Engineering Commons^™

Generating Properties For Runtime Monitoring From Software Specification Patterns, Oscar Mondragon, Ann Q. Gates, Oleg Sokolsky

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

The paper presents an approach to support run-time verification of software systems that combines two existing tools, Prospec and Java-MaC, into a single framework. Prospec can be used to clarify natural language specifications for sequential, concurrent, and nondeterministic behavior. In addition, the tool assists the user in reading, writing, and understanding formal specifications through the use of property patterns and visual abstractions. Currently, Prospec automatically generates a specification written in Future Interval Logic (FIL). The goal is to automate the generation of MEDL formulas that can be used by the Java-MaC tool to check run-time compliance of system execution to …

Non-Lexical Conversational Sounds In American English, Nigel Ward

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

This article analyzes the non-lexical conversational sounds (conversational grunts) of English, including such items as uh-huh, un-hn, um, mm, and oh, based primarily on examination of a few hundred occurrences in a corpus of conversations. The data includes extensive phonetic variation, suggesting that these items are best explained, not as fixed words, but as dynamic creations. In particular, the vast majority of these items can be generated by a simple model consisting of 10 component sounds and 2 combining rules. Moreover, each of these component sounds seems to bear some meaning or function which is fairly constant across grunts and …

Discovering Transcriptional Regulatory Rules From Gene Expression And Tf-Dna Binding Data By Decision Tree Learning, Jianhua Ruan, Weixiong Zhang

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

Background: One of the most promising but challenging task in the post-genomic era is to reconstruct the transcriptional regulatory networks. The goal is to reveal, for each gene that responds to a certain biological event, which transcription factors affect its transcription, and how several transcription factors coordinate to accomplish specific regulations. Results: Here we propose a supervised machine learning approach to address these questions. We build decision trees to associate the expression level of a gene with the transcription factor binding data of its promoter. From the decision trees, we extract regulatory rules that specify how the binding of a …

Field-Programmable Analog Arrays: A Floating-Gate Approach, Tyson S. Hall

Faculty Works

Field-programmable analog arrays (FPAAs) provide a method for rapidly pro- totyping analog systems. Currently available commercial and academic FPAAs are typically based on operational amplifiers (or other similar analog primitives) with only a few computational elements per chip. While their specific architectures vary, their small sizes and often restrictive interconnect designs leave current FPAAs limited in functionality, flexibility, and usefulness. Recent advances in the area of floating-gate transistors have led to an analog technology that is very small, accurately programmable, and extremely low in power consumption. By leveraging the advantages of floating-gate devices, a large-scale FPAA is designed that dramatically …

Visual Impact Of The Illuminations Of Lcd Monitor Under Different Ambient Lightings, Yuichi Yuasa

Graduate Research Papers

As criticisms about the eyestrain of computer monitor are increased, the interaction between human and VDTs has been examined. The studies of visual performance of LCD monitor are emphasized with numerous advantages. This study investigated the differences of visual comfort among three levels of illumination of an LCD monitor and ambient lighting. A statis ti cal experience was conducted concerning the procedure ofISO's recommendations with sample participants in the selected area. After the analysis of the data using ANOVA, the result showed the statistically significant difference and significant interaction between two variables. The combination between both medium ambient lighting and …

Beyond Convex? Global Optimization Is Feasible Only For Convex Objective Functions: A Theorem, R. Baker Kearfott, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

It is known that there are feasible algorithms for minimizing convex functions, and that for general functions, global minimization is a difficult (NP-hard) problem. It is reasonable to ask whether there exists a class of functions that is larger than the class of all convex functions for which we can still solve the corresponding minimization problems feasibly. In this paper, we prove, in essence, that no such more general class exists. In other words, we prove that global optimization is always feasible only for convex objective functions.

Optimal Finite Characterization Of Linear Problems With Inexact Data, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

For many linear problems, in order to check whether a certain property is true for all matrices A from an interval matrix [A], it is sufficient to check this property for finitely many "vertex" matrices. J. Rohn has discovered that we do not need to use all 2^(n^2) vertex matrices, it is sufficient to only check these properties for 2^(2n-1)<<2^(n^2) vertex matrices of a special type A_{yz}. In this paper, we show that a further reduction is impossible: without checking all 2^(2n-1) matrices A_{yz}, we cannot guarantee that the desired property holds for all A from [A]. Thus, these special vertex matrices provide an optimal finite characterization of linear problems with inexact data.

