reasoning processes by programs. Knowledge in the real world is huge in size, complex in structure, and is also constantly changing even in limited domains. Unfortunately, reasoning algorithms are very often intractable, which means that they are too slow for any practical applications. One technique to deal with this problem is to design special-purpose reasoners. Many past Al systems have worked rather nicely for limited problem sizes, but …

Design, Simulation And Fabrication Of A Mems In-Situ Contactless Sensor To Detect Plasma Induced Damage During Reactive Ion Etching, Subramanian Ganesh

Theses

The present trend in the semiconductor industry is towards submicron devices. An inevitable process technique in achieving this is by reactive ion etching of the polysilicon gate. During RIE, the gate oxide may get damaged due to several causes. One of the main causes of the damage is the non-uniformity of the plasma. It is reported that these plasma inconsistencies are mainly due to electrode design and that they create spatial plasma potential fluctuation. These fluctuations are reported to be in the range of 10-20 Volts. By providing an in-situ monitoring of the wafers, the reliability of the device could …