Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Efficient Storage And Retrieval Of Georeferenced Objects In A Semantic Database For Web-Based Applications, Debra Lee Davis

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The use and dissemination of remotely-sensed data is an important resource that can be used for environmental, commercial and educational purposes. Because of this, the use and availability of remotely-sensed data has increased dramatically in recent years. This usefulness, however, is often overshadowed by the difficulty encountered with trying to deal with this type of data. The amount of data available is immense. Storing, searching and retrieving the data of interest is often difficult, time consuming and inefficient. This is particularly true when these types of data need to be rapidly and continually accessed via the Internet, or combined with …

Covert Shells, John Christian Smith

John Christian Smith

The potential for covert communications exist anywhere that legitimate communication channels are in use. In order to maintain control of the channel once exploited, the insertion of a backdoor Trojan horse server, to be used with a client that provides shell access, is often a necessary prerequisite to establishing and using a covert channel long term.

We discuss covert channel communications methods ranging from embedded channels to disguised protocols. What follows is a review of available covert shell tools. The underground, historical evolution of covert shells is reviewed, focusing on selected, available tools, which range from simple encapsulation methods to …

Classes Of Logic Programs Which Possess Unique Supported Models, Anthony K. Seda, Pascal Hitzler

Computer Science and Engineering Faculty Publications

Logic programming is concerned with the use of logic as a programming language. The main manifestation of this computing paradigm is in the various versions of Prolog which are now available, in which computation is viewed as deduction from sets of Horn clauses, although there is also growing interest in the related form known as answer set programming, see [10]. The reference [1] contains a good survey of the growth of logic programming over the last twenty-five years both as a stand-alone programming language and as a software component of large information systems. One advantage a logic program P has …

Side Collision Warning System For Transit Buses, Sue Mcneil, David Duggins, Christoph Mertz, Arne Suppe, Chuck Thorpe

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Transit buses are involved in many more accidents than other vehicles. Collision warning systems (CWS) are therefore placed most efficiently on these buses. In our project, we investigate their operating environment and available technologies to develop performance specifications for such CWS. The paper discusses our findings of transit buses driving through very cluttered surroundings and being involved in many different types of accidents where currently available CWS no not work effectively. One of the focuses of our work is pedestrians around the bus and their detection.

Semantic Web And Information Brokering: Opportunities, Commercialization, And Challenges, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

From the chairs' report published in SIGMOD record: The keynote address entitled 'Semantic Web and Information Brokering: Opportunities, Early Commercializations, and Challenges' was delivered by Amit Sheth (University of Georgia and Taalee Corp). Sheth characterized semantics as the next step in the evolution of the WWW and stressed the importance of semantically organized information for supporting ubiquitous, powerful, accurate and efficient access to this information. Sheth also reviewed proposals for semantic interoperability frameworks such as the DAML(DARPA Agent Mark-Up Language), the Oingo family of tools for defining concepts and extracting knowledge from large databases, as well as several scenarios on …

Exception Handling In Workflow Systems, Zongwei Luo, Amit P. Sheth, Krzysztof J. Kochut, John A. Miller

Kno.e.sis Publications

In this paper, defeasible workflow is proposed as a framework to support exception handling for workflow management. By using the “justified” ECA rules to capture more contexts in workflow modeling, defeasible workflow uses context dependent reasoning to enhance the exception handling capability of workflow management systems. In particular, this limits possible alternative exception handler candidates in dealing with exceptional situations. Furthermore, a case-based reasoning (CBR) mechanism with integrated human involvement is used to improve the exception handling capabilities. This involves collecting cases to capture experiences in handling exceptions, retrieving similar prior exception handling cases, and reusing the exception handling experiences …

Knowledge Discovery In Biological Databases : A Neural Network Approach, Qicheng Ma

Dissertations

Knowledge discovery, in databases, also known as data mining, is aimed to find significant information from a set of data. The knowledge to be mined from the dataset may refer to patterns, association rules, classification and clustering rules, and so forth. In this dissertation, we present a neural network approach to finding knowledge in biological databases. Specifically, we propose new methods to process biological sequences in two case studies: the classification of protein sequences and the prediction of E. Coli promoters in DNA sequences. Our proposed methods, based oil neural network architectures combine techniques ranging from Bayesian inference, coding theory, …

Integration And Querying Of Heterogeneous, Autonomous, Distributed Database Systems, Rukshan Indika Athauda

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Today, databases have become an integral part of information systems. In the past two decades, we have seen different database systems being developed independently and used in different applications domains. Today's interconnected networks and advanced applications, such as data warehousing, data mining & knowledge discovery and intelligent data access to information on the Web, have created a need for integrated access to such heterogeneous, autonomous, distributed database systems. Heterogeneous/multidatabase research has focused on this issue resulting in many different approaches. However, a single, generally accepted methodology in academia or industry has not emerged providing ubiquitous intelligent data access from heterogeneous, …

