Computer Sciences Commons^™

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, …

Study Of Architecture And Protocols For Reliable Multicasting In Packet Switching Networks, Shiwen Chen

Dissertations

Group multicast protocols have been challenged to provide scalable solutions that meet the following requirements: (i) reliable delivery from different sources to all destinations within a multicast group; (ii) congestion control among multiple asynchronous sources. Although it is mainly a transport layer task, reliable group multicasting depends on routing architectures as well.

This dissertation covers issues of both network and transport layers. Two routing architectures, tree and ring, are surveyed with a comparative study of their routing costs and impact to upper layer performances. Correspondingly, two generic transport protocol models are established for performance study. The tree-based protocol is rate-based …

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 …

A Meta-Semantic Language For Smart Component-Adapters, Leon K. Jololian

Dissertations

The issues confronting the software development community today are significantly different from the problems it faced only a decade ago. Advances in software development tools and technologies during the last two decades have greatly enhanced the ability to leverage large amounts of software for creating new applications through the reuse of software libraries and application frameworks. The problems facing organizations today are increasingly focused around systems integration and the creation of information flows.

Software modeling based on the assembly of reusable components to support software development has not been successfully implemented on a wide scale. Several models for reusable software …

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 …

Universal Access In Digital Libraries, Igg Adiwijaya

Theses

Digital libraries are concerned with the creation and management of information sources, the movement of information across global networks and the effective use of this information by a wide range of users. A digital library is a vast collection of obj ects that are of multimedia nature, e.g., text, video, images, and audio. Users wishing to access the digital library objects may possess varying capabilities, preferences, domain expertise, and may use different information appliances. With the phenomenal growth of the Internet, the number of different information appliances will, if not already, increase substantially in the near future. Facilitating access to …

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 …

Hytexpros : A Hypermedia Information Retrieval System, Hong Shen

Dissertations

The Hypermedia information retrieval system makes use of the specific capabilities of hypermedia systems with information retrieval operations and provides new kind of information management tools. It combines both hypermedia and information retrieval to offer end-users the possibility of navigating, browsing and searching a large collection of documents to satisfy an information need. TEXPROS is an intelligent document processing and retrieval system that supports storing, extracting, classifying, categorizing, retrieval and browsing enterprise information. TEXPROS is a perfect application to apply hypermedia information retrieval techniques. In this dissertation, we extend TEXPROS to a hypermedia information retrieval system called HyTEXPROS with hypertext …

Integration Of Multi Lifecycle Assessment And Design For Environment Database Using Relational Moddel Concepts, Bhagyashree Suratran

Theses

Multi-lifecycle Assessment (MLCA) systematically considers and quantifies the consumption of resources and the environmental impact associated with a product or process. Design challenges posed by a multi-lifecycle strategy are significantly more complex than traditional product design. The designer must look forward in time to maximize the product's end-of-life yield of assemblies, parts and materials while looking backward to the world of existing products for feedstock sources for the current design. As MLCA and DEE share some common data items, such as, part geometry, material and manufacturing process, it is advantageous to integrate the database for MLCA and DEE. The integration …

A Visualization System For Information Retrieval And Mining In High Dimensional Databases, Xinhuan Zheng

Theses

In this thesis, we present a search engine capable of giving good heuristic answers to the queries on a structural database. A structural database holds structural objects, e.g., protein secondary and tertiary structures, 3D molecules, phylogenetic trees, neuroanatomical networks, parse trees, CAD/CAM parts, and XML documents. Answering queries on such databases often requires solving variants of the graph isomorphism or subisomorphism problems. We also describe a graphic user interface which interacts with users to facilitate visualizing query results. We use 3D molecules (graphs) as illustrating examples, though our prototype is able to handle many other different types of structural data.

Automatic Categorization Of Abstracts Through Bayesian Networks, William Ramirez

Theses

This thesis presents a method for assigning abstracts of Artificial Intelligence papers to their area of the field. The technique is implemented by the use of a Bayesian network where relevant keywords extracted from the abstract being categorized, are entered as evidence and inferencing is made to determine potential subject areas. The structure of the Bayesian network represents the causal relationship between Artificial Intelligence keywords and subject areas. Keyword components of the network are selected from precategorized abstracts. The work reported here is part of a larger project to automatically assign papers to reviewers for Artificial Intelligence conferences. The process …

Analysis Of Clustering Algorithms For Spike Sorting Of Multiunit Extracellular Recordings, Jayesh Rege

Theses

Various techniques have been considered in the past to identify distinct spike shapes from mulitunit extracellular recording. These techniques involve adaptive filtering techniques or template matching techniques or hierarchical clustering techniques. In this investigation, we have used Principal Component Analysis followed by various clustering techniques to identify distinct spike shapes. The amplitude filter is used to separate spikes from background neuronal activity. The correlation matrix of the spike data is used to compute principal component wave forms. Each spike is thus represented by the coefficients of principal components. Then, We have used agglomorative hierarchical clustering algorithm to perform the initial …

