Engineering Commons^™

Searches For The Neutral Higgs Bosons Of The Mssm In E+E- Collisions At Centre-Of-Mass Energies Of 181-184 Gev, Barate, R.; Et Al., M. Thulasidas

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The data collected by ALEPH at LEP at centre-of-mass energies ranging from 181 to 184 GeV, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 57 pb−1, are analysed to search for pair-produced neutral Higgs bosons h and A, in the bb̄bb̄ and τ+τ−bb̄ final states. Two events are found in the data with 2.5 expected from standard model processes. When combined with the lower energy data collected by ALEPH and with earlier reported searches for associated hZ production, these analyses are interpreted in the context of the minimal supersymmetric extension of the standard model (MSSM). For standard choices of MSSM parameter sets, …

Validation Of Waimss Incident Duration Estimation Model, Wei Wu, Pushkin Kachroo, Kaan Ozbay

Electrical & Computer Engineering Faculty Research

This paper presents an effort to validate the traffic incident duration estimation model of WAIMSS (wide area incident management support system). Duration estimation model of WAIMSS predicts the incident duration based on an estimation tree which was calibrated using incident data collected in Northern Virginia. Due to the limited sample size, a full scale test of the distribution, mean and variance of incident duration was performed only for the root node of the estimation tree, white only mean tests were executed at all other nodes whenever a data subset was available. Further studies were also conducted on the model error …

Wide-Area Incident Management System On The Internet, Kaan Ozbay, Pushkin Kachroo

Electrical & Computer Engineering Faculty Research

The incident management process consists of four sequential steps-incident detection, response, clearance and recovery. Each of these components comprises of a number of operations and coordinated decision-making between the agencies involved. The provision of computer based support tools for the personnel involved will help develop appropriate strategies and increase efficiency and expediency. Existing systems are developed on various traditional computing platforms. However, with the advent of World Wide Web and Internet based programming tools such as Java, it is now possible to develop platform independent decision support tools for the incident management agencies. Any agency will be able to use …

A Feedback-Driven Proportion Allocator For Real-Rate Scheduling, David Steere, Ashvin Goel, Joshua Gruenberg, Dylan Mcnamee, Calton Pu, Jonathan Walpole

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

In this paper we propose changing the decades-old practice of allocating CPU to threads based on priority to a scheme based on proportion and period. Our scheme allocates to each thread a percentage of CPU cycles over a period of time, and uses a feedback-based adaptive scheduler to assign automatically both proportion and period. Applications with known requirements, such as isochronous software devices, can bypass the adaptive scheduler by specifying their desired proportion and/or period. As a result, our scheme provides reservations to applications that need them, and the benefits of proportion and period to those that do not. Adaptive …

Scalar Quark Searches In E+E- Collisions At √S = 181 - 184 Gev, Barate, R.; Et Al., M. Thulasidas

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Searches for scalar top, scalar bottom and degenerate scalar quarks have been performed with data collected with the ALEPH detector at LEP. The data sample consists of 57 pb−1 taken at s = 181–184 GeV. No evidence for scalar top, scalar bottom or degenerate scalar quarks was found in the channels t̃→cχ, t̃→bℓν̃, b̃→bχ, and q̃→qχ. From the channel t̃→cχ a limit of 74 GeV/c2has been set on the scalar top quark mass, independent of the mixing angle. This limit assumes a mass difference between the t̃ and the χ in the range 10–40 GeV/c2. From the channel t̃→bℓν̃ the …

Synthetic Files: Enabling Low-Latency File I/O For Qos-Adaptive Applications, Dylan Mcnamee, Dan Revel, Calton Pu, David Steere, Jonathan Walpole

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

Files are a tried and true operating system abstraction. They present a simple byte-stream model of I/O that has proven intuitive for application programmers and efficient for operating system builders. However, current file systems do not provide good support for adaptive continuous media (CM) applications - an increasingly important class of applications that exhibit complex access patterns and are particularly sensitive to variations in I/O performance. To address these problems we propose synthetic files. Synthetic files are specialized views of underlying regular files, and convert complex file access patterns into simple sequential synthetic file access patterns. Synthetic file construction can …

Maximally Disjoint Solutions Of The Set Covering Problem, David J. Rader, Peter L. Hammer

Mathematical Sciences Technical Reports (MSTR)

This paper is concerned with finding two solutions of a set covering problem that have a minimum number of variables in common. We show that this problem is NP­ complete, even in the case where we are only interested in completely disjoint solutions. We describe three heuristic methods based on the standard greedy algorithm for set covering problems. Two of these algorithms find the solutions sequentially, while the third finds them simultaneously. A local search method for reducing the overlap of the two given solutions is then described. This method involves the solution of a reduced set covering problem. Finally, …

