Computer Sciences Commons^™

Characterizations Of Classes Of Programs By Three-Valued Operators, Anthony K. Seda, Pascal Hitzler

Computer Science and Engineering Faculty Publications

Several important classes of normal logic programs, including the classes of acyclic, acceptable, and locally hierarchical programs, have the property that every program in the class has a unique two-valued supported model. In this paper, we call such classes unique supported model classes. We analyse and characterize these classes by means of operators on three-valued logics. Our studies will motivate the definition of a larger unique supported model class which we call the class of Phi-accessible programs. Finally, we show that the class of Phi -accessible programs is computationally adequate in that every partial recursive function can be implemented by …

On-Line Bayesian Tree-Structured Transformation Of Hidden Markov Models For Speaker Adaptation, Shaojun Wang, Yunxin Zhao

Kno.e.sis Publications

This paper presents a new recursive Bayesian learning approach for transformation parameter estimation in speaker adaptation. Our goal is to incrementally transform (or adapt) the entire set of HMM parameters for a new speaker or new acoustic enviroment from a small amount of adaptation data. By establishing a clustering tree of HMM Gaussian mixture components, the finest affine transformation parameters for individual HMM Gaussian mixture components can be dynamically searched. The on-line Bayesian learning technique proposed in our recent work is used for recursive maximum a posteriori estimation of affine transformation parameters. Speaker adaptation experiments using a 26-letter English alphabet …

Critical It Role In Healthcare: National Agenda, Applications, And Technologies, Jack Corley, Warren Karp, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

We share a widely-held vision that tomorrow's health care will be delivered by a distributed team using a knowledge based process that is focused on prevention and wellness. Caregivers will be able to treat and monitor patients where and when needed, capturing data as a natural byproduct of care delivery. Clinical teams with a wide range of skills and expertise will deliver consistent, quality care based on timely, situation-specific knowledge and guidance derived from outcomes evidence. That same knowledge will support advances in healthcare research and education. Home care and remote medicine will increase, reducing the need for high-cost hospitalization. …

Efficient Support For Decision Flows In E-Commerce Applications, Richard Hull, Francois Llirbat, Jianwen Su, Guozhu Dong, Bharat Kumar, Gang Zhou

Kno.e.sis Publications

In the coming era of segment-of-one marketing, decisions about business transactions will be quite intricate, so that customer treatments can be highly individualized, reflecting customer preferences, targeted business objectives, etc. This paper describes a paradigm called “decision flows” for specifying a form of incremental decision-making that can combine a myriad of diverse business factors and be executed in near-realtime. Starting with initial input, a decision flow will iteratively gather and derive additional information until a conclusion is reached. Decision flows can be specified in a rules-based manner that generalizes so-called “business rules” but provides more structure than traditional expert systems. …

Three-Dimensional Reconstructions Of Tadpole Chondrocrania From Historical Sections, Gary Radice, Mary K. Boggiano, Mark Desantis, Peter Larson, Joseph Oppong, Matthew Smetanick, Todd Stevens, James Tripp, Rebecca Weber, Michael Kerckhove, Rafael De Sá

Virginia Journal of Science

Reconstructing three dimensional structures (3DR) from histological sections has always been difficult but is becoming more accessible with the assistance of digital imaging. We sought to assemble a low cost system using readily available hardware and software to generate 3DR for a study of tadpole chondrocrania. We found that a combination of RGB can1era, stereomicro­scope, and Apple Macintosh PowerPC computers running NIH Image, Object Image, Rotater, and SURFdriver software provided acceptable reconstruc­tions. These are limited in quality primarily by the distortions arising from histological protocols rather than hardware or software.

Three-Dimensional Reconstructions Of Tadpole Chondrocrania From Histological Sections, Gary P. Radice, Mary Kate Boggiano, Mark Desantis, Peter M. Larson, Joseph Oppong, Matthew T. Smetanick, Todd M. Stevens, James Tripp, Rebecca A. Weber, Michael Kerckhove, Rafael O. De Sá

Biology Faculty Publications

Reconstructing three dimensional structures (3DR) from histological sections has always been difficult but is becoming more accessible with the assistance of digital imaging. We sought to assemble a low cost system using readily available hardware and software to generate 3DR for a study of tadpole chondrocrania. We found that a combination of RGB camera, stereomicroscope, and Apple Macintosh PowerPC computers running NIH Image, Object Image, Rotater. and SURFdriver software provided acceptable reconstructions. These are limited in quality primarily by the distortions arising from histological protocols rather than hardware or software.

