Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition (Scada) Systems, George H. Baker, Allan Berg

George H Baker

Our critical national infrastructure systems have become almost universally dependent upon computer-based control systems technically referred to as supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems. SCADA systems evolved from the telemetry and event-alarm systems developed in the early days of utilities. With the widespread use of SCADA systems, computers have become the "basis element" for much of our critical infrastructure. Thus, the disruption of controlling computer terminals and networks due to natural disasters, electric power failure, accidents or malicious activity can have catastrophic consequences.

Oral History Interview With Laszlo A. Belady, Philip L. Frana

Philip L Frana

Belady discusses his early life and education in Hungary, escape to West Germany during the 1956 revolution, and work as a draftsman at Ford Motor Company in Cologne and as an aerodynamics engineer at Dassault in Paris. Belady covers his 1961 immigration into the United States, where he joined International Business Machines and did early work in operating systems, virtual machine architectures, program behavior modeling, memory management, computer graphics, Asian character sets, and data security. He also ...

Oral History Interview With Stephen Cook, Philip L. Frana

Philip L Frana

Cook recounts his early interest in electronics and association with electronic cardiac pacemaker inventor Wilson Greatbatch, and his education at the University of Michigan and Harvard University. He describes his first position as an assistant professor of mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley, and his growing interest in problems of computational complexity preceding an influential 1971 presentation on “The Complexity of Theorem Proving Procedures” at the ACM SIGACT Symposium on the Theory of ...

Researching The History Of Software: Mining Internet Resources In The “Old World,”“New World,” And The “Wild West”, Juliet Burba, Philip L. Frana

Philip L Frana

So wrote the great philosopher and poet Jorge Augustín Nicolás Ruiz de Santayana in his essay" The Elements and Function of Poetry."[1] Without doubt, the advent of the early Web unleashed a mania, an unreasonable recklessness that to this day resists being swept back under the rug. How can we tease" sanity" out of the Web? Can the historian put this madness to good use?

Globally Distributed Content Delivery, John Dilley, Bruce Maggs, Jay Parikh, Harald Prokop, Ramesh Sitaraman, Bill Weihl

Ramesh Sitaraman

No abstract provided.

Predictable Assembly Of Substation Automation Systems: An Experiment Report, Scott A. Hissam, John Hudak, James Ivers, Mark H. Klein, Magnus Larsson, Gabriel A. Moreno, Linda M. Northrop, Daniel Plakosh, Judith Stafford, Kurt C. Wallnau, William G. Wood

Gabriel A. Moreno

Oral History Interview With Peter Watson, Philip L. Frana

Philip L Frana

Peter Watson is founder of Berkeley Computer Services Limited (BCS), one of the oldest continuously operating software houses in Scotland. The company was established in 1978, and is based in Glasgow. BCS's first customer was Kangolwear. The company moved into healthcare solutions in the 1980s. In 1991 the company launched the integrated software package Masterlab, first implemented at Neville Hall Hospital in Abergavenny, Wales. In 2002 BCS was one of the largest providers of laboratory information systems in the United ...

Oral History Interview With Charles Antony Richard Hoare, Philip L. Frana

Philip L Frana

Sir Antony Hoare is Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research in Cambridge, England, and Research/Professor Emeritus at the University of Oxford. Hoare is the recipient of the AM Turing Award for fundamental contributions to the definition and design of programming languages. He has also been awarded the Kyoto Prize in Advanced Technology for pioneering and fundamental contributions to software science. In this oral history Hoare recounts his personal involvement in the development of academic computing science ...

Core Services In The Architecture Of The National Digital Library For Science Education (Nsdl), Carl Lagoze, Walter Hoehn, David Millman, William Arms, Stoney Gan, Diane Hillmann, Christopher Ingram, Dean Krafft, Richard Marisa, Jon Phipps, John Saylor, Carol Terrizzi, James Allan, Sergio Guzman-Lara, Tom Kalt

James Allan

We describe the core components of the architecture for the (NSDL) National Science, Mathematics, Engineering, and Technology Education Digital Library. Over time the NSDL will include heterogeneous users, content, and services. To accommodate this, a design for a technical and organization infrastructure has been formulated based on the notion of a spectrum of interoperability. This paper describes the first phase of the interoperability infrastructure including the metadata repository, search and discovery services, rights management services, and user interface portal facilities.

Oral History Interview With Carl Machover, Philip L. Frana

Philip L Frana

Carl Machover is computer graphics pioneer and president of Machover Associates Corporation (MAC), a computer graphics consultancy founded in 1976. MAC provides a broad range of management, engineering, marketing, and financial services to computer graphics users, suppliers, and investors worldwide. In this oral history Machover describes his upbringing in Iowa and training in the Eddy radar and radio program and other Navy service schools in Mississippi and Texas. He also provides details of his education under ...