Outlier Detection Under Interval Uncertainty: Algorithmic Solvability And Computational Complexity, Vladik Kreinovich, Luc Longpre, Praveen Patangay, Scott Ferson, Lev Ginzburg

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

In many application areas, it is important to detect outliers. Traditional engineering approach to outlier detection is that we start with some "normal" values x1,...,xn, compute the sample average E, the sample standard variation sigma, and then mark a value x as an outlier if x is outside the k0-sigma interval [E-k0*sigma,E+k0*sigma] (for some pre-selected parameter k0). In real life, we often have only interval ranges [xi] for the normal values x1,...,xn. In this case, we only have intervals of possible values for the bounds E-k0*sigma and E+k0*sigma. We can therefore identify outliers as values that are outside all k0-sigma …

Towards Combining Probabilistic And Interval Uncertainty In Engineering Calculations, Scott A. Starks, Vladik Kreinovich, Luc Longpre, Martine Ceberio, Gang Xiang, Roberto Araiza, J. Beck, R. Kandathi, A. Nayak, R. Torres

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

In many engineering applications, we have to combine probabilistic and interval errors. For example, in environmental analysis, we observe a pollution level x(t) in a lake at different moments of time t, and we would like to estimate standard statistical characteristics such as mean, variance, autocorrelation, correlation with other measurements. In environmental measurements, we often only know the values with interval uncertainty. We must therefore modify the existing statistical algorithms to process such interval data. Such modification are described in this paper.

Computing 2-Step Predictions For Interval-Valued Finite Stationary Markov Chains, Marcilia Andrade Campos, Gracaliz Pereira Dimuro, Antonio Carlos Da Rocha Costa, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

Markov chains are a useful tool for solving practical problems. In many real-life situations, we do not know the exact values of initial and transition probabilities; instead, we only know the intervals of possible values of these probabilities. Such interval-valued Markov chains were considered and analyzed by I. O. Kozine and L. V. Utkin in their Reliable Computing paper. In their paper, they propose an efficient algorithm for computing interval-valued probabilities of the future states. For the general case of non-stationary Markov chains, their algorithm leads to the exact intervals for the probabilities of future states.

In the important case …

Cs 340: Programming Language Workshop In Java, Ronald F. Taylor

Computer Science & Engineering Syllabi

This course is designed as a self-study in Java. You are expected to work independently to learn the Java language and solve a set of programming problems assigned to you using latest Java SDK available at http://java.sun.com or other software as approved by the instructor. There are no exams. We officially meet only once in a quarter. However, I will be available in the posted office hours for clarifications and general discussion of the programming assignments. Do not expect support in debugging badly documented code.

Cs 214: Object Oriented Programming, Roddy Keish

Computer Science & Engineering Syllabi

No abstract provided.

Teabag: A Debugger For Curry, Stephen Lee Johnson

Dissertations and Theses

This thesis describes TeaBag, which is a debugger for functional logic computations. TeaBag is an accessory of a virtual machine currently under development. A distinctive feature of this machine is its operational completeness of computations, which places novel demands on a debugger. This thesis describes the features of TeaBag, in particular the handling of non-determinism, the ability to control nondeterministic steps, to remove context information, to toggle eager evaluation, and to set breakpoints on both functions and terms. This thesis also describes TeaBag's architecture and its interaction with the associated virtual machine. Finally, some debugging sessions of defective programs are …

Functional Model Of The Army's Initial Capabilities Training Plan (Ictp) Generation Process (Transitioning To A Knowledge-Base Enterprise), Bryon Keith Hartzog

Computational Modeling & Simulation Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Background: The Army's transformation of its requirements and acquisition process to the Joint Capabilities Integration Development System (JCIDS), supporting the paradigm shift from a threat-based to capabilities-based methodology, signifies that the training/ training support business processes must also change. The new Capabilities Integration Development System - Army (CIDS-A) will prevent the development of service-only oriented materiel solutions that do not interoperate. Additionally, the CIDS-A will force early analysis across the Doctrine, Organization, Training, Leader, Material, Personnel, and Facilities (DOTLMPF) focus areas. This early DOTLMPF analysis ensures materiel solutions incorporate dynamic and flexible training/ training support. To efficiently manage the training …

Interactive Land Use Vrml Application Using Servlet Assist, Suresh Chitithoti

Electrical & Computer Engineering Theses & Dissertations

The integration of VRML and Servlet technologies has the potential to revolutionize web-based simulation visualization. The Interactive Land Use VRML Application (ILUVA) uses Java Servlets enabling one to perform urban planning by taking a virtual land area and add buildings, roadways, landscaping, and other features. The Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML) is a web-based technology for specifying and delivering interactive three-dimensional visualizations over a browser. The Java Servlet technology offers several powerful capabilities such as user authentication, session management, database connectivity for maintaining several possibly simultaneous user sessions, and dynamically generated VRML. Save and restore capabilities for any applications are …

Qos Provisioning For Multi-Class Traffic In Wireless Networks, Mona El-Kadi Rizvi

Computer Science Theses & Dissertations

Physical constraints, bandwidth constraints and host mobility all contribute to the difficulty of providing Quality of Service (QoS) guarantees in wireless networks. There is a growing demand for wireless networks to support all the services that are available on wired networks. These diverse services, such as email, instant messaging, web browsing, video conferencing, telephony and paging all place different demands on the network, making QoS provisioning for wireless networks that carry multiple classes of traffic a complex problem. We have developed a set of admission control and resource reservation schemes for QoS provisioning in multi-class wireless networks.