A Multilevel Secure Workflow Management System, Myong H. Kang, Judith N. Froscher, Amit P. Sheth, Krzysztof J. Kochut, John A. Miller

Kno.e.sis Publications

The Department of Defense (DoD) needs multilevel secure (MLS) workflow management systems to enable globally distributed users and applications to cooperate across classification levels to achieve mission critical goals. An MLS workflow management system that allows a user to program multilevel mission logic, to securely coordinate widely distributed tasks, and to monitor the progress of the workflow across classification levels is required. In this paper, we present a roadmap for implementing MLS workflows and focus on a workflow builder that is a graphical design tool for specifying such workflows.

How Proteins Fold, Flex, And Bind Other Molecules, Leslie A. Kuhn, Volker Schnecke, Michael L. Raymer, Paul C. Sanschagrin

Kno.e.sis Publications

No abstract provided.

Data Integration By Describing Sources With Constraint Databases, Xun Cheng, Guozhu Dong, Tzekwan Lau, Jianwen Su

Kno.e.sis Publications

We develop a data integration approach for the efficient evaluation of queries over autonomous source databases. The approach is based on some novel applications and extensions of constraint database techniques. We assume the existence of a global database schema. The contents of each data source are described using a set of constraint tuples over the global schema; each such tuple indicates possible contributions from the source. The “source description catalog” (SDC) of a global relation consists of its associated constraint tuples. Such a method of description is advantageous since it is flexible to add new sources and to modify existing …

Efficient Mining Of Partial Periodic Patterns In Time Series Database, Jiawei Han, Guozhu Dong, Yiwen Yin

Kno.e.sis Publications

Partial periodicity search, i.e., search for partial periodic patterns in time-series databases, is an interesting data mining problem. Previous studies on periodicity search mainly consider finding full periodic patterns, where every point in time contributes (precisely or approximately) to the periodicity. However, partial periodicity is very common in practice since it is more likely that only some of the time episodes may exhibit periodic patterns.

We present several algorithms for efficient mining of partial periodic patterns, by exploring some interesting properties related to partial periodicity, such as the Apriori property and the max-subpattern hit set property, and by shared mining …

Method For Identification Of Origins Of Replication And Genes Regulated By Dnaa In Bacteria, Olga G. Troyanskaya

Honors Theses

The study is focused on developing computer programs to identify origin of DNA replication based on analysis of total bacterial genomes, scoring regions for number of DnaA binding sites, AT content, DNA adenine methylase boxes, and integration host factors binding sites. The programs were tested on cyanobacterium Synechocystis, and several potential origins were identified. However, no one definite region could be located. Currently, software is being developed to analyze common motifs around the origins of all bacteria with known origins. Genes whose transcription could be regulated by DnaA were identified by searching for DnaA boxes preceding promoter regions.

Multivalued Mappings, Fixed-Point Theorems And Disjunctive Databases, Pascal Hitzler, Anthony K. Seda

Computer Science and Engineering Faculty Publications

In this paper, we discuss the semantics of disjunctive programs and databases and show how multivalued mappings and their fixed points arise naturally within this context. A number of fixed-point theorems for multivalued mappings are considered, some of which are already known and some of which are new. The notion of a normal derivative of a disjunctive program is introduced. Normal derivatives are normal logic programs which are determined by the disjunctive program. Thus, the well-known single-step operator associated with a normal derivative is single-valued, and its fixed points can be found by well-established means. It is shown how fixed …

Maintaining Transitive Closure Of Graphs In Sql, Guozhu Dong, Leonid Libkin, Jianwen Su, Limsoon Wong

Kno.e.sis Publications

It is common knowledge that relational calculus and even SQL are not expressive enough to express recursive queries such as the transitive closure. In a real database system, one can overcome this problem by storing a graph together with its transitive closure and maintaining the latter whenever updates to the former occur. This leads to the concept of an incremental evaluation system, or IES.

Much is already known about the theory of IES but very little has been translated into practice. The purpose of this paper is to fill in this gap by providing a gentle introduction to and …

Infoharness: Managing Distributed, Heterogeneous Information, Kshitij Shah, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

Today, important information is scattered in so many places, formats, and media, that getting the right information at the right time and place is an extremely difficult task. Developing a single software product, for example, includes the creation of documents ranging from the requirements specification and project schedules to marketing presentations, multimedia tutorials, and more. Each document may be created by a different person using a different tool, and each may be stored in a different place. InfoHarness is an information integration system, platform, and tool set that addresses these problems, managing huge amounts of heterogeneous information in a distributed …

Processes Driving The Networked Economy, Amit P. Sheth, Will Van Der Aalst, I. Budak Arpinar

Kno.e.sis Publications

The authors propose that an organic workflow-process technology will power the evolution of information system architectures. The authors outline three likely stages of architectural evolution in the context of a networked economy and discuss critical gaps in the current technology with respect to their envisioned future.