Packaging And Deploying Predictable Assembly, Scott A. Hissam, Gabriel A. Moreno, Judith Stafford, Kurt C. Wallnau

Gabriel A. Moreno

Significant economic and technical benefits accrue from the use of pre-existing and commercially available software components to develop new systems. However, challenges remain that, if not adequately addressed, will slow the adoption of software component technology. Chief among these are a lack of consumer trust in the quality of components, and a lack of trust in the quality of assemblies of components without extensive and expensive testing. This paper describes predictionenabled component technology (PECT). A PECT results from integrating component technology with analysis models. An analysis model permits analysis and prediction of assembly-level properties prior to component composition, and, perhaps, …

Oral History Interview With Gary Durbin, Philip L. Frana

Philip L Frana

Gary Durbin is a software pioneer and entrepreneur with over thirty-five years of experience. He began his career specializing in operating systems and database systems. His first company, started in 1970, developed operating system improvements for IBM machines. That company introduced Secure, an early software security product. Secure was sold to Boole & Babbage in 1978. Durbin then founded Tesseract Corporation, a human resources software company that introduced the Time Relational Database. Tesseract was sold to ...

Oral History Interview With Lee Keet, Philip L. Frana

Philip L Frana

In this oral history software entrepreneur Ernest E.(Lee) Keet chronicles his education in programming and engineering at Cornell University, his early work as a salesperson and systems engineer for IBM in White Plains, NY, and his success as founder and CEO of Turnkey Systems, Inc.(TSI). Keet characterizes the heavy" craft" versus the" art" components of computer programming; he discusses the introduction of TSI's Task/Master, the first commercial telecommunications monitor; and his entrepreneurial efforts in Europe. Keet ...

Statistical Models For Empirical Component Properties And Assembly-Level Property Predictions: Toward Standard Labeling, Gabriel A. Moreno, Scott A. Hissam, Kurt C. Wallnau

Gabriel A. Moreno

One risk inherent in the use of software components has been that the behavior of assemblies of components is discovered only after their integration. The objective of our work is to enable designers to use known (and certified) component properties as parameters to models that can be used to predict assembly-level properties. Our concern in this paper is with empirical component properties and compositional reasoning, rather than formal properties and reasoning. Empirical component properties must be measured; assessing the effectiveness of predictions based on these properties also involves measurement. This, in turn, introduces systematic and random measurement error. As a …

Learning From One Example In Machine Vision By Sharing Probability Densities, Erik Learned-Miller

Erik G Learned-Miller

Human beings exhibit rapid learning when presented with a small number of images of a new object. A person can identify an object under a wide variety of visual conditions after having seen only a single example of that object. This ability can be partly explained by the application of previously learned statistical knowledge to a new setting. This thesis presents an approach to acquiring knowledge in one setting and using it in another. Specifically, we develop probability densities over common image changes. Given a single image of a new object and a model of change learned from a different …

Nullspace Composition Of Control Laws For Grasping, Robert Platt, Andrew Fagg, Roderic Grupen

Roderic Grupen

Much of the tradition in robot grasping is rooted in geometrical, planning-based approaches in which it assumed that object and finger geometries are well modeled a priori. Some recent approaches have chosen instead to deal with objects of unknown geometry. These techniques treat grasping as an active sensory-driven problem. At any given time, finger contacts are incrementally displaced along the objects local surface using a single control law. In this paper, we extend this approach by allowing multiple control laws to be active simultaneously. Three control laws are combined by projecting the actions of subordinate control laws into other control …

Transform-Invariant Image Decomposition With Similarity Templates, Chris Stauffer, Erik Learned-Miller, Kinh Tieu

Erik G Learned-Miller

Recent work has shown impressive transform-invariant modeling and clustering for sets of images of objects with similar appearance. We seek to expand these capabilities to sets of images of an object class that show considerable variation across individual instances (e.g. pedestrian images) using a representation based on pixel-wise similarities, similarity templates. Because of its invariance to the colors of particular components of an object, this representation enables detection of instances of an object class and enables alignment of those instances. Further, this model implicitly represents the regions of color regularity in the class-specific image set enabling a decomposition of that …

Automatic Segmentation And Indexing Of Specialized Databases, Madirakshi Das, R. Manmatha

R. Manmatha

The aim of this work is to index images based on color, in domain specific databases using colors computed from the object of interest only, instead of using the whole image. The main problem in this task is the segmentation of the region of interest from the background. Viewing segmentation as a figure/ground segregation problem leads to a new approach--successful elimination of the background leaves the figure or object of interest. The background elements are eliminated using general observations true for any photograph where there is a single, prominent object of interest. First, we form a hypothesis about possible background …