Dimensionality Reduction Using Genetic Algorithms, Michael L. Raymer, William F. Punch, Erik D. Goodman, Leslie A. Kuhn, Anil K. Jain

Kno.e.sis Publications

Pattern recognition generally requires that objects be described in terms of a set of measurable features. The selection and quality of the features representing each pattern affect the success of subsequent classification. Feature extraction is the process of deriving new features from original features to reduce the cost of feature measurement, increase classifier efficiency, and allow higher accuracy. Many feature extraction techniques involve linear transformations of the original pattern vectors to new vectors of lower dimensionality. While this is useful for data visualization and classification efficiency, it does not necessarily reduce the number of features to be measured since each …

A New Fixed-Point Theorem For Logic Programming Semantics, Anthony K. Seda, Pascal Hitzler

Computer Science and Engineering Faculty Publications

We present a new fixed-point theorem akin to the Banach contraction mapping theorem, but in the context of a novel notion of generalized metric space, and show how it can be applied to analyse the denotational semantics of certain logic programs. The theorem is obtained by generalizing a theorem of Priess-Crampe and Ribenboim, which grew out of applications within valuation theory, but is also inspired by a theorem of S.G. Matthews which grew out of applications to conventional programming language semantics. The class of programs to which we apply our theorem was defined previously by us in terms of operators …

Is Information Systems A Science? An Inquiry Into The Nature Of The Information Systems Discipline, Deepak Khazanchi, Bjørn Erik Munkvold

Information Systems and Quantitative Analysis Faculty Publications

The Information Systems (IS) discipline is apparently undergoing an identity crisis. Academicians question the need for IS departments in colleges stating the absence of a core for the field and its integration within other business functions as a basis for its elimination. At the same time, many practitioners, as reflected in the US government's recent IT labor shortage report, continue to ignore IS as a distinct field of study. This article briefly outlines these and other challenges and argues that notwithstanding underlying philosophical differences, it can be concluded that IS is an emerging scientific discipline. This conclusion is reached through …

On-Line Bayesian Speaker Adaptation By Using Tree-Structured Transformation And Robust Priors, Shaojun Wang, Yunxin Zhao

Kno.e.sis Publications

This paper presents new results by using our previously proposed on-line Bayesian learning approach for affine transformation parameter estimation in speaker adaptation. The on-line Bayesian learning technique allows updating parameter estimates after each utterance and it can accommodate flexible forms of transformation functions as well as prior probability density functions. We show through experimental results the robustness of heavy tailed priors to mismatch in prior density estimation. We also show that by properly choosing the transformation matrices and depths of hierarchical trees, recognition performance improved significantly.

Re-Engineering Structures From Web Documents, Moh Chuang Hue, Ee Peng Lim, Wee-Keong Ng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

To realize a wide range of applications (including digital libraries) on the Web, a more structured way of accessing the Web is required and such requirement can be facilitated by the use of XML standard. In this paper, we propose a general framework for reverse engineering (or re-engineering) the underlying structures i.e.,the DTD from a collection of similarly structured XML documents when they share some common but unknown DTDs. The essential data structures and algorithms for the DTD generation have been delveloped and experiments on real Web collections have been conducted to demonstrate their feasibilty. In addition, we also proposed …

Dtd-Miner: A Tool For Mining Dtds From Xml Documents, Moh Chuang Hue, Ee Peng Lim, Wee-Keong Ng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

XML documents are semistructured and the structure of the documents is embedded in the tags. Although XML documents can be accompanied by a DTD that defines the structure of the documents, the presence of a DTD is not mandatory. The difficulty in deriving the DTD for XML documents lies in the fact that DTDs are of different syntax as XML and that prior knowledge of the structure of the documents is required. In this paper, we introduce DTD-Miner, an automatic structure-mining tool for XML documents. Using a Web-based interface, the user will be able to submit a set of similarly …

Genetically Evolved Dynamic Control For Quadruped Walking, Giorgio Grasso

Dissertations

The aim of this dissertation is to show that dynamic control of quadruped locomotion is achievable through the use of genetically evolved central pattern generators. This strategy is tested both in simulation and on a walking robot. The design of the walker has been chosen to be statically unstable, so that during motion less than three supporting feet may be in contact with the ground.

The control strategy adopted is capable of propelling the artificial walker at a forward locomotion speed of ~1.5 Km/h on rugged terrain and provides for stability of motion. The learning of walking, based on simulated …

Component-Based Software Engineering, Zhiyuan Wang

Dissertations

To solve the problems coming with the current software development methodologies, component-based software engineering has caught many researchers' attention recently. In component-based software engineering, a software system is considered as a set of software components assembled together instead of as a set of functions from the traditional perspective. Software components can be bought from third party vendors as off-the-shelf components and be assembled together.