Quality Of Service Semantics For Multimedia Database Systems, Jonathan Walpole, Charles Krasic, Ling Liu, David Maier, Calton Pu, Dylan Mcnamee, David Steere

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

Quality of service (QoS) support has been a hot research topic in multimedia databases, and multimedia systems in general, for the past several years. However, there remains little consensus on how QoS support should be provided. At the resource-management level, systems designers are still debating the suitability of reservation- based versus adaptive QoS management. The design of higher system layers is less clearly understood, and the specification of QoS requirements in domain-specific terms is still an open research topic. To address these issues, we propose a QoS model for multimedia databases. The model covers the specification of user-level QoS preferences …

Location Independent Names For Nomadic Computers, David Steere, Mark Morrissey, Peter Geib, Calton Pu, Jonathan Walpole

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

Recent advances in the Domain Name System (DNS) and the Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) have enabled a new approach to supporting mobile users: location independent naming. In this approach, machines use the same hostname from any internet location, but use an IP address that corresponds to their current location. We describe a protocol that implements location independent naming for nomadic computers, i.e., machines that do not need transparent mobility. Our protocol allows hosts to move across security domains, uses existing protocols, and preserves existing trust relationships. Therefore, it preserves the performance and security of normal IP for nomadic computers …

Adaptation Space: Surviving Non-Maskable Failures, Crispin Cowan, Lois Delcambre, Anne-Francoise Le Meur, Ling Liu, David Maier, Dylan Mcnamee, Michael Miller, Calton Pu, Perry Wagle, Jonathan Walpole

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

Some failures cannot be masked by redundancies, because an unanticipated situation occurred, because fault-tolerance measures were not adequate, or because there was a security breach (which is not amenable to replication). Applications that wish to continue to offer some service despite nonmaskable failure must adapt to the loss of resources. When numerous combinations of non-maskable failure modes are considered, the set of possible adaptations becomes complex. This paper presents adaptation spaces, a formalism for navigating among combinations of adaptations. An adaptation space describes a collection of possible adaptations of a software component or system, and provides a uniform way of …

Integrating Security Into The Curriculum, Cynthia E. Irvine, Shiu-Kai Chin, Deborah Frincke

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science - All Scholarship

The number of skilled practitioners of computer security who are able to address the complexities of modern technology and are familiar with successful approaches to system security is very small. People want security but are faced with two difficulties. First, they do not know how to achieve it in the context of their enterprises. They may not even know of a way to translate organizational procedures into policies, much less implement a set of mechanisms to enforce those policies. Second, they have no way of knowing whether their chosen mechanisms are effective. The recent US Presidential Commission on Critical Infrastructure …

A Simplified Reservation And State Setup Protocol, Hari Adiseshu, Guru Parulkar, Subhash Suri

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

The last few years have seen the development of a model for Integrated Services Internet, which extends the traditional Internet by adding multiple service classes in addition to the traditional best effort service class, and a signaling protocol called RSVP for applications to reserve resources. While this framework has been standardized in the IETF WGs and the RSVP protocol has been defined, there has been no movement towards a commercial implementation of this framework, principally due to its perceived complexity and lack of scalability. This paper analyzes RSVP, discusses some of the its bottlenecks and shows how they can be …

Fault-Tolerant Mobile Ip, Rajib Ghosh, George Varghese

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

We describe mechanisms to enhance the reliability and performance of Mobile IP. In Mobile IP today home agents and foreign agents are single points of failure and potential performance bottlenecks. For example, a home agent crash can lead to communication failure if the mobile is away from home. In this paper we describe new mechanisms to allow redundant home and foreign agents. Redundant agents can take over from each other in case of failure, and also split load amongst themselves. Our mechanisms are simple, transparent to existing mobile nodes, and compatible with the existing Mobile IP specification. We have implemented …

Router Plugins: A Modular And Extensible Software Framework For Modern High Performance Integrated Services Routers, Dan Decasper, Zubin Dittia, Guru Parulkar, Bernhard Plattner

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

Present day routers typically employ monolithic operating systems which are not easily upgraded and extensible. WIth the rapid rate of protocol development it is becoming increasingly important to dynamically upgrade router software in an incremental fashion. We have designed and implemented a high performance, modular, extended integrated services router software architecture in the NetBSD operating system kernel. This architecture allows code modules, called plugins, to be dynamically added and configured at run time. One of the novel features of our design is the ability to bind different plugins to individual flows; this allows for distinct plugin implementations to seamlessly coexist …

The Playground Mediator: Visual Tool For Configuring And Debugging Distributed Applications, T. Paul Mccartney

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

The Mediator is a visual configuration tool for use with The Programmers' Playground distributed programming environment. With the Mediator, one can interactively launch distributed application modules, configured communication among the modules, observe communication patterns, interactively control module communication, kill running modules, and receive imported applications from a separate World Wide Web interface. This manual describes how to use the Mediator both as a stand-alone configuration tool and as a visual interface to the Playground Application Management System.