Teaching Operating System Concepts Using Multimedia And Internet, Amit Narielwala

Theses

The prime objective of the thesis is to research and demonstrate the benefits and advantages of using Internet and multimedia tools for an interactive educational leaning experience. As we speak Internet is developing as a mainstream communication medium via personal computer as a tool at a breathtaking speed. The information technology field is a prime reason behind such phenomenon as it continues to mature and expand. In what is described as the "information age", the students of information technology need to master and devour new complex technological concepts and ideas at faster rate than ever before. The traditional approach using …

Agents : Concept, Technologies & Applications And Search Engine To Compile Urls Containing Documents Related To Environment Science For Njpies, Dhaval P. Shah

Theses

Agents are emerging technology that is making computer systems easier to use by allowing people (computer users) to delegate work back to the computer. They act on user's behalf and achieve user's goals. The advent of these software agents gave rise to much discussion of just what such an agent is, and of how they differ from programs in general. Agents are in research area for a long time. Earlier they were considered a part of just Artificial Intelligence. Nowadays they are just not in research area anymore. Commercial agent based applications are existing in the market because of the …

Developing Techniques For Enhancing Comprehensibility Of Controlled Medical Terminologies, Huanying Gu

Dissertations

A controlled medical terminology (CMT) is a collection of concepts (or terms) that are used in the medical domain. Typically, a CMT also contains attributes of those concepts and/or relationships between those concepts. Electronic CMTs are extremely useful and important for communication between and integration of independent information systems in healthcare, because data in this area is highly fragmented. A single query in this area might involve several databases, e.g., a clinical database, a pharmacy database, a radiology database, and a lab test database.

Unfortunately, the extensive sizes of CMTs, often containing tens of thousands of concepts and hundreds of …

Porting The Sisal Functional Language To Distributed-Memory Multiprocessors, Jui-Yuan Ku

Dissertations

Parallel computing is becoming increasingly ubiquitous in recent years. The sizes of application problems continuously increase for solving real-world problems. Distributed-memory multiprocessors have been regarded as a viable architecture of scalable and economical design for building large scale parallel machines. While these parallel machines can provide computational capabilities, programming such large-scale machines is often very difficult due to many practical issues including parallelization, data distribution, workload distribution, and remote memory latency.

This thesis proposes to solve the programmability and performance issues of distributed-memory machines using the Sisal functional language. The programs written in Sisal will be automatically parallelized, scheduled and …

Automatic Document Classification And Extraction System (Adoces), Xuhong Li

Dissertations

Document processing is a critical element of office automation. Document image processing begins from the Optical Character Recognition (OCR) phase with complex processing for document classification and extraction. Document classification is a process that classifies an incoming document into a particular predefined document type. Document extraction is a process that extracts information pertinent to the users from the content of a document and assigns the information as the values of the “logical structure” of the document type. Therefore, after document classification and extraction, a paper document will be represented in its digital form instead of its original image file format, …

Knowledge Management For Texpros, Jianshun Hu

Dissertations

Most of the document processing systems today have applied Al technologies to support their system intelligent behaviors. For the application of Al technologies in such systems, the core problem is how to represent and manage different kinds of knowledge to support their inference engine components' functionalities. In other words, knowledge management has become a critical issue in the document processing systems. In this dissertation, within the scope of the TEXt PROcessing System (TEXPROS), we identify knowledge of various kinds that are applicable in the system. We investigate several problems of managing this knowledge and then develop a knowledge base for …

Pattern Discovery In Trees : Algorithms And Applications To Document And Scientific Data Management, Chia-Yo Chang

Dissertations

Ordered, labeled trees are trees in which each node has a label and the left-to-right order of its children (if it has any) is fixed. Such trees have many applications in vision, pattern recognition, molecular biology and natural language processing.

In this dissertation we present algorithms for finding patterns in the ordered labeled trees. Specifically we study the largest approximately common substructure (LACS) problem for such trees. We consider a substructure of a tree T to be a connected subgraph of T. Given two trees T₁, T₂ and an integer d, the LACS problem is to find …

A New-Generation Class Of Parallel Architectures And Their Performance Evaluation, Qian Wang

Dissertations

The development of computers with hundreds or thousands of processors and capability for very high performance is absolutely essential for many computation problems, such as weather modeling, fluid dynamics, and aerodynamics. Several interconnection networks have been proposed for parallel computers. Nevertheless, the majority of them are plagued by rather poor topological properties that result in large memory latencies for DSM (Distributed Shared-Memory) computers. On the other hand, scalable networks with very good topological properties are often impossible to build because of their prohibitively high VLSI (e.g., wiring) complexity. Such a network is the generalized hypercube (GH). The GH supports full-connectivity …

