Engineering Commons^™

Enhancements To The Scalable Coherent Interface Cache Protocol, Robert J. Safranek

Dissertations and Theses

As the number of NUMA system's cache coherency protocols based on the IEEE Std. 1596-1992, Standard for Scalable Coherent Interface (SCI) Specification increases, it is important to review this complex protocol to determine if the protocol can be enhanced in any way. This research provides two realizable extensions to the standard SCI cache protocol. Both of these extensions lie in the basic confines of the SCI architectures.

The first extension is a simplification to the SCI protocol in the area of prepending to a sharing list. Depending if the cache line is marked "Fresh" or "Gone", the flow of events …

Trends. International Trends In Space Policy: An Interview With Eligar Sadeh, Ibpp Editor

International Bulletin of Political Psychology

The article is an interview with Eligar Sadeh, Interim Director, Center for Engineering Infrastructure and Sciences in Space (CIESS), Colorado State University, Fort Collins, Colorado, United States of America.

Irrigation Water Balance Fundamentals, Charles M. Burt

BioResource and Agricultural Engineering

Water balances are essential for making wise decisions regarding water conservation and water management. The paper defines the essential ingredients of water balances, and distinguishes between farm and district-level balances. An example of a hypothetical district-level balance is provided. The importance of listing confidence intervals is highlighted. Classic errors in water balance determination are noted

Water Balance-Related Performance Indicators For International Projects, Charles M. Burt, Stuart W. Styles

BioResource and Agricultural Engineering

A unique study to examine the impacts of irrigation project modernization was funded by the Research Committee of the World Bank and managed by the International Program for Technology Research in Irrigation and Drainage (IPTRID). The project examined 16 irrigation projects in 10 developing countries, 15 of which have been partially modernized in some aspects of hardware and/or management. Besides developing specific recommendations for donor agencies interested in irrigation project modernization, this project also accomplished the following: 1. A Rapid Appraisal Process (RAP) was developed to quickly (within a week) evaluate an irrigation project to assess what type of modernization …

Subsurface Flows Water Balance Components For Irrigation Districts In The San Joaquin Valley, Stuart W. Styles, Charles M. Burt

BioResource and Agricultural Engineering

Cal Poly ITRC has conducted several water balances for regions or districts within the San Joaquin Valley. In each case, the greatest unknown component for the water balance is subsurface flows (ITRC, 1994). Water balance calculations can be confusing, especially in districts where there is groundwater pumping. This paper will discuss ITRC efforts to determine both lateral and vertical components of subsurface flow, the accuracy of the estimates, and the impact upon the accuracy of the final estimates of irrigation district or regional irrigation efficiencies.

Implant Pre-Treated For Reducing The Generation Of Wear Particulates, David A. Pienkowski, Kwon-Yong Lee

Biomedical Engineering Faculty Patents

A method is provided for reducing the amount of wear particulates generated by a total joint orthopaedic implant. The implant consists of two matched articulating components wherein at least one of the components is made of polymer or other material with similar physical properties. The method includes the steps of placing the total joint orthopaedic implant in a fluid bath and articulating the implant in the fluid bath for at least 1,000 cycles. The articulation may be performed in three stages. In the first, the implant is articulated under a load of substantially 0.1-500 Newtons with sliding speeds of substantially …

Transgenic Mammals Expressing Human Coagulation Factor Viii , William H. Velander

Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering: Patents

A non-human transgenic mammalian animal, as described above, contains an exogenous double stranded DNA sequence stably integrated into the genome of the animal, which comprises cis-acting regulatory units operably linked to a DNA sequence encoding human Factor VIII protein and a signal peptide, where the cis-acting regulatory units are active in mammary gland cells and the signal peptide is active in directing newly expressed Factor VIII into the milk of the animal. The promoter may be a milk protein promoter such as for whey acidic protein, casein, lactalbumin, or beta-lactoglobulin promoter. The transgenic mammals are preferably farm animals, for example, …

Monotonic And Cyclic Tests Of Long Steel-Frame Shear Walls With Openings, Alexander J. Salenikovich, J. Daniel Dolan, W. Samuel Easterling

American Iron and Steel Institute (AISI) Specifications, Standards, Manuals and Research Reports (1946 - present)

No abstract provided.

Acuta Enews April 1999, Vol.28, No. 4

ACUTA Newsletters

In This Issue

Calling-Party-Pays Cellular to Get Legislative Push from Cellular Industry

Midwest Local Events

Achievements Award Nominations

Van Houweling to Speak on Internet2

Michael Zastrocky Described Enterprise 2004

Board Report

Near-TV-Quality Over Net

DC at a Glance

Positions Available

Welcome New Members

Looking Back: Cyclamate, Allan Mazur, Kevin Jacobson

RISK: Health, Safety & Environment (1990-2002)

The second in a series re-evaluating hazards identified in the 1950s and 60s.

Institutional Controls For Contaminated Sites: Help Or Hazard, Mary R. English, Robert B. Inerfeld

RISK: Health, Safety & Environment (1990-2002)

The authors discuss the different institutional controls available to control long term site remediation of hazardous waste to prevent exposure to residual contamination.