Lime: Linda Meets Mobility, Gian Pietro Picco, Amy L. Murphy, Gruia-Catalin Roman

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

LIME is a system designed to assist in the rapid development of dependable mobile applications over both wired and ad hoc networks. Mobile agents reside on mobile hosts and all communication takes place via transiently shared tuple spaces distributed across the mobile hosts. The decoupled style of computing characterizing the Linda model is extended to the mobile environment. At the application level, both agents and hosts perceive movement as a sudden change of context. The set of tuples accessible by a particular agent residing on a given host is altered transparently in response to changes in the connectivity pattern among …

Tcp Dynamic Acknowledgment Delay: Theory And Practice, Daniel R. Dooly, Sally A. Goldman, Stephen D. Scott

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

We study an on-line problem that is motivated by the networking problem of dynamically adjusting delays of acknowledgments in the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP). The theoretical problem we study is the following. There is a sequence of n packet arrival times A = and a look-ahead coefficient L. The goal is to partition A into k subsequences sigma1, sigma2, ...,sigmak (where a subsequence end is defined by an acknowledgment) that minimizes a linear combination of the cost for the number of acknowledgments sent and the cost for the additional latency introduced by delaying acknowledgments. At each arrival, an oracle provides …

Design And Design Centers In Engineering Education, Clive L. Dym

All HMC Faculty Publications and Research

This paper is intended to be the opening salvo of the workshop, Computing Futures in Engineering Design (Dym, 1997). Thus, I want to take this privileged moment to ask you to think with me about the role of design in engineering. In particular, I want to reflect upon how design is articulated and how design is taught; about the role of design in engineering education and in the practice of engineering; and about the role that could be played locally and, perhaps, nationally by a center devoted to design education. Because I teach here at Harvey Mudd College (HMC), …

Stackguard: Automatic Adaptive Detection And Prevention Of Buffer-Overflow Attacks, Crispin Cowan, Calton Pu, David Maier, Heather Hinton, Jonathan Walpole, Peat Bakke, Steve Beattie, Aaron Grier, Perry Wagle, Qian Zhang

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

This paper presents a systematic solution to the persistent problem of buffer overflow attacks. Buffer overflow attacks gained notoriety in 1988 as part of the Morris Worm incident on the Internet. While it is fairly simple to fix individual buffer overflow vulnerabilities, buffer overflow attacks continue to this day. Hundreds of attacks have been discovered, and while most of the obvious vulnerabilities have now been patched, more sophisticated buffer overflow attacks continue to emerge.

We describe StackGuard: a simple compiler technique that virtually eliminates buffer overflow vulnerabilities with only modest performance penalties. Privileged programs that are recompiled with the StackGuard …

Generalized Ultrametrics, Domains And An Application To Computational Logic, Anthony K. Seda, Pascal Hitzler

Computer Science and Engineering Faculty Publications

Fixed points of functions and operators are of fundamental importance in programming language semantics in giving meaning to recursive definitions and to constructs which involve self-reference. It follows therefore that fixed-point theorems are also of fundamental importance in theoretical computer science. Often, order-theoretic arguments are available in which case the well-known Knaster-Tarski theorem can be used to obtain fixed-points. Sometimes, however, analytical arguments are needed involving the Banach contraction mapping theorem as is the case for example in studying concurrency and communicating systems. Situations arise also in computational logic in the presence of negation which force non-monotonicity of the operators …

Tcp/Ip Implementation With Endsystem Qos, Sherlia Y. Shi, Gurudatta M. Parulkar, R. Gopalakrishnan

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

This paper presents a Real-time Upcall (RTU) [1] based TCP/IP implementation that guarantees throughput for continuous media applications and ensures low latency bounds for interactive applications. RTU is an endsystem rate-based scheduling mechanism that provides quality of service (QoS) in terms of CPU cycles, to applications. We restructured the existing NetBSD TCP/IP implementation to exploit the RTU concurrency model and to provide predictable performance. Our experimental results show that on two 200 MHz NetBSD PCs connected by a 155Mbps ATM link, the RTU based kernel TCP/IP implementation provides excellent throughput guarantees for periodic connections regardless the system or network load. …

Integrating A Constraint Mechanism With The Javabeans Model, William M. Shapiro

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

The JavaBeans component model allows users to plug together software components to create Java applications by specifying simple relationships between component events and properties. This paper describes work on augmenting the simple JavaBeans model with a multi-way constraint mechanism that allows users to graphically specify more complex multi-way contraints, resolve cyclical constraints between bean properties and graphically layout bean components. We also discuss weaknesses in the JavaBeans model and Java Abstract Windowing Toolkit (AWT) that were discovered while integrating a constraint mechanism with JavaBeans.

