Management Information Systems Commons^™

Genetically Evolved Dynamic Control For Quadruped Walking, Giorgio Grasso

Dissertations

The aim of this dissertation is to show that dynamic control of quadruped locomotion is achievable through the use of genetically evolved central pattern generators. This strategy is tested both in simulation and on a walking robot. The design of the walker has been chosen to be statically unstable, so that during motion less than three supporting feet may be in contact with the ground.

The control strategy adopted is capable of propelling the artificial walker at a forward locomotion speed of ~1.5 Km/h on rugged terrain and provides for stability of motion. The learning of walking, based on simulated …

Component-Based Software Engineering, Zhiyuan Wang

Dissertations

To solve the problems coming with the current software development methodologies, component-based software engineering has caught many researchers' attention recently. In component-based software engineering, a software system is considered as a set of software components assembled together instead of as a set of functions from the traditional perspective. Software components can be bought from third party vendors as off-the-shelf components and be assembled together.

Component-based software engineering, though very promising, needs to solve several core issues before it becomes a mature software development strategy. The goal of this dissertation is to establish an infrastructure for component-based software development. The author …

Applications Of Agent Architectures To Decision Support In Distributed Simulation And Training Systems, Plamen V. Petrov

Dissertations

This work develops the approach and presents the results of a new model for applying intelligent agents to complex distributed interactive simulation for command and control. In the framework of tactical command, control communications, computers and intelligence (C₄I), software agents provide a novel approach for efficient decision support and distributed interactive mission training. An agent-based architecture for decision support is designed, implemented and is applied in a distributed interactive simulation to significantly enhance the command and control training during simulated exercises. The architecture is based on monitoring, evaluation, and advice agents, which cooperate to provide alternatives to the …

Development And Characterization Of Techniques For Neuro-Imaging Registration, Carlo Ciulla

Theses

Three automated techniques were developed for the alignment of Neuro-Images acquired during distinct scanning periods and their performance were characterized. The techniques are based on the assumption that the human brain is a rigid body and will assume different positions during different scanning periods. One technique uses three fiducial markers, while the other two uses eigenvectors of the inertia matrix of the Neuro-Image, to compute the three angles (pitch, yaw and roll) needed to register the test Neuro-Image to the reference Neuro-Image. A rigid body transformation is computed and applied to the test Neuro-Image such that it results aligned to …

Collaborative Software Agents Support For The Texpros Document Management System, Jrtian Lin

Dissertations

This dissertation investigates the use of active rules that are embedded in markup documents. Active rules are used in a markup representation by integrating Collaborative Software Agents with TEXPROS (abbreviation for TEXt PROcessing System) [Liu and Ng 1996] to create a powerful distributed document management system. Such markup documents with embedded active rules are called Active Documents. For fast retrieval purposes, when we need to generate a customized Internet folder organization, we first define the Folder Organization Query Language (FO-QL) to solve data categorization problems. FO-QL defines the folder organization query process that automatically retrieves links of documents deposited into …

An International Cross-Cultural Study Of The Role Of Chief Informational Officers In Healthcare, Wallace Saunders

Faculty Dissertations

The introduction and utilization of Information Systems (IS) in the hospital environment has had a significant and lasting impact on the practice of medicine. The development of this dissertation will attempt to explore a widely overlooked area: The comparison of Chief Information Officers (CIOs) in the United States and the United Kingdom.

Aspects of CIO experiences relating to assumed roles, CIO challenges, skills, frustrations, success, failure, leadership, management, involvement and perceptions about the role of Information Technology (IT) in healthcare are discussed with a comparative global model. This study investigates the managerial roles of the Chief Information Officer based on …

Mis Legitimacy And The Proposition Of A New Multi-Dimensional Model Of Mis, Gondy Leroy, Paul Benjamin Lowry, H. Wayne Anderson, Dennis C. Wilson, Lin Lin

CGU Faculty Publications and Research

This paper addresses the definition of MIS and the legitimacy of MIS as an academic discipline. Both sides of the MIS legitimacy debate are presented, with the authors embracing the diversity of MIS as a strength that enhances the legitimacy of the MIS discipline. Based on the diversity theory of MIS, the authors propose a new-multidimensional model of MIS that presents a new way of looking at the discipline and the researchers who work in it.