We present three …

Selecting Metal Alloy Electric Contact Materials For Mems Switches, Ronald A. Coutu Jr., Paul E. Kladitis, Kevin D. Leedy, Robert L. Crane

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research and Publications

This paper presents a method for selecting metal alloys as the electric contact materials for microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) metal contact switches. This procedure consists of reviewing macro-switch lessons learned, utilizing equilibrium binary alloy phase diagrams, obtaining thin film material properties and, based on a suitable model, predicting contact resistance performance. After determining a candidate alloy material, MEMS switches were designed, fabricated and tested to validate the alloy selection methodology. Minimum average contact resistance values of 1.17 and 1.87 Ω were measured for micro-switches with gold (Au) and gold–platinum (Au–(6.3%)Pt) alloy electric contacts, respectively. In addition, 'hot-switched' life cycle test results …

Geon: Geophysical Data Add The 3rd Dimension In Geospatial Studies, R. Aldouri, George R. Keller, Ann Q. Gates, J. Rasillo, Leonardo Salayandia, Vladik Kreinovich, John M. Seeley, P. Taylor, S. Holloway

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

A major trend in GIS is the addition of subsurface information to provide a 3-D perspective on data. Geophysical data provide information about subsurface structures and conditions, but require considerable analysis. The 4-D emphasis with the GEON projects has required the development of many sophisticated tools to allow users to utilize geophysical datasets that will be available on the GEON grid. Our group has created tools that will allow users to search new gravity and magnetic databases of the entire U.S. These tools will extract specific records from an Oracle database, and display the points over a map, grid and …

Computing Higher Central Moments For Interval Data, Vladik Kreinovich, Luc Longpre, Scott Ferson, Lev Ginzburg

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

Higher central moments are very useful in statistical analysis: the third moment M3 characterizes asymmetry of the corresponding probability distribution, the fourth moment M4 describes the size of the distribution's tails, etc. When we know the exact values x1,...,xn, we can use the known formulas for computing the corresponding sample central moments. In many practical situations, however, we only know intervals [x1],...,[xn] of possible values of xi; in such situations, we want to know the range of possible values of Mm. In this paper, we propose algorithms that compute such ranges.

Variations On Particle Swarm Optimization And Their Experimental Evaluation On Maximum Satisfiability, Susan A Abdelshahid

Archived Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.

Time Series Classification Using Gaussian Mixture Models Of Reconstructed Phase Spaces, Richard J. Povinelli, Michael T. Johnson, Andrew C. Lindgren, Jinjin Ye

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research and Publications

A new signal classification approach is presented that is based upon modeling the dynamics of a system as they are captured in a reconstructed phase space. The modeling is done using full covariance Gaussian mixture models of time domain signatures, in contrast with current and previous work in signal classification that is typically focused on either linear systems analysis using frequency content or simple nonlinear machine learning models such as artificial neural networks. The proposed approach has strong theoretical foundations based on dynamical systems and topological theorems, resulting in a signal reconstruction, which is asymptotically guaranteed to be a complete …

Mobile Agent Based Distributed Network Management : Modeling, Methodologies And Applications, Jian Ye

Dissertations

The explosive growth of the Internet and the continued dramatic increase for all wireless services are fueling the demand for increased capacity, data rates, support of multimedia services, and support for different Quality of Services (QoS) requirements for different classes of services. Furthermore future communication networks will be strongly characterized by heterogeneity. In order to meet the objectives of instant adaptability to the users' requirements and of interoperability and seamless operation within the heterogeneous networking environments, flexibility in terms of network and resource management will be a key design issue. The new emerging technology of mobile agent (MA) has arisen …

Design And Evaluation Of Processes For Fuel Fabrication: Quarterly Progress Report #11, Georg F. Mauer

Fuels Campaign (TRP)

The eleventh quarter of the project covered the following:

• Mr. Richard Silva successfully defended his thesis in April 2004 and graduated from the MEG Master’s program.