Routing Table Compression Using Binary Tree Collapse, Jonathan Turner, Qiyong Bian, Marcel Waldvogel

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

This paper describes an algorithm which can roughly halve the size of the current Internet routing tables. This algorithm is based on the radix trie representation of routing tables, which was firstly used in the BSD Unix distributions. The binary tree representation, which is a simplified case of radix tree, does well at showing the relationships among all routing table entries and provides us a way to build a collapse algorithm based on its internal structure. The binary tree collapse algorithm consists of three techniques, with the first two quite intuitive while the third is a bit more elaborate. All …

Congestion Control In Multicast Transport Protocols, Rajib Ghosh, George Varghese

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

We discuss congestion control mechanisms in multicast transport protocols and we propose TCP-M - a TCP-friendly Multicast transport protocol. TCP-M uses IP multicast to deliver data packets and acknowledgements to provide reliability. Ack implosion at the source is prevented by fusing acknowledgements at some intermediate routers. TCP-M reacts to network congestion exactly like TCP by having the sender emulate a TCP sender.

Modeling Mobile Ip In Mobile Unity, Peter J. Mccann, Gruia-Catalin Roman

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

With recent advances in wireless communication technology, mobile computing is an increasingly important area of research. A mobile system is one where independently executing components may migrate through some space during the course of the computation, and where the pattern of connectivity among the components changes as they move in and out of proximity. Mobile UNITY is a notation and proof logic for specifying and reasoning about mobile systems. In this paper it is argued that Mobile UNITY contributes to the modular development of system specifications because of the declarative fashion in which coordination among components is specified. The packet …

Terabit Burst Switching Progress Report (6/98-9/98), Jonathan S. Turner

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

This report summarizes progress on the Terabit Burst Switching Project at Washington University for the period from June 15, 1998 through September 15, 1998.

Terabit Burst Switching Progress Report (12/97-2/98), Jonathan S. Turner

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

This report summarizes progress on the Terabit Burst Switching Project at Washington University for the period from December 15, 1997 through March 15, 1998. Efforts during this period have concentrated on working out details of the burst switch architecture, evaluating a variety of implementation alternatives and developing the physical design of the 160 Gb/s ATM switch to allow demonstration of the burst switch within a realistic network context.

Diagnostic Screening Of Digital Mammograms Using Wavelets And Neural Networks To Extract Structure, Barry L. Kalman, Stan C. Kwasny, William R. Reinus

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

As the primary tool for detecting breast carcinoma, mammography provides visual images from which a trained radiologist can identify suspicious areas that suggest the presence of cancer. We describe an approach to image processing that reduces an image to a small number of values based on its structural characteristics using wavelets and neural networks. To illustrate its utility, we apply this methodology to the automatic screening of mammograms for mass lesions. Our results approach performance levels of trained human mammographers.

Learning From Examples With Unspecified Attribute Values, Sally A. Goldman, Stephen S. Kwek, Stephen D. Scott

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

We introduce the UAV learning model in which some of the attributes in the examples are unspecified. In our model, an example x is classified positive (resp., negative) if all possible assignments for the unspecified attributes result in a positive (resp., negative) classification. Otherwise the classificatoin given to x is "?" (for unknown). Given an example x in which some attributes are unspecified, the oracle UAV-MQ responds with the classification of x. Given a hypothesis h, the oracle UAV-EQ returns an example x (that could have unspecified attributes) for which h(x) is incorrect. We show that any class learnable in …

Buckets: Aggregative, Intelligent Agents For Publishing, Michael L. Nelson, Kurt Maly, Stewart N. T. Shen, Mohammad Zubair

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Buckets are an aggregative, intelligent construct for publishing in digital libraries. The goal of research projects is to produce information. This information is often instantiated in several forms, differentiated by semantic types (report, software, video, datasets, etc.). A given semantic type can be further differentiated by syntactic representations as well (PostScript version, PDF version, Word version, etc.). Although the information was created together and subtle relationships can exist between them, different semantic instantiations are generally segregated along currently obsolete media boundaries. Reports are placed in report archives, software might go into a software archive, but most of the data and …