Locating The Whole Pattern Is Better Than Locating Its Pieces: A Geometric Explanation Of An Empirical Phenomenon, Scott A. Starks, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

In many practical problems, we must find a pattern in an image. For situations in which the desired pattern consists of several simple components, the traditional approach is first to look for such components, and then to see whether the relative locations of these components are consistent with the pattern. Recent experiments have shown that a much more efficient pattern recognition can be achieved if we look for the whole pattern (without decomposing it first). In this paper, we give a simple geometric explanation of this empirical fact.

Arithmetic Of Complex Sets: Nickel's Classical Paper Revisited From A Geometric Viewpoint, Vladik Kreinovich, Juergen Wolff Von Gudenberg

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

Due to measurement uncertainty, after measuring a value of a physical quantity (or quantities), we do not get its exact value, we only get a set of possible values of this quantity (quantities). In case of 1-D quantities, we get an interval of possible values. It is known that the family of all real intervals is closed under point-wise arithmetic operations (+,-,*) (i.e., this family forms an arithmetic). This closeness is efficiently used to estimate the set of possible values for y=f(x1,...,xn) from the known sets of possible values for xi.

In some practical problems, physical quantities are complex-valued; it …

Chu Spaces: Towards New Foundations For Fuzzy Logic And Fuzzy Control, With Applications To Information Flow On The World Wide Web, Hung T. Nguyen, Vladik Kreinovich, Guoqing Liu

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

We show that Chu spaces, a new formalism used to describe parallelism and information flow, provide uniform explanations for different choices of fuzzy methodology, such as choices of fuzzy logical operations, of membership functions, of defuzzification, etc.

Towards Faster, Smoother, And More Compact Fuzzy Approximation, With An Application To Non-Destructive Evaluation Of Space Shuttle's Structural Integrity, Yeung Yam, Roberto Osegueda, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

It is known that fuzzy systems are universal approximators, i.e., any input-output system can be approximated, within any given accuracy, by a system described by fuzzy rules. Fuzzy rules work well in many practical applications. However, in some applications, the existing fuzzy rule approximation techniques are not sufficient:

First, in many practical problems (e.g., in many control applications), derivatives of the approximated function are very important, and so, we want not only the approximating function to be close to the approximated one, but we also want their derivatives to be close; however, standard fuzzy approximation techniques do not guarantee the …

A New Look At Fuzzy Theory Via Chu Spaces, Hung T. Nguyen, Berlin Wu, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

We propose to use Chu categories as a general framework for uncertainty analysis, with a special attention to fuzzy theory. We emphasize the fact that by viewing fuzzy concepts as Chu spaces, we can discover new aggregation operators, and model interactions and relationship between fuzzy data; these possibilities are due, in essence, to the category structure of Chu spaces, and especially to their morphisms. This paper is a tutorial introduction to the subject.

An Optimality Criterion For Arithmetic Of Complex Sets, Vladik Kreinovich, Juergen Wolff Von Gudenberg

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

Uncertainty of measuring complex-valued physical quantities can be described by complex sets. These sets can have complicated shapes, so we would like to find a good approximating family of sets. Which approximating family is the best? We reduce the corresponding optimization problem to a geometric one: namely, we prove that, under some reasonable conditions, an optimal family must be shift-, rotation- and scale-invariant. We then use this geometric reduction to conclude that the best approximating low-dimensional families consist of sets with linear or circular boundaries. This result is consistent with the fact that such sets have indeed been successful in …

On Average Bit Complexity Of Interval Arithmetic, Chadi Hamzo, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

In many practical situations, we know only the intervals which contain the actual (unknown) values of physical quantities. If we know the intervals [x] for a quantity x and [y] for another quantity y, then, for every arithmetic operation *, the set of possible values of x*y also forms an interval; the operations leading from [x] and [y] to this new interval are called interval arithmetic operations. For addition and subtraction, corresponding interval operations consist of two corresponding operations with real numbers, so there is no hope of making them faster. The best known algorithms for interval multiplication consists of …

Constructions Of Generalized Concatenated Codes And Their Trellis-Based Decoding Complexity, Robert H. Morelos-Zaragoza, Toru Fujiwara, Tadao Kasami, Shu Lin

Faculty Publications

In this correspondence, constructions of generalized concatenated (GC) codes with good rates and distances are presented. Some of the proposed GC codes have simpler trellis omplexity than Euclidean geometry (EG), Reed–Muller (RM), or Bose–Chaudhuri–Hocquenghem (BCH) codes of approximately the same rates and minimum distances, and in addition can be decoded with trellis-based multistage decoding up to their minimum distances. Several codes of the same length, dimension, and minimum distance as the best linear codes known are constructed.

Closure To "Irrigation Performance Measures: Efficiency And Uniformity", Albert J. Clemmens, Charles M. Burt, Kenneth H. Solomon, Terry A. Howell, Theodor S. Strelkoff

BioResource and Agricultural Engineering

No abstract provided.