Modeling Score Distributions For Meta Search, R. Manmatha, T. Rath, F. Feng

R. Manmatha

In this paper the score distributions of a number of text search engines are modeled. It is shown empirically that the score distributions on a per query basis may be modeled using an exponential distribution for the set of non-relevant documents and a normal distribution for the set of relevant documents. Experiments show that this model fits TREC-3 and TREC-4 data for a wide variety of different search engines including INQUERY a probabilistic search engine, SMART a vector space engine, and search engines based on latent semantic indexing and language modeling. The model also works when search engines index other …

Oral History Interview With Jim Gray, Philip L. Frana

Philip L Frana

Gray discusses his childhood in Rome and education at the University of California, Berkeley. He explains the influence of Sputnik, Norbert Wiener's view of cybernetics and society, the social impact of computing, and the artificial intelligence papers of Newell and Simon in the shaping of his career. Gray describes his co-op position at General Dynamics, as well as positions with Bell Labs (Murray Hill) and IBM Research in Yorktown Heights and San Jose. Gray also describes his evaluations of computer models stimulated by the ...

Smoke And Mirrors Or Science? Teaching Law With Computers - A Reply To Cass Sunstein On Artificial Intelligence And Legal Science, Eric A. Engle

Eric A. Engle

The article explores the possibilities and limits of AI for teaching and modeling law.

Characterization Of Different Reactive Lysines In Bovine Heart Mitochondrial Porin. Al Jamal Ja, Philadelphia University

Philadelphia University, Jordan

No abstract provided.

Synchronization Of The Human Cortical Working Memory Network, Sharlene Newman, Marcel Just, Patricia Carpenter

Marcel Adam Just

No abstract provided.

On The Convergence Of Puck Clustering Systems, S. Kazadi, A. Abdul-Khaliq, R. Goodman

Sanza Kazadi

Features For Word Spotting In Historical Manuscripts, Toni M. Rath, R. Manmatha

R. Manmatha

For the transition from traditional to digital libraries, the large number of handwritten manuscripts that exist pose a great challenge. Easy access to such collections requires an index, which is currently created manually at great cost. Because automatic handwriting recognizers fail on historical manuscripts, the word spotting technique has been developed: the words in a collection are matched as images and grouped into clusters which contain all instances of the same word. By annotating ``interesting clusters," an index that links words to the locations where they occur can be built automatically.

Due to the noise in historical documents, selecting the …

Word Image Matching Using Dynamic Time Warping, Toni M. Rath, R. Manmatha

R. Manmatha

Libraries and other institutions are interested in providing access to scanned versions of their large collections of handwritten historical manuscripts on the web or on CDROMs. Providing convenient access to a collection requires an index which is manually created at great labour and expense. Since current handwriting recognizers do not perform well on historical documents, a technique called word spotting has been developed. It addresses the need for indexing single-author handwritten historical manuscripts in a new way: word images are matched to form clusters which contain occurrences of the same word throughout a collection. By annotating ``interesting" clusters, an index …

A Formal Approach To Score Normalization For Metasearch, H. Sever, R. Manmatha

R. Manmatha

Meta-search, or the combination of the outputs of different search engines in response to a query, has been shown to improve performance. Since the scores produced by different search engines are not comparable, researchers have often decomposed the metasearch problem into a score normalization step followed by a combination step. Combination has been studied by many researchers. While appropriate normalization can affect performance, most of the normalization schemes suggested are ad hoc in nature.

In this paper, we propose a formal approach to normalizing scores for meta-search by taking the distributions of the scores into account. Recently, it has been …

A Critical Examination Of Tdt’S Cost Function, R. Manmatha, Ao Feng, James Allan

R. Manmatha

Topic Detection and Tracking (TDT) tasks are evaluated using a cost function. The standard TDT cost function assumes a constant probability of relevance P(rel) across all topics. In practice, P(rel) varies widely across topics. We argue using both theoretical and experimental evidence that the cost function should be modified to account for the varying P(rel).

Indexing For A Digital Library Of George Washington’S Manuscripts: A Study Of Word Matching Techniques, T. M. Rath, S. Kane, A. Lehman, E. Partridge, R. Manmatha

R. Manmatha

In a multimedia world, one would like electronic access to all kinds of information. But a lot of important information still only exists on paper and it is a challenge to efficiently access or navigate this information even if it is scanned in. The previously proposed \word spotting" idea is an approach for accessing and navigating a collection of handwritten documents available as images using an index automatically generated by matching words as pictures. The most difficult task in solving this problem is the matching of word images. The quality of the aged documents and the variations in handwriting make …

Candidate Set Strategies For Ant Colony Optimisation, Marcus Randall, James Montgomery

Marcus Randall

Ant Colony Optimisation based solvers systematically scan the set of possible solution elements before choosing a particular one. Hence, the computational time required for each step of the algorithm can be large. One way to overcome this is to limit the number of element choices to a sensible subset, or candidate set. This paper describes some novel generic candidate set strategies and tests these on the travelling salesman and car sequencing problems. The results show that the use of candidate sets helps to find competitive solutions to the test problems in a relatively short amount of time.