Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Automated Online News Classification With Personalization, Chee-Hong Chan, Aixin Sun, Ee Peng Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Classification of online news, in the past, has often been done manually. In our proposed Categorizor system, we have experimented an automated approach to classify online news using the Support Vector Machine (SVM). SVM has been shown to deliver good classification results when ample training documents are given. In our research, we have applied SVM to personalized classification of online news.

A Dipolar Coupling Based Strategy For Simultaneous Resonance Assignment And Structure Determination Of Protein Backbones, Fang Tian, Homayoun Valafar, James H. Prestegard

Faculty Publications

A new approach for simultaneous protein backbone resonance assignment and structure determination by NMR is introduced. This approach relies on recent advances in high-resolution NMR spectroscopy that allow observation of anisotropic interactions, such as dipolar couplings, from proteins partially aligned in field ordered media. Residual dipolar couplings are used for both geometric information and a filter in the assembly of residues in a sequential manner. Experimental data were collected in less than one week on a small redox protein, rubredoxin, that was 15N enriched but not enriched above 1% natural abundance in 13C. Given the acceleration possible with partial 13C …

On Clustering And Retrieval Of Video Shots, Chong-Wah Ngo, Ting-Chuen Pong, Hong-Jiang Zhang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Clustering of video data is an important issue in video abstraction, browsing and retrieval. In this paper, we propose a two-level hierarchical clustering approach by aggregating shots with similar motion and color features. Motion features are computed directly from 20 tensor histograms, while color features are represented by 30 color histograms. Cluster validity analysis is further applied to automatically determine the number of clusters at each level. Video retrieval can then be done directly based on the result of clustering. The proposed approach is found to be useful particularly for sports games, where motion and color are important visual cues …

Reifying Communication At The Application Level, Andrew P. Black, Jie Huang, Jonathan Walpole

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

Middleware, from the earliest RPC systems to recent Object-Oriented Remote Message Sending (RMS) systems such as Java RMI and CORBA, claims transparency as one of its main attributes. Coulouris et al. define transparency as “the concealment from the … application programmer of the separation of components in a distributed system.” They go on to identify eight different kinds of transparency.

We considered titling this paper “Transparency Considered Harmful”, but that title is misleading because it implies that all kinds of transparency are bad. This is not our view. Rather, we believe that the choice of which transparencies should be offered …

Video Partitioning By Temporal Slice Coherency, Chong-Wah Ngo, Ting-Chuen Pong, Roland T. Chin

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We present a novel approach for video partitioning by detecting three essential types of camera breaks, namely cuts, wipes, and dissolves. The approach is based on the analysis of temporal slices which are extracted from the video by slicing through the sequence of video frames and collecting temporal signatures. Each of these slices contains both spatial and temporal information from which coherent regions are indicative of uninterrupted video partitions separated by camera breaks. Properties could further be extracted from the slice for both the detection and classification of camera breaks. For example, cut and wipes are detected by color-texture properties, …

Feedback Correction Of Angular Error In Grating Readout, Monish Ranjan Chatterjee, Sundaram Ramachandran

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

Angular and wavelength READ beam errors in holographic interconnection systems are often a recurrent problem. Several strategies have been proposed to minimize or eliminate such READOUT misalignments.

Some years ago, Chatterjee and co-workers proposed a method involving READ beam wavelength tuning to correct output angular errors. In this paper, we investigate the possibility of using an acousto-optic (A-O) Bragg cell with optoelectronic feedback to dynamically correct the scattered beam for deviations in the incidence direction of the READ beam of a hologram. The concept here is based on an acoustic frequency feedback strategy used recently by Balakshy and Kazaryan for …

Infopipes—An Abstraction For Information Flow, Jie Huang, Andrew P. Black, Jonathan Walpole, Calton Pu

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

Building Object-Oriented Distributed Systems has been facilitated by Remote Message Sending (RMS) systems like Java RMI and implementations of CORBA. However, RMS systems are designed to support request/response interactions. Streaming applications, in contrast, are characterized by high-bandwidth, long-duration communication with stringent performance requirements. Examples of streaming applications include video-on-demand, teleconferencing, on-line education, and environmental observation. These applications transfer huge amounts of data and focus on distributed information flow rather than request/response.

To simplify the task of building distributed streaming applications, we propose a new abstraction for information flow—Infopipes. Using Infopipes, information flow becomes the heart of the system, not an …

Comparison Of Two Distributed Fuzzy Logic Controllers For Flexible-Link Manipulators, Linda Z. Shi, Mohamed Trabia

Mechanical Engineering Faculty Presentations

The paper suggests that fuzzy logic controllers present a computationally efficient and robust alternative to conventional controllers. The paper presents two possible structures for the distributed fuzzy logic controller of a single-link flexible manipulator. A linear quadratic regulator method is used to prove the effectiveness of fuzzy logic controllers.