Modeling Controlled Vocabularies Using Oodbs And Multilevel Area Diagrams, Li-Min Liu

Dissertations

A Controlled Vocabulary (CV) is a software system of domain knowledge that consolidates and unifies the terminology of a large application domain. With a common, centralized CV, costly and time-consuming translations can be eliminated between pairs of organizations and pairs of software systems. Unfortunately, the more knowledge we put into a CV, the harder it is to understand and maintain it. In this dissertation, a comprehensive theoretical methodology for modeling CVs using Object-Oriented Database (OODB) technology is presented. We present two methods for representing a semantic network CV as an equivalent OODB, which we call an Object-Oriented Vocabulary Repository (OOVR). …

Decision Support System For Forecasting Product And Waste Disposal Over Time, Amit P. Amte

Theses

A current barrier to the end-of-life product strategies is a lack of knowledge of the quantity and timing of product returns or waste generation. Consequently, a Decision Support System (DSS), to predict the timing and quantity of waste generation is needed. Therefore a web-based system that predicts the rate of product entering the waste-stream has been developed. The system accepts information relating to sales, reliability, storage and disposal behavior. This data is used to simulate the return waste flow. The DSS can be used to simulate the effect of different policies and to provide data for end-of-life and multi-lifecycle strategy …

Recasting Cohn's Many Sorted Logic Into A Constrained Logic, Christopher Brendan Koelbl

Theses

The use of a many sorted logic for theorem proving carries many advantages over a traditional unsorted logic. By placing restrictions on the search space, a many sorted logic can significantly reduce the amount steps in the resolution process. However, as a logic becomes more efficient, it increases in complexity.

One of these efficient log ics is Cohn's Many Sorted Logic, LLAMA. It uses complex data structures such as the sort lattice and sort arrays to maintain information about the sorts. Recasting LLAMA into Bürckert's constrained logic will keep the functionality of LLAMA while using a format that reduces the …

Improved Su320 Nir Camera Image Processing System, Weimin Shi

Theses

This paper describes an improved image processing system which is applied in solar observation. In order to get the higher performance in frame grabbing rate, the system is using, PCI Master Bus with on-board memory frame-grabber. From software side, the application program has been modified to reduce the grabbing time, which speeds up the whole process significantly. The paper described them in detail.

Domain Architecture A Design Framework For System Development And Integration, Vassilka D. Kirova

Dissertations

The ever growing complexity of software systems has revealed many short-comings in existing software engineering practices and has raised interest in architecture-driven software development. A system's architecture provides a model of the system that suppresses implementation detail, allowing the architects to concentrate on the analysis and decisions that are most critical to structuring the system to satisfy its requirements. Recently, interests of researchers and practi-tioners have shifted from individual system architectures to architectures for classes of software systems which provide more general, reusable solutions to the issues of overall system organization, interoperability, and allocation of services to system components. These …

Parallelization For Image Processing Algorithms Based Chain And Mid-Crack Codes, Wai-Tak Wong

Dissertations

Freeman chain code is a widely-used description for a contour image. Another mid-crack code algorithm was proposed as a more precise method for image representation. We have developed a coding algorithm which is suitable to generate either chain code description or mid-crack code description by switching between two different tables. Since there is a strong urge to use parallel processing in image related problems, a parallel coding algorithm is implemented. This algorithm is developed on a pyramid architecture and a N cube architecture. Using link-list data structure and neighbor identification, the algorithm gains efficiency because no sorting or neighborhood pairing …

A Methodology For Component-Based System Integration, Yongming Tang

Dissertations

Component-based software based on software architectures is emerging to be the next generation software development paradigm. The paradigm shifts the development focus from lines-of-codes to coarser-grained components and the interconnections among them. It consists of system architecture design, architecture description, component search and system integration from components to generate a software system.

However, one of the bottlenecks in this paradigm is the integration of the individual components into the overall system. In this dissertation a methodology for component-based system integration is proposed. It is based on an architectural aggregation view, a component model, flowgraphs and cyclomatic complexity. We introduce this …

A Comparative Study Of Sequence Analysis Tools In Computational Biology, Wei-Jen Chuang

Theses

A biomolecular object, such as a deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), a ribonucleic acid (RNA) or a protein molecule, is made up of a long chain of subunits. A protein is represented as a sequence made from 20 different amino acids, each represented as a letter. There are a vast number of ways in which similar structural domains can be generated in proteins by different amino acid sequences. By contrast, the structure of DNA, made up of only four different nucleotide building blocks that occur in two pairs, is relatively simple, regular, and predictable.

Biomolecular sequence alignment/string search is the most important …