Component-based software engineering, though very promising, needs to solve several core issues before it becomes a mature software development strategy. The goal of this dissertation is to establish an infrastructure for component-based software development. The author …

Applications Of Agent Architectures To Decision Support In Distributed Simulation And Training Systems, Plamen V. Petrov

Dissertations

This work develops the approach and presents the results of a new model for applying intelligent agents to complex distributed interactive simulation for command and control. In the framework of tactical command, control communications, computers and intelligence (C₄I), software agents provide a novel approach for efficient decision support and distributed interactive mission training. An agent-based architecture for decision support is designed, implemented and is applied in a distributed interactive simulation to significantly enhance the command and control training during simulated exercises. The architecture is based on monitoring, evaluation, and advice agents, which cooperate to provide alternatives to the …

Development And Characterization Of Techniques For Neuro-Imaging Registration, Carlo Ciulla

Theses

Three automated techniques were developed for the alignment of Neuro-Images acquired during distinct scanning periods and their performance were characterized. The techniques are based on the assumption that the human brain is a rigid body and will assume different positions during different scanning periods. One technique uses three fiducial markers, while the other two uses eigenvectors of the inertia matrix of the Neuro-Image, to compute the three angles (pitch, yaw and roll) needed to register the test Neuro-Image to the reference Neuro-Image. A rigid body transformation is computed and applied to the test Neuro-Image such that it results aligned to …

The Gx-Tree, Amgad Mohamed Abdelkader Al-Sisi

Archived Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.

Local Properties Of Query Languages, Guozhu Dong, Leonid Libkin, Limsoon Wong

Kno.e.sis Publications

In this paper we study the expressiveness of local queries. By locality we mean — informally — that in order to check if a tuple belongs to the result of a query, one only has to look at a certain predetermined portion of the input. Examples include all relational calculus queries. We start by proving a general result describing outputs of local queries. This result leads to many easy inexpressibility proofs for local queries. We then consider a closely related property, namely, the bounded degree property. It describes the outputs of local queries on structures that locally look “simple.” Every …

Using Raster Sketches For Digital Image Retrieval, James Carswell

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This research addresses the problem of content-based image retrieval using queries on image-object shape, completely in the raster domain. It focuses on the particularities of image databases encountered in typical topographic applications and presents the development of an environment for visual information management that enables such queries. The query consists of a user-provided raster sketch of the shape of an imaged object. The objective of the search is to retrieve images that contain an object sufficiently similar to the one specified in the query. The new contribution of this work combines the design of a comprehensive digital image database on-line …

Load Sharing In Distributed Multimedia-On-Demand Systems, Y. C. Tay, Hwee Hwa Pang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Service providers have begun to offer multimedia-on-demand services to residential estates by installing isolated, small-scale multimedia servers at individual estates. Such an arrangement allows the service providers to operate without relying on a highspeed, large-capacity metropolitan area network, which is still not available in many countries. Unfortunately, installing isolated servers can incur very high server costs, as each server requires spare bandwidth to cope with fluctuations in user demand. The authors explore the feasibility of linking up several small multimedia servers to a (limited-capacity) network, and allowing servers with idle retrieval bandwidth to help out servers that are temporarily overloaded; …

Predictive Adaptive Resonance Theory And Knowledge Discovery In Databases, Ah-Hwee Tan, Hui-Shin Vivien Soon

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper investigates the scalability of predictive Adaptive Resonance Theory (ART) networks for knowledge discovery in very large databases. Although predictive ART performs fast and incremental learning, the number of recognition categories or rules that it creates during learning may become substantially large and cause the learning speed to slow down. To tackle this problem, we introduce an on-line algorithm for evaluating and pruning categories during learning. Benchmark experiments on a large scale data set show that on-line pruning has been effective in reducing the number of the recognition categories and the time for convergence. Interestingly, the pruned networks also …

Enhancing A Virtual Distributed Library User Interface Via Server-Side User Profile Caching, Jason T. Ward

Theses and Dissertations

Various Department of Defense (DoD) agencies archive terabytes of intelligence imagery and electrooptical signature data. The Air Force Research Laboratory, Sensors Directorate (AFRL/SN), is tasked with creating and managing a virtual distributed library that facilitates secure, detailed queries across these distributed holdings using the internally developed Advanced Query Tool (AQT). In this research, a methodology is proposed to utilize user profiling techniques to augment a digital library. As part of this methodology, product-oriented usability analysis metrics are introduced that quantitatively verify the usability of an interface. The methodology is applied to the AFRL/SN's Virtual Distributed Laboratory AQT and subsequently analyzed …