Overview Of Acousto-Optic Bistability, Chaos, And Logical Applications, Monish Ranjan Chatterjee, Erol Sonmez

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

An overview is presented of the key results in the field of acousto-optic bistability in the past two decades. It is shown that the basic acousto-optic bistable device may be described as a nonlinear dynamical system which satisfies a quadratic map. Thereafter, details are presented of several analytical methods, computer modeling approaches, including the SPICE circuit modeling technique, and experiments that have been used to understand the phenomenon.

Extensions to logical and digital applications are also discussed.

Modeling The Transient Rate Behavior Of Bandwidth Sharing As A Hybrid Control System, Kang Li, Molly H. Shor, Jonathan Walpole, Calton Pu

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

This paper uses hybrid control to model a problem of computer network systems, the dynamic behavior of bandwidth sharing among competing TCP traffic. It has been well known in the computer network community that well-behaved (TCP-friendly) congestion control mechanisms are crucial to the robustness of the Internet. Congestion control determines the transmission rate for each flow. Right now, most TCP-friendly research focuses only on the average throughput behavior without considering how the data is sent out in the short-term (e.g. bursty or smooth). However, recent experimental results show that short-term rate adjustments can change the bandwidth sharing result. Therefore, it …

Moving Towards Massively Scalable Video-Based Sensor Networks, Wu-Chi Feng, Jonathan Walpole, Calton Pu, Wu-Chang Feng

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

Networking and computing technologies are becoming advanced enough to enable a wealth of diverse applications that will drastically change our everyday lives. Some past examples of these developments include the World Wide Web and wireless data networking infrastructures. As is quite obvious, the World Wide Web has enabled a fundamental change in the way many people deal with day-to-day tasks. Through the web, one can now make on-line reservations for travel, pay bills through on-line banking services, and view personalized on-line newscasts. More recently, developments in wireless technologies have enabled anywhere, anytime access to information over wireless medium. As wireless …

Infosphere Project: An Overview, Calton Pu, Jonathan Walpole

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

We describe the Infosphere project, which is building the systems software support for information-driven applications such as digital libraries and electronic commerce. The main technical contribution is the Infopipe abstraction to support information flow with quality of service. Using building blocks such as program specialization, software feedback, domain-specific languages, and personalized information filtering, the Infopipe software generates code and manage resources to provide the specified quality of service with support for composition and restructuring.

Fuzzycast: Media Broadcasting For Multiple Asynchronous Receivers, Marcel Waldvogel, Wei Deng, Ramaprabhu Janakiraman

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

When using an on-demand media streaming system on top of a network with Multicast support, it is sometimes more efficient to use broadcast to distribute popular content. There has been a lot of research in broadcasting on-demand content to multiple, asynchronous receivers. In this paper, we propose a family of novel, practical techniques for broadcasting on-demand media, which achieve lowest known server/network bandwidth usage and I/O efficient client buffer management, while retaining the simplicity of a frame-based single channel scheme.

Study Of Dynamics And Mechanism Of Metal-Induced Silicon Growth, Elena A. Guliants, Wayne A. Anderson

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

The present study addresses the mechanism of metal-induced growth of device-quality silicon thin films. Si deposition was performed by magnetron sputtering on a 25-nm-thick Ni prelayer at 525–625 °C and yielded a continuous, highly crystalline film with a columnar structure. A Ni disilicide intermediate layer formed as a result of the Ni reaction with Si deposit provides a sufficient site for the Si epitaxial growth because lattice mismatch is small between the two materials. The reaction between Ni and Si was observed to progress in several stages. The NixSiy phase evolution in a Ni:Si layer was studied by x-ray photoelectron …

Local Search And Encoding Schemes For Soft Constraint Minimization Problems, Michael P. Moran, Weixiong Zhang

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

Soft constraint minimization problems (SCMPs) contain hard constraints that cannot be violated and soft constraints that may be violated but carry penalties if not satisfied. In this paper, we first extend local search, WalkSAT in particular, to SCMPs and study the existing SAT encoding schemes for SCMPs. We propose a general encoding method called k-encoding. We then investigate the effects of local search neiborhood structures introduced by encoding schemes and analyze the anytime performance of extended WalkSAT using different encoding methods. Our experimental results on various graph coloring problems show that a direct extension of WalkSAT is most effective, and …

Formal Specification And Design Of Mobile Systems, Gruia-Catalin Roman, Christine Julien, Qingfeng Huang

