Engineering Commons^™

Agent Societies: Magnitude And Duration, Michael N. Huhns

Faculty Publications

If you only need agents to search the Web for cheap CDs, scalability is not an issue. The Web can support numerous agents if each acts independently. In short order, however, billions of embedded agents that sense their environment and interact with us and other agents will fill our world, making the human environment friendlier and more efficient. These agents will need not only scalable infrastructures and communication services, but also scalable social services encompassing ethics and laws. Research projects are under way around the world to develop and deploy such services. The author takes a look at the critical …

Designing Human-Centered Distributed Information Systems, Jiagie Zhang, Vimla L. Patel, Kathy A. Johnson, Jane Malin, Jack W. Smith

Journal Articles

No abstract provided.

Computer Forensics: The Issues And Current Books In The Field, Gary C. Kessler, Michael Schirling

Publications

Computer crime investigation is a multidisciplinary profession and almost no one today has been trained purely as a computer forensic analyst. Toward that end, investigators need professional reference guides and texts that cover the major points of computer forensics. In this article, we discuss some broad issues related to forensic computing and include a review of four texts on the subject:

• Computer Forensics: Incident Response Essentials, Warren G. Kruse II & Jay G. Heiser
• Computer Forensics & Privacy, Michael Caloyannides
• Cyber Forensics: A Field Manual for Collecting, Examining, and Preserving Evidence of Computer Crimes, edited by Albert J. …

Advances In Space Radiation Shielding Codes, John W. Wilson, Ram K. Tripathi, Garry D. Qualls, Francis A. Cucinotta, Richard E. Prael, John W. Norbury, John H. Heinbockel, John Tweed, Giovanni De Angelis

Mathematics & Statistics Faculty Publications

Early space radiation shield code development relied on Monte Carlo methods and made important contributions to the space program. Monte Carlo methods have resorted to restricted one-dimensional problems leading to imperfect representation of appropriate boundary conditions. Even so, intensive computational requirements resulted and shield evaluation was made near the end of the design process. Resolving shielding issues usually had a negative impact on the design. Improved spacecraft shield design requires early entry of radiation constraints into the design process to maximize performance and minimize costs. As a result, we have been investigating high-speed computational procedures to allow shield analysis from …

Preface, Alexander Kurz

Engineering Faculty Articles and Research

No abstract provided.

Definability, Canonical Models, And Compactness For Finitary Coalgebraic Modal Logic, Alexander Kurz, Dirk Pattinson

Engineering Faculty Articles and Research

This paper studies coalgebras from the perspective of the finitary observations that can be made of their behaviours. Based on the terminal sequence, notions of finitary behaviours and finitary predicates are introduced. A category Behω(T) of coalgebras with morphisms preserving finitary behaviours is defined. We then investigate definability and compactness for finitary coalgebraic modal logic, show that the final object in Behω(T) generalises the notion of a canonical model in modal logic, and study the topology induced on a coalgebra by the finitary part of the terminal sequence.

Modal Predicates And Coequations, Alexander Kurz, Jiří Rosický

Engineering Faculty Articles and Research

We show how coalgebras can be presented by operations and equations. This is a special case of Linton’s approach to algebras over a general base category X, namely where X is taken as the dual of sets. Since the resulting equations generalise coalgebraic coequations to situations without cofree coalgebras, we call them coequations. We prove a general co-Birkhoff theorem describing covarieties of coalgebras by means of coequations. We argue that the resulting coequational logic generalises modal logic.

Thread Transparency In Information Flow Middleware, Rainer Koster, Andrew P. Black, Jie Huang, Jonathan Walpole, Calton Pu

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

Existing middleware is based on control-flow centric interaction models such as remote method invocations, poorly matching the structure of applications that process continuous information flows. Difficulties cultiesin building this kind of application on conventional platforms include flow-specific concurrency and timing requirements, necessitating explicit management of threads, synchronization, and timing by the application programmer. We propose Infopipes as a high-level abstraction for information flows, and we are developing a middleware framework that supports this abstraction. Infopipes transparently handle complexities associated with control flow and multi-threading. From high-level configuration descriptions the platform determines what parts of a pipeline require separate threads or …

Vertical Integration And Media Regulation In The New Economy, Christopher S. Yoo

All Faculty Scholarship

Recent mergers and academic commentary have placed renewed focus on what has long been one of the central issues in media policy: whether media conglomerates can use vertical 'integration to harm competition. This Article seeks to move past previous studies, which have explored limited aspects of this issue, and apply the full sweep of modern economic theory to evaluate the regulation of vertical integration in media-related industries. It does so initially by applying the basic static efficiency analyses of vertical integration developed under the Chicago and post-Chicago Schools of antitrust law and economics to three industries: broadcasting, cable television, and …