A Recurring Improvisational Methodology For Change Management In Erp Implementation, Michelle Sieber, Fiona Fui-Hoon Nah

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Change has become an ongoing phenomenon and business process re-engineering has become a necessity for survival of organizations as we approach the 21st century. As participants in this ever-changing working environment, we must be innovative in managing change as it affects both our professional and personal lives. One of the innovative ways to manage change in the implementation of an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system is to adopt a comprehensive change management methodology. In this research, we propose the use of the recurring improvisational change methodology for managing such change. This research is also aimed at implementing the improvisational change …

Knowledge Sharing With Customers On The Www: Approaches By National Tourism Organizations, Xinran You, Joseph O'Leary, Fiona Fui-Hoon Nah

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The importance of knowledge management has been emphasized increasingly in recent literature. Knowledge has been regarded as the most important corporate asset in an organization (Nonaka and Takeuchi, 1995). But what is knowledge? According to Harris (1996), "when information is combined with context and experience, it becomes knowledge". Hence, knowledge is the integration of information, context, and experience (Ponelis and Fairer-Wessels, 1998). In the tourism context of this paper, there are two components of knowledge: (1) customer knowledge--understanding of customers by marketers that leads to more effective marketing actions; and (2) destination knowledge that either the travelers or travel experts …

Considerations For An Effective Telecommunications-Use Policy, Michael E. Whitman, Anthony M. Townsend, Robert J. Aalberts

Faculty Articles

Recent changes in federal telecommunications legislation have underscored the importance of an up-to-date and effective telecommunications-use policy in business organizations. With the proliferation of the Internet, intranets, and email as commonplace business tools, the potential for misuse and subsequent liability has become an increasing concern. Even though the recent Supreme Court decision struck down the obscenity provisions of the Communications Decency Act (CDA), it left intact legislation that effectively mandates development of a sound telecommunications-use policy. In addition to potential liability for systems misuse, organizations have also had to address issues of individual employee privacy within the new systems.

This …

Porting The Sisal Functional Language To Distributed-Memory Multiprocessors, Jui-Yuan Ku

Dissertations

Parallel computing is becoming increasingly ubiquitous in recent years. The sizes of application problems continuously increase for solving real-world problems. Distributed-memory multiprocessors have been regarded as a viable architecture of scalable and economical design for building large scale parallel machines. While these parallel machines can provide computational capabilities, programming such large-scale machines is often very difficult due to many practical issues including parallelization, data distribution, workload distribution, and remote memory latency.

This thesis proposes to solve the programmability and performance issues of distributed-memory machines using the Sisal functional language. The programs written in Sisal will be automatically parallelized, scheduled and …

Automatic Document Classification And Extraction System (Adoces), Xuhong Li

Dissertations

Document processing is a critical element of office automation. Document image processing begins from the Optical Character Recognition (OCR) phase with complex processing for document classification and extraction. Document classification is a process that classifies an incoming document into a particular predefined document type. Document extraction is a process that extracts information pertinent to the users from the content of a document and assigns the information as the values of the “logical structure” of the document type. Therefore, after document classification and extraction, a paper document will be represented in its digital form instead of its original image file format, …

A New-Generation Class Of Parallel Architectures And Their Performance Evaluation, Qian Wang

Dissertations

The development of computers with hundreds or thousands of processors and capability for very high performance is absolutely essential for many computation problems, such as weather modeling, fluid dynamics, and aerodynamics. Several interconnection networks have been proposed for parallel computers. Nevertheless, the majority of them are plagued by rather poor topological properties that result in large memory latencies for DSM (Distributed Shared-Memory) computers. On the other hand, scalable networks with very good topological properties are often impossible to build because of their prohibitively high VLSI (e.g., wiring) complexity. Such a network is the generalized hypercube (GH). The GH supports full-connectivity …

Customizable And Ontology-Enhanced Medical Information Retrieval Interfaces, Gondy Leroy, K.M. Tolle, Hsinchun Chen

CGU Faculty Publications and Research

This paper describes the development and testing of the Medical Concept Mapper as an aid to providing synonyms and semantically related concepts to improve searching. All terms are related to the userquery and fit into the query context. The system is unique because its five components combine humancreated and computer-generated elements. The Arizona Noun Phraser extracts phrases from natural language user queries. WordNet and the UMLS Metathesaurus provide synonyms. The Arizona Concept Space generates conceptually related terms. Semantic relationships between queries and concepts are established using the UMLS Semantic Net. Two user studies conducted to evaluate the system are described.

The Intelligent Browser For Texpros, Chih-Ying Wang

Dissertations

Browsing is a technique, which helps users to formulate their query and retrieve information in the information retrieval system. This technique provides users with capabilities of understanding their information needs and gaining system knowledge during the course of the browsing and thus it eases the users' burden when issuing queries. The basic components of the browser provides an underlying structure which allows users to navigate and a browsing process controller which provides users with the needed assistance during each browsing session.

In this dissertation, a new infrastructure (OP-Net), transformed from the existing object network is proposed. Each object in the …

Development Of A Framework For Internet Based Education System, Srinivas Lanka

Theses

Development of a framework for Internet based education has demonstrated the use of Oracle tools for the use of delivery of education on the World Wide Web. This also has proved that for an efficient dynamic education scenario, the use of a database-based system with a proper retrieval system is required.

We have designed the system on an Oracle backend system with Designer/2000. Developer/2000 helped us with the design and development of the system. Oracle Web Server 2.1 helped us with the retrieval of the web pages.