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

Termination detection, a classical problem in distributed computing, is revisited in the new setting provided by the emerging mobile computing technology. A simple solution tailored for use in ad hoc networks is employed as a vehicle for demonstrating the applicability of formal requirements and design strategies to the new field of mobile computing. The approach is based on well understood techniquest in specification refinement, but the methodology is tailored to mobile applications and helps designers address novel concerns such as the mobility of hosts, transient interactions, and specific coordination constructs. The proof logic and programming notation of Mobile UNITY provide …

Obiwan - An Internet Protocol Router In Reconfigurable Hardware, Florian Braun, Marcel Waldvogel, John Lockwood

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

The ongoing exponential increase of line speed in the Internet and combined with the uncountable requests for increased functionality of network devices presents a major challenge. These demands call for the use of reprogrammable hardware to provide the required flexible high-speed functionaltiy. The Field Programmable Port Extender (FPX) provides such an environment for development of networking components in reprogrammable hardware. We present the high-speed IP routing components in reprogrammable hardware. We present the high-speed IP routing module "OBIWAN" (Optimal Binary search IP lookup for Wide Area Networks) built on top of an IP processing framework.

Phase Transitions And Backbones Of Constraint Minimization Problems, Weixiong Zhang

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

Many real-world problems involve constraints that cannot be all satisfied. The goal toward an overconstrained problem is to find solutions minimizing the total number of constraints violated. We call such a problem constraint minimization problem (CMP). We study the behavior of the phase transitions and backbones of CMP. We first investigate the relationship between the phase transitions of Boolean satisfiability, or precisely 3-SAT (a well-studied NP-complete decision problem), and the phase transitions of MAX 3-SAT (an NP-hard optimization problem). To bridge the gap between the easy-hard-easy phase transitions of 3-SAT, in which solutions of bounded quality, e.g., solutions with at …

Parbit: A Tool To Transform Bitfiles To Implement Partial Reconfiguration Of Field Programmable Gate Arrays (Fpgas), Edson L. Horta, John W. Lockwood

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) can be partially reconfigured to implement Dynamically loadable Hardware Plugin (DHP) modules. A tool called PARBIT has been developed that transforms FPGA configuration bitfiles to enable DHP modules. With this tool it is possible to define a partial reconfigurable area inside the FPGA and download it into a specified region of the FPGA device. One or more DHPs, with different sizes can be implemented using PARBIT.

Network Abstractions For Context-Aware Mobile Computing, Gruia-Catalin Roman, Christine Julien, Qingfeng Huang

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

Context-Aware computing is characterized by the ability of a software system to continuously adapt its behavior to a changing environment over which it has little or no control. Previous work along these lines presumed a rather narrow definition of context, one that was centered on resources immediately available to the component in question, e.g., communication bandwidth, physical location, etc. This paper explores context-aware computing in the setting of ad hoc networks consisting of numerous mobile hosts that interact with each other opportunistically via transient wireless interconnections. We extend the context to encompass awareness of an entire neighborhood within the ad …

Synthesizable Design Of A Multi-Module Memory Controller, Sarang Dharmapurikar, John W. Lockwood

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

Random Access Memory (RAM) is a common resources needed by networking hardware modules. Synchronous Dynamic RAM (SDRAM) provides a cost effective solution for such data storage. As the packet processing speeds in the hardware increase memory throughput can be a bottleneck to achieve overall high performance. Typically there are multiple hardware modules which perform different operations on the packet payload and hence all try to access the common packet buffer simultaneously. This gives rise to a need for a memory controller which arbitrates between the memory requests made by different modules and maximizes the memory throughput. This paper discusses the …

Embedding Images In Non-Flat Spaces, Robert Pless

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

Multi-dimensional scaling is an analysis tool which transforms pairwise distances between points to an embedding of points in space which are consistent with those distances. Two recent techniques in statistical patter recognition, locally linear embedding (LLE) and Isomap, give a mechanism for finding the structure underlying point sets for which comparisons or distances are only meaningful between nearby points. We give a direct method to extend the embedding algorithm to new topologies, finding the optimal embedding of points whose geodesic distance on a surface mathes the given pairwise distance measurements. Surfaces considered include spheres, cylinders, tori, and their higher dimensional …

A Proposal For A Scalable Internet Multicast Architecture, Sherlia Shi

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

We propose a new network and system architecture for multicast in the Internet. Our main objectives are to find a cost-effective way to scale to a large number of multicast groups whose members are geographically dispersed, and to enable small and less capable devices to participate in group communications. In order to preserve the efficiency of data distribution gained by multicast, while avoiding the control complexity previously exhibited by IP multicast, we propose the use of an overlay network for multicast services. We construct "virtual" multicast trees, which consist of unicast connections joining multicast servers in the network. These servers …