Logical Information Modeling Of Web-Accessible Heterogeneous Digital Assets, Kshitij Shah, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

This paper introduces the MREF framework for representing and correlating information at a higher semantic level than is possible with Web-based information systems today. The role that metadata plays in this framework is described, together with a metadata based infrastructure to support our media independent information correlation paradigm. To keep it consistent with evolving standards, broader acceptance and ease of implementation, MREF abstraction is structured on top of RDF and XML. Its central role in the context of the InfoQuilt system, for exploiting heterogeneous digital media using a federated and scalable architecture, is briefly described.

Zebra Image Access System, Srilekha Mudumbai, Kshitij Shah, Amit P. Sheth, Krishnan Parasuraman, Clemens Bertram

Kno.e.sis Publications

The ZEBRA system, which is part of the VisualHarness platform for managing heterogeneous data, supports three types of access to distributed image repositories: keyword based, attribute based, and image content based. A user can assign different weights (relative importance) to each of the three types, and within the last type of access, to each of the image properties. The image based access component (IBAC) supports access based on computable image properties such as those based on spatial domain, frequency domain or statistical and structural analysis. However, it uses a novel black box approach of utilizing a Visual Information Retrieval (VIR) …

Strictly Level-Decreasing Logic Programs, Pascal Hitzler, Anthony K. Seda

Computer Science and Engineering Faculty Publications

We study strictly level-decreasing logic programs (sld-programs) as defined earlier by the present authors. It will be seen that sld-programs, unlike most other classes of logic programs, have both a highly intuitive declarative semantics, given as a unique supported model, and are computationally adequate in the sense that every partial recursive function can be represented by some sld-program P. Allowing for a safe use of cuts, an interpreter based on SLDNF-resolution, as implemented for example in standard Prolog systems, is shown to be sound and complete with respect to this class of programs. Furthermore, we study connections between topological …

Interestingness Of Discovered Association Rules In Terms Of Neighborhood-Based Unexpectedness, Guozhu Dong, Jinyan Li

Kno.e.sis Publications

One of the central problems in knowledge discovery is the development of good measures of interestingness of discovered patterns. With such measures, a user needs to manually examine only the more interesting rules, instead of each of a large number of mined rules. Previous proposals of such measures include rule templates, minimal rule cover, actionability, and unexpectedness in the statistical sense or against user beliefs.

In this paper we will introduce neighborhood-based interestingness by considering unexpectedness in terms of neighborhood-based parameters. We first present some novel notions of distance between rules and of neighborhood of rules. The neighborhood-based interestingness of …

From Contemporary Workflow Process Automation To Adaptive And Dynamic Work Activity Coordination And Collaboration, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

The article outlines a research agenda for researchers in the area of workflow. We believe that today's workflow systems should evolve to what is termed as work coordination and collaboration systems (WCCSs). A WCCS will: (a) adapt to various changes in the organization (including its interactions with external organizations) and the organizational processes by being able to change the process definitions as well as change the processes and component activities while they are being enacted or executed; and (b) support a unified framework for managing coordination, collaboration, and information based decision making activities that naturally occur as part of organizational …

Celluloid Blackness : Race, Modernity, And The Conflicted Roots Of American Cinema (1915-1939), Lincoln Farr

Honors Theses

Introduction: "The Problem of the Twentieth Century" In a full page interview in the New York Times on May 29, 1912, the Swiss psychiatrist Dr. Carl G. Jung told the American people, "It seems to me that you are about to discover yourselves. You have discovered everything else-all the land of this continent; all the resources, all the hidden things of nature."Jung used the interview to address the American people, at a moment which he somehow recognized as crucial in the development of human civilization. America, the "tragic" country which he struggled to comprehend, would soon become the harbinger of …

A Vhdl-93 Hardware Description Browser, Laura C. Debrock, Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan

Kno.e.sis Publications

This paper describes the design and implementation of the VHDL-93 Hardware Description Browser, which is a tool for the intelligent retrieval of information from VHDL designs. The Browser consists of two UNIX processes: a TCL/TK Graphical User Interface and a Prolog search engine. The GUI elicits queries from the user and submits them to the Prolog search engine via a two-way communication pipe. The search engine satisfies queries by traversing a forest of parse trees corresponding to the associated VHDL designs. The results are then sent to the GUI for posting.