The entire design of the system and the reasoning behind the system has …

Application Of The Internet Technology And Client/Server Paradigm For The Implementation Of Repi, Chetankumar G. Patel

Theses

There are many problems associated with Requirements Engineering such as defining the system scope, developing understanding among the communities involved in the system to be built, volatility of requirements etc. These problems may lead to poor requirements and therefore cancellation of the system development, or else the development of a system that is unsatisfactory, has high maintenance cost or is unacceptable. By improving Requirements Elicitation, the Requirements Engineering can be improved, leading to a better requirements specification and eventually a better product.

Requirements Elicitation requires effective communication among the team members, as communication is the key factor. Easing communications between …

Applications Of Internet Technology For Requirements Elicitation, Deepak Pandit

Theses

During the Requirements Elicitation part of a project various stakeholders need to be able to communicate their requirements to the developers, and the developers need to be able communicate their understanding back to the stakeholders. Communication between the various members of the project is the key factor during the Requirements Elicitation part of a project. Easing communications between stakeholders and developers makes the process of eliciting requirement easier, leading to better requirements specification and eventually a better product.

The Requirements Elicitation Process through Internet (REPI) web site has been designed and implemented to explore this idea. The prototype version of …

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 …

Using Expert Support And Its Explanation Facilities For Group Decision Making, Fiona Fui-Hoon Nah, Izak Benbasat

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

As information technology is increasingly used to support group work, it becomes desirable to identify the types of computer-based decision aids that are beneficial for supporting group decision making. In a review of the decision support literature, Benbasat, DeSanctis and Nault (1993) point out the lack of empirical research in examining the use of expert support for group decision making. In our review of the literature in this respect, we identified only one case study (Sviokla, 1989), which examined the processes involved in the pre- and post-use of an expert support system (ESS) called PlanPower by a group of financial …

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 …

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 …

Technology And Business: The Missing Link, S Chandrasekar

IIMB Management Review

Technology, despite its critical importance to business, has far too often played a secondary role compared to other major management functions like marketing, finance, human resources development, production or corporate planning. The success of many US based technology driven companies in electronics and biotechnology in the seventies and early eighties and the Japanese and German economic miracles, driven largely by technology upgradation in specific targeted industries, should serve to renew interest in the study of the role of technology in improving business performance.

Towards Designing A Knowledge-Based Tutoring System : Sql-Tutor As An Example, Gang Zhou

Dissertations

A Knowledge-Based Tutoring System, also sometimes called an Intelligent Tutoring System, is a computer based instructional system that uses artificial intelligence techniques to help people learn some subject. The goal of the system is to provide private tutoring to its students based on their different backgrounds, requests, and interests. The system knows what subject materials it should teach, when and how to teach them, and can diagnose the mistakes made by the students and help them correct the mistakes.

The major objective of this dissertation is to investigate and develop a generic framework upon which we can build a Knowledge-Based …

Pattern Discovery In Sequence Databases : Algorithms And Applications To Dna/Protein Classification, Gung-Wei Chirn

Dissertations

Sequence databases comprise sequence data, which are linear structural descriptions of many natural entities. Approximate pattern discovery in a sequence database can lead to important conclusions or prediction of new phenomena. Traditional database technology is not suitable for accomplishing the task, and new techniques need to be developed.

In this dissertation, we propose several new techniques for discovering patterns in sequence databases. Our techniques incorporate pattern matching algorithms and novel heuristics for discovery and optimization. Experimental results of applying the techniques to both generated data and DNA/proteins show the effectiveness of the proposed techniques.

We then develop several classifiers using …

Visual Pattern Recognition Using Neural Networks, Jenlong Moh

Dissertations

Neural networks have been widely studied in a number of fields, such as neural architectures, neurobiology, statistics of neural network and pattern classification. In the field of pattern classification, neural network models are applied on numerous applications, for instance, character recognition, speech recognition, and object recognition. Among these, character recognition is commonly used to illustrate the feature and classification characteristics of neural networks.

In this dissertation, the theoretical foundations of artificial neural networks are first reviewed and existing neural models are studied. The Adaptive Resonance Theory (ART) model is improved to achieve more reasonable classification results. Experiments in applying the …

Transplanting Manufacturing Power: Observations From Five Years At Fujitsu, Steven M. Miller

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Within a factory, what are the underpinnings of manufacturing power? During my thirty-month residency at Fujitsu's factory in Oyama, Japan, I constantly reflected on this question. The standard view of a factory structure provided by an organization chart was inadequate for summarizing my observations.

Graphical Oodb Modeling For Medical Information Standards (Gommis), Jiping Liu

Theses

The graphical representation of database schemata has been a useful tool for the designer and users of database systems. Such a tool for OODB schemata should incorporate a wide variety of symbols which cover most concepts of existing Object-Oriented Database (OODB), so it is sufficient to support a diverse group of object-oriented data models.

In this paper we created a. graphical representation, using the OOdini system and language, of the European Prestandard for Medical Informatics on Message Exchange of Laboratory Information. This European Prestandard describes a standardized format for messages to be exchanged between a. health care provider and a …

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 …