Aggregated Hierarchical Multicast For Active Networks, Tilman Wolf, Sumi Y. Choi

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

Active Networking is the basis for a range of new and innovative applications that make use of computational resources inside network routers. One such application is Aggregated Hierarchical Multicast, which aims at implementing efficient many-to-many communication. In certain scenarios it is possible to transmit less accurate, aggregated data and thus achieve better scalability. Using Active Networks, this aggregation computation can be done transparently by network routers without end system support. We present how aggregated data streams can be structured in a hierarchical fashion to allow easy access of data at the desired aggregation level. We introduce two application examples to …

Dres: Internet Resource Management Using Deferred Reservations, Samphel Norden

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

In this proposal, we consider the problem of resource reservation for Integrated Services (IntServ) and Differentiated Services (DiffServ) networks. Current approaches for resource reservation in INtegrated Service Networks adopt an all-or-nothing approach, where partially acquired resources must be released if resources are not available at all routers on the chosen path. Furthermore, under high load, end-systems must retry requests repeatedly leading to inefficient allocation and increased traffic. We propose a new approach called Deferred REServation (DERS) that substantially improves performance (reduces the overall cell rejection probability and increases link utilization) over the all-or-nothing reservation approach. Call admissibility is increased by …

Fast Incremental Crc Updates For Ip Over Atm Networks, Florian Braun, Marcel Waldvogel

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

In response to the increasing network speeds, many operations in IP routers and similar devices are being made more efficient. With the advances in other areas of packet processing, the verification and regeneration of cyclic redundancy check (CRC) codes of the data link layer is likely to become a bottleneck in the near future. In this paper, we present a mechanism to defer CRC verification without compromising reliability. This opens the possibility of incremental updates of the CRC. We introduce a new high-speed technique and present efficient implementation, speeding up CRC processing by a factor of 15. Although the paper …

A Distributed Annotation System, Robin Dowell

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

One goal of any genome project is the elucidation of hte primary sequence of DNA contained within a given species. While the availability ot the primary sequence itself is valuable, it does not reach its full potential until i has been annotated. Generally defined, annotation is descriptive information or commentary added to text, in this case genomic sequence. Without a mechanism for collecting, recording, and disseminating community-based annotation, a valuable source of information is severely diminshed. In this report I outline the design and implementation of a Distributed Annotation System (DAS). DAS allowes sequence annotations to be decentralized among multiple …

Layered Protocol Wrappers For Internet Packet Processing In Reconfigurable Hardware, Florian Braun, John Lockwood, Marcel Waldvogel

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

The ongoing increases of line speed in the Internet backbone combined with the need for increased functionality of network devices presents a major challenge. These demands call for the use of reprogrammable hardware to provide the required flexible, high-speed functionality, at all network layers. The Field Programmable Port Extender (FPX) provides such an environment for development of networking components in reprogrammable hardware. We present a framework to streamline and simplify networking applications that process ATM cells, AAL5 frames, Internet Protocol (IP) packets and UDP datagrams directly in hardware.

Implementation Of An Open Multi-Service Router, Fred Kuhns, John Dehart, Ralph Keller, John Lockwood, Prashanth Papu, Jyoti Parwatikar, Ed Spitznagel, David Richard, David Taylor, Jon Turner, Ken Wong

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

This paper describes the design, implementation, and performance of an open, high-performance, dynamically reconfigurable Multi-Service Router (MSR) being developed at Washington University in St. Louis. This router provides an experimentation platform for research on protocols, router software, and hardware design, network management, quality of service and advanced applications. The MSR has been designed to be flexible, without sacrificing performance. It support gigabit links and uses a scalable architecture suitable for supporting hundreds or even thousands of links. The MSR's flexibility makes it an ideal platform for experimental research on dynamically extensible networks that implement higher level functions in direct support …

Routing In Overlay Multicast Networks, Sherlia Y. Shi, Jonathan S. Turner

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

Multicast servises can be provided either as a basic network service or as an application-layer service. Higher level multicast implementations often provide more sophisticated features, and since they don't require network supoprt for multicast, they can provide multicast services, where no network layer support is available. Overlay multicast networks offer an intermediate option, potentially combining the flexibility and advanced features of application layer multicast with the greater efficiency of network layer multicast. Overlay multicast networks play an important role in the Internet. Indeed, since Internet Service Providers have been slow to enable IP multicast in their networks, Internet multicast is …