Two public-domain tools were used to implement the Browser: …

The Carnot Heterogeneous Database Project: Implemented Applications, Munindar Singh, Phil Cannata, Michael N. Huhns, Nigel Jacobs, Tomasz Ksiezyk, Kayliang Ong, Amit P. Sheth, Christine Tomlinson, Darrell Woelk

Kno.e.sis Publications

The Carnot project was an ambitious research project in heterogeneous databases. It integrated a variety of techniques to address a wide range of problems in achieving interoperation in heterogeneous environments. Here we describe some of the major implemented applications of this project. These applications concern(a) accessing a legacy scientific database, (b) automating a workflow involving legacy systems, (c) cleaning data, and (d) retrieving semantically appropriate information from structured databases in response to text queries. These applications support scientific decision support, business process management, data integrity enhancement, and analytical decision support, respectively. They demonstrate Carnot‘s capabilities for (a) heterogeneous query processing, …

Characterizing A Portable Subset Of Behavioral Vhdl-93, Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan, Robert Ewing

Kno.e.sis Publications

Goossens defined a structural operational semantics for a subset of VHDL-87 and proved that the parallelism present in VHDL is benign. We extend this work to include VHDL-93 features such as shared variables and postponed processes that change the underlying semantic model. In the presence of shared variables, nondeterministic execution of VHDL-93 processes destroys the unique meaning property. We identify and characterize a class of portable VHDL-93 descriptions for which unique meaning property can be salvaged. Our specification can serve as a correctness criteria for a VHDL-93 simulator.

Some Relationships Between Foies And Sigma 1 1 Arity Hierarchies, Guozhu Dong, Limsoon Wong

Kno.e.sis Publications

No abstract provided.

Structural Issues In Active Rule Systems, James Bailey, Guozhu Dong, Kotagiri Ramamohanarao

Kno.e.sis Publications

Active database systems enhance the functionality of traditional databases through the use of active rules or ‘triggers’. There is little consensus, though, on what components should be included in a rule system. In this paper, the expressive power of some simple active database rule systems is examined and the effect of choosing different features studied. Four important parameters of variation are presented, namely the rule language, the external query language, the meta rule language and the pending rule structure. We show that each of these is highly influential in determining the expressiveness of the rule system as a whole, and …

An Error Handling Framework For The Orbwork Workflow Enactment Service Of Meteor, Davasish Worah, Amit P. Sheth, Krzysztof J. Kochut, John A. Miller

Kno.e.sis Publications

Workflow Management Systems (WFMSs) can be used to re-engineer, streamline, automate, and track organizational processes involving humans and automated information systems. However, the state-of-the-art in workflow technology suffers from a number of limitations that prevent it from being widely used in large-scale mission critical applications. Error handling is one such issue. What makes the task of error handling challenging is the need to deal with errors that appear in various components of a complex distributed application execution environment, including various WFMS components, workflow application tasks of different types, and the heterogeneous computing infrastructure.

In this paper, we discuss a top-down …

Genetic Algorithms: A Visual Search, Paul W. Jones

Honors Theses, 1963-2015

Genetic algorithms apply the biological principles of selection, mutation, and crossover to a population set containing individuals representing target solutions to a given problem. Using these principles genetic algorithms attempt to create a migration of the individuals in subsequent generations toward the optimal solution.

This project is an attempt to visually represent the progress of a genetic algorithm. The coordinate fitness program attempts to find the maximum or minimum value of a given function. It visually represents the progress of the algorithm by providing a plot of each individual in each generation in time. It is then possible to view …

Algorithms For Adapting Materialised Views In Data Warehouses, Mukesh Mohania, Guozhu Dong

Kno.e.sis Publications

In this paper we consider the problem of materialised view adaptation in data warehouses. Materialised views are important in data warehousing where they are used to speed up query processing on large amounts of data. User requirements change over time, which may change the definitions of views dynamically. For such situations, the question arises whether the materialised views should be recomputed from scratch for every change in the definition or they should be obtained by adapting old materialised views. Changes to a view definition may be expensive, if the view is recomputed from scratch. Therefore, it is worthwhile to examine …

On The Portability Of Behavioral Vhdl-93, Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan, Robert Ewing

Kno.e.sis Publications

Goossens defined a structural operational semantics for a subset of VHDL-87 and proved that the parallelism present in VHDL is benign. We extend this work to include shared variables in VHDL-93 that changes the underlying semantic model. In the presence of shared variables, non-deterministic execution of VHDL-93 processes destroys the unique meaning property. We identify and characterize a class of portable VHDL-93 descriptions for which unique meaning property can be salvaged.