• Further refinements on Concepts and Methods for Vision-Based Hot Cell Supervision and control, focusing on rule-based object recognition (Ph.D. Graduate Jae-Kyu Lee). Ms. Caroline Wiejak, an exchange student from the ESIEE in Marne-la-Vallee, France is continuing with the image analysis effort. To date, she has transferred Jae-Kyu’s code to Matlab, and is presently expanding its application to more complex 3D shapes.

• Graduate student Jamil Renno refined and detailed his simulations of …

A Spatiotemporal Query Service For Mobile Users In Sensor Networks, Chenyang Lu, Guoliang Xing, Octav Chipara, Chien-Liang Fok, Sangeeta Bhattacharya

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

This paper presents MobiQuery, a spatiotemporal query service that allows mobile users to periodically gather information from their surrounding areas through a wireless sensor network. A key advantage of MobiQuery lies in its capability to meet stringent spatiotemporal performance constraints crucial to many applications. These constraints include query latency, data freshness and fidelity, and changing query areas due to user mobility. A novel just-in-time prefetching algorithm enables MobiQuery to main-tain robust spatiotemporal guarantees even when nodes op-erate under extremely low duty cycles. Furthermore, it sig-nificantly reduces the storage cost and network contention caused by continuous queries from mobile users. We …

Composing Systemic Aspects Into Component-Oriented Doc Middleware, Nanbor Wang

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

The advent and maturation of component-based middleware frameworks have sim-plified the development of large-scale distributed applications by separating system devel-opment and configuration concerns into different aspects that can be specified and com-posed at various stages of the application development lifecycle. Conventional component middleware technologies, such as J2EE [73] and .NET [34], were designed to meet the quality of service (QoS) requirements of enterprise applications, which focus largely on scalability and reliability. Therefore, conventional component middleware specifications and implementations are not well suited for distributed real-time and embedded (DRE) ap-plications with more stringent QoS requirements, such as low latency/jitter, timeliness, and …

On-Line Algorithms For Computing Mean And Variance Of Interval Data, And Their Use In Intelligent Systems, Berlin Wu, Hung T. Nguyen, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

No abstract provided.

Application Of Kolmogorov Complexity To Advanced Problems In Mechanics, Vladik Kreinovich, Isaak A. Kunin

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

In the 1960s, A.N. Kolmogorov described the main reason why a mathematical correct solution to a system of differential equations may be not physically possible: Traditional mathematical analysis tacitly assumes that all numbers, no matter how large or how small, are physically possible. From the engineering viewpoint, however, a number like 10^{10^10} is not possible, because it exceeds the number of particles in the Universe. In this paper, we extend Kolmogorov's ideas from discrete objects to continuous objects known with given accuracy epsilon, and show how this extension can clarify the analysis of dynamical systems.

Using Fft-Based Data Processing Techniques To Characterize Asphaltic Concrete Mixtures, Scott A. Starks, Vladik Kreinovich, Roberto Araiza, Soheil Nazarian, J. Adidhela

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

A natural way to test the quality of a pavement is to send signals with different frequencies through the pavement and compare the results with the signals passing through an ideal pavement. For this comparison, we must determine how, for the corresponding mixture, the elasticity E depends on the frequency f in the range from 0.1 to 10^5 Hz. It is very expensive to perform measurements in high frequency area (above 20 Hz). To avoid these measurements, we can use the fact that for most of these mixtures, when we change a temperature, the new dependence changes simply by scaling. …

Using 1-D Radar Observations To Detect A Space Explosion Core Among The Explosion Fragments: Sequential And Distributed Algorithms, P. Debroux, J. Boehm, Vladik Kreinovich, Gang Xiang, J. Beck, K. Tupelly, R. Kandathi, Luc Longpre, K. Villaverde

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

A radar observes the result of a space explosion. Due to radar's low horizontal resolution, we get a 1-D signal s(t) representing different 2-D slices. Based on these slices, we must distinguish between the body at the core of the explosion and the slowly out-moving fragments. We propose new algorithms for processing this 1-D data. Since these algorithms are time-consuming, we also exploit the possibility of parallelizing these algorithms.

Geometry Of Protein Structures. I. Why Hyperbolic Surfaces Are A Good Approximation For Beta-Sheets, Boguslaw Stec, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

Protein structure is invariably connected to protein function. To analyze the structural changes of proteins, we should have a good description of basic geometry of proteins' secondary structure. A beta-sheet is one of important elements of protein secondary structure that is formed by several fragments of the protein that form a surface-like feature. The actual shapes of the beta-sheets can be very complicated, so we would like to approximate them by simpler geometrical shapes from an approximating family. Which family should we choose? Traditionally, hyperbolic (second order) surfaces have been used as a reasonable approximation to the shape of beta-sheets. …