Data Warehouse Techniques To Support Global On-Demand Weather Forecast Metrics, Meriellen C. Joga

Theses and Dissertations

Air Force pilots and other operators make crucial mission planning decisions based on weather forecasts; therefore, the ability to forecast the weather accurately is a critical issue to Air Force Weather (AFW) and its customers. The goal of this research is to provide Air Force Weather with a methodology to automate statistical data analysis for the purpose of providing on-demand metrics. A data warehousing methodology is developed and applied to the weather metrics problem in order to present an option that will facilitate on-demand metrics. On-line analytical processing (OLAP) and data mining solutions are also discussed.

A Framework For Acquiring Domain Semantics And Knowledge For Database Integration, Roger Hsiang-Li Chiang, Ee Peng Lim, Veda C. Storey

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Database integration research has traditionally focused on understanding integration issues from the schema and instance perspectives. As a result, database integration approaches tend to rely on a direct comparison of schema and instance elements. However, when the integration of heterogeneous databases is performed without considering the domain semantics and knowledge of local databases such as context information and requirement specifications, an incorrect integrated database may be produced. In this research, a framework for carrying out database integration tasks using the above knowledge is proposed. The framework provides a thorough foundation to: 1. analyze database integration issues from a broad scope, …

Crop Updates 2000 Cereals - Part 4, C. Tang, Z. Rengel, E. Diatloff, B. Mcgann, Mehmet Cakir, Nick Galwey, David Poulsen, M. Carter, A. Briney, R. Wilson, R. H. Potter, M. G. K. Jones, Ian Barclay, Robyn Mclean, Dean Diepeveen, Robert Loughman, Ross Kingwell, Michael O'Connell, Simone Blennerhasset, Benjamin Michael Tiller, Senthold Asseng, Holger Meinke, Bill Bowden, Jeff Russell, Ivan Lee, Clare Johnson, Chris Newman, Robert Emery, Romolo Tassone, Ernestos Kostas, Graeme Ralph, Robert Sudmeyer, David Hall, Harvey Jones

Crop Updates

This session covers twelve papers from different authors:

BREEDING

1.Response to subsoil acidity of wheat genotypes differing in Al-tolerance, C. Tang, Z. Rengel, E. Diatloff and B. McGann, Soil Science and Plant Nutrition/CLIMA, University of Western Australia

2. Application of molecular markers in Barley Improvement, Mehmet Cakir¹, Nick Galwey¹ and David Poulsen^{2, 1}Plant Sciences, Faculty of Agriculture, University of Western Australia, ²Queensland Department of Primary Industries, Hermitage Research Station, Queensland

3. Implementation of molecular markers for wheat improvement in the Western Region, M. Carter¹, A. Briney¹, …

Cataloging Expert Systems: Optimism And Frustrated Reality, William Olmstadt

E-JASL 1999-2009 (Volumes 1-10)

There is little question that computers have profoundly changed how information professionals work. The process of cataloging and classifying library materials was one of the first activities transformed by information technology. The introduction of the MARC format in the 1960s and the creation of national bibliographic utilities in the 1970s had a lasting impact on cataloging. In the 1980s, the affordability of microcomputers made the computer accessible for cataloging, even to small libraries. This trend toward automating library processes with computers parallels a broader societal interest in the use of computers to organize and store information. Following World War II, …

Collaborative Software Agents Support For The Texpros Document Management System, Jrtian Lin

Dissertations

This dissertation investigates the use of active rules that are embedded in markup documents. Active rules are used in a markup representation by integrating Collaborative Software Agents with TEXPROS (abbreviation for TEXt PROcessing System) [Liu and Ng 1996] to create a powerful distributed document management system. Such markup documents with embedded active rules are called Active Documents. For fast retrieval purposes, when we need to generate a customized Internet folder organization, we first define the Folder Organization Query Language (FO-QL) to solve data categorization problems. FO-QL defines the folder organization query process that automatically retrieves links of documents deposited into …

The Space Of Jumping Emerging Patterns And Its Incremental Maintenance, Jinyan Li, Kotagiri Ramamohanarao, Guozhu Dong

Kno.e.sis Publications

The concept of jumping emerging patterns (JEPs) has been proposed to describe those discriminating features which only occur in the positive training instances but do not occur in the negative class at all; JEPs have been used to construct classifiers which generally provide better accuracy than the state-of-the-art classifiers such as C4.5. The algorithms for maintaining the space of jumping emerging patterns (JEP space) are presented in this paper. We prove that JEP spaces satisfy the property of convexity. Therefore JEP spaces can be concisely represented by two bounds: consisting respectively of the most general elements and the most specific …