Locally Optimal, Buffer-Constrained Motion Estimation And Mode Selection For Video Sequences, C. B. Peel, Scott E. Budge, K. Liang, C.-M. Huang

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

We describe a method of using a Lagrange multiplier to make a locally optimal trade off between rate and distortion in the motion search for video sequences, while maintaining a constant bit rate channel. Simulation of this method shows that it gives up to 3.5 dB PSNR improvement in a high motion sequence. A locally rate-distortion (R-D) optimal mode selection mechanism is also described. This method also gives significant quality benefit over the nominal method. Though the benefit of these techniques is significant when used separately, when the optimal mode selection is combined with the R-D optimal motion search, it …

Santa Clara Magazine, Volume 40 Number 4, March 1999, Santa Clara University

Santa Clara Magazine

8 - ENGAGING HEARTS AND MINDS By President Paul L. Locatelli, S.J. '60. Does an SCU education help students become more humane, more able to engage with life? Do students work to transform the world? Does a Santa Clara education fire both their hearts and minds?

12 - TREASURE ISLANDS By Sam Scott '96. The Women Broncos soccer team soars to the 1998 NCAA Finals. With a roster packed with talent, players and coach hold high hopes for 1999·

16 - SOCKING IT TO THEM By Connie Hinckley. Six SCU faculty emeriti apply intellectual curiosity and passion to their retirement …

Towards Intelligent Virtual Environment For Training Medical Doctors In Surgical Pain Relief, Richard Alo, Kenneth Alo, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

Chronic pain is a serious health problem affecting millions of people worldwide. Spinal cord stimulation is one of the most effective methods of easing the chronic pain. For most patients, a careful selection of weak electric currents drastically decreases the pain level. Engineering progress leads to more and more flexible devices that offer a wide variety of millions of possible simulation regimes. It is not possible to test all of them on each patient, we need an intelligent method of choosing an appropriate simulation regime. In this paper, we describe the need for an intelligent virtual environment for training medical …

System Reliability: A Case When Fuzzy Logic Enhances Probability Theory's Ability To Deal With Real-World Problems, Timothy J. Ross, Carlos M. Ferregut, Roberto Osegueda, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

In his recent paper "Probability theory needs an infusion of fuzzy logic to enhance its ability to deal with real-world problems", L. Zadeh explains that probability theory needs an infusion of fuzzy logic to enhance its ability to deal with real-world problems. In this talk, we give an example of a real-world problem for which such an infusion is indeed successful: the problem of system reliability.

From Fuzzy Models To Fuzzy Control, Chitta Baral, Vladik Kreinovich, Hung T. Nguyen, Yeung Yam

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

Traditional (non-fuzzy) control methodology deals with situations when we know exactly how the system behaves and how it will react to different controls, and we want to choose an appropriate control strategy. This methodology enables us to transform the description of the plant's (system's) behavior into an appropriate control strategy. In many practical situations, we do not have the exact knowledge of the system's behavior, but we have expert-supplied fuzzy rules which describe this behavior. In such situations, it is desirable to transform these description rules into rules describing control. There exist several reasonable heuristics for such transformation; however, the …

Acuta Enews March 1999, Vol.28, No. 3

ACUTA Newsletters

In This Issue

Austin Peay Survives Tornado

Nominate Now for Board of Directors

Tips to Make Your Presentation Better

President's Message

ACUTA Spring Seminars

Preparing Competitive Proposals

Board Report

DC at a Glance

Positions Available

Welcome New Members

Editorial, Orhan Talu, Shivaji Sircar

Chemical & Biomedical Engineering Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Wright State University College Of Engineering And Computer Science Bits And Pcs Newsletter, Volume 15, Number 3, March 1999, College Of Engineering And Computer Science, Wright State University

BITs and PCs Newsletter

A ten page newsletter created by the Wright State University College of Engineering and Computer Science that addresses the current affairs of the college.

A Value Focused Approach To Determining The Top Ten Hazards In Army Aviation, Brian K. Sperling

Theses and Dissertations

The United States Army Safety Center is challenged with identifying the top ten most severe hazards in Army Aviation. This research utilizes value-focused thinking and multiattribute preference theory concepts to produce a decision analysis model designed to aid decision-makers in their analysis process. The severity model is based on the Army's Risk Management doctrinal manual and has been tailored specifically for aviation related accidents and hazards. The model determines the severity and risk ranking for 65 categories of accidents and 24 existing hazards. A sensitivity analysis is conducted to examine the effects of variations in the weights of the top-level …

Technology Selection For The Air Force Research Laboratory Air Vehicles Directorate: An Analysis Using Value Focused Thinking, Michael F. Winthrop

Theses and Dissertations

A technology selection model was developed for the Air Vehicles Directorate of Air Force Research Laboratory. The model was developed and demonstrated to aid in addressing the question of what technologies Air Vehicles' should invest in to remain consistent with Air Force values. Both Value-Focused Thinking and optimization approaches were used to identify the value of Air Vehicles technology, to provide insights to Air Vehicles' decision-makers, to determine where value gaps might exist with the scored alternatives, and to determine how sensitive the model was to changes. As a demonstration of the approach, seven technologies were scored, representing all three …