Computer Sciences Commons^™

Computational Geometry Column 35, Joseph O'Rourke

Computer Science: Faculty Publications

The subquadratic algorithm of Kapoor for finding shortest paths on a polyhedron is described.

Training Methods For Shunting Inhibitory Artificial Neural Networks, Son Lam Phung

Theses : Honours

This project investigates a new class of high-order neural networks called shunting inhibitory artificial neural networks (SIANN's) and their training methods. SIANN's are biologically inspired neural networks whose dynamics are governed by a set of coupled nonlinear differential equations. The interactions among neurons are mediated via a nonlinear mechanism called shunting inhibition, which allows the neurons to operate as adaptive nonlinear filters. The project's main objective is to devise training methods, based on error backpropagation type of algorithms, which would allow SIANNs to be trained to perform feature extraction for classification and nonlinear regression tasks. The training algorithms developed will …

Software Quality Function Deployment : A Method For Building Better Software, Dean Carruthers

Theses : Honours

In recent years it is becoming increasingly more apparent that quality even more than productivity is emerging as the key issue in the development of software. The quality systems currently employed by most software companies however arc simply not up to the task, traditional quality systems focus upon conformance to company standards, automation to eliminate human error and in some cases quality improvement teams. These traditional quality assurance methods lead to quality as defined from the organizations point of view, all work performed is done to their standards, however a what it is that makes a quality product is defined …

Light Aircraft Management System, Evan Karjalainen

Theses : Honours

This report details methods to construct a flight data logging system that can be used to manage student flight and aircraft maintenance records. These methods utilise GPS, embedded processors and associated software to depict the occurrence of landings, "Touch and Goes" and record aircraft total flight time. By manipulating these methods it was possible to produce a usable data-logging unit which facilitated the automation of flight maneuver recording. This datatogging unit was constructed from embedded components and interfaced with a user defined database. Perusal of the details within should provide the reader with a clear understanding of the tasks involved …

Implementing Flexible Software Techniques In A 4gl Environment, Stephen O'Connor

Theses : Honours

Today more IT professionals arc employed on the maintenance of existing software applications than are employed to develop new systems. Why is there such a need for this maintenance? Part of the problem is that developers have traditionally seen system requirements as fixed from the time they have been 'signed off. In reality requirements arc dynamic and subject to change as an organisation's environment changes. Flexible software techniques recognise that software requirements are subject to future changes. Flexibility is seen as an important design goal criterion with "true" or "strong" flexibility implying that an application's behaviour can be altered without …

Enterprise Business Objects : Design And Implementation Of A Business Object Framework, Kai-Uwe Schafer

Theses

Software components representing business entities like customer or purchase order introduce a new way of Online Transaction Processing to business applications. Collaborating business objects allow to complete whole business processes as a single distributed transaction, instead of dividing it into queued steps, which sometimes even require user intervention. This IS due to the fact that business objects contain both business data and logic and that they incorporate multiple databases from different vendors and different geographic locations in a single transaction.

Business objects cannot be used as stand-alone components, but require a framework of services that manage persistence, concurrent transactions, and …

Design And Code Generation Concepts For Statechart Diagrams Of The Uml V1.1 In Concurrent Environments, Pierre Metz

Theses

This thesis deals with code generation concepts for the statechart diagrams of the UML vl.l. It explores implementation approaches for mapping statechart diagrams to code. It also focuses on modelling rules for consistent design of dynamic object behaviour. Most of the given object-oriented (00) methods have statechart diagrams as their centre. It is proposed to use statechart diagrams to model the internal behaviour of objects and lifecycles, respectively. Generally, statechart diagrams are used in the area of analysis and design of reactive systems such as realtime- and embedded-systems. This thesis introduces different existing implementation patterns and shows how they can …

Backtracking In Wormhole-Switched Interconnection Networks, Soha Saad Zaghloul Abdallah

Archived Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.

Parametric Polymorphism In The Simple Language, Soumaia Ahmed Al Ayyat

Archived Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.

Application-Specific Extensible Operating System's Support For Mpeg Video-Encoding, Kamal Wagdy Botros Sami

Archived Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.

An Intelligent Editor For Natural Language Processing Of Unrestricted Text, Demetrios George Glinos

Retrospective Theses and Dissertations

The understanding of natural language by computational methods has been a continuing and elusive problem in artificial intelligence. In recent years there has been a resurgence in natural language processing research. Much of this work has been on empirical or corpus-based methods which use a data-driven approach to train systems on large amounts of real language data. Using corpus-based methods, the performance of part-of-speech (POS) taggers, which assign to the individual words of a sentence their appropriate part of speech category (e.g., noun, verb, preposition), now rivals human performance levels, achieving accuracies exceeding 95%. Such taggers have proved useful as …

Gasturbnlab Pse Design, Sanford Fleeter, Elias N. Houstis, John R. Rice, Chem Zhou

Department of Computer Science Technical Reports

No abstract provided.

Computer-Assisted Kinematic Tolerance Analysis Of A Gear Selector Mechanism With The Configuration Space Method, Elisha P. Sacks, Leo Joskowicz, Ralf Schultheiss, Uwe Hinze

Department of Computer Science Technical Reports

No abstract provided.

A Framework For Building Collaborative Network Agents, Ladislau Bölöni, Dan C. Marinescu

Department of Computer Science Technical Reports

No abstract provided.

Creating A New University Through Object Oriented Enterprise Modeling: A Study Of Communications Knowledge Management & Distributed Cognition, Armando A. Arias Jr., Beryl L. Bellman

SSGS Faculty Publications and Presentations

Enterprise based object oriented (OO) and Unified Modeling Language (UML) modeling makes it possible to build the needed visual environments to organize people, technologies and activities (Arias, 1999d). In our modeling approach, the focus is on "things and relationships between things" described in commonly used terms. The modeling software bridges the so-called "semantic gap" between the people and the computer language (Booch, Rumbaugh & Jacobson, 1999). An object can be a product, a process, a person, a team, a company, an application or the inter-relationship between other objects. Objects can be pictured on the screen as maps formed by personalized …

Camera Trackers, Matthew Cutts

Link Foundation Modeling, Simulation and Training Fellowship Reports

Tracking an object's location with inertial sensors works well over short time periods, but sensor drift and errors in integration cause errors to accumulate exponentially. Images, in contrast, work very well to determine a camera's location provided that the camera moves slowly. I received fellowship funding to work on a hybrid image and inertial tracker. The idea was to use data from the image sensors to correct errors and drift in the inertial sensors. The computer vision community has expended a great deal of energy in pursuing motion tracking from images. This area of research is also related to compositing …

Spatially Augmented Reality, Ramesh Raskar

Link Foundation Modeling, Simulation and Training Fellowship Reports

To create an effective illusion of virtual objects coexisting with the real world, see-through HMD-based Augmented Reality techniques supple1nent the user's view with images of virtual objects. We introduce here a new paradigm, Spatially Augmented Reality (SAR), where virtual objects are rendered directly within or on the user's physical space. A key benefit of SAR is that the user does not need to wear a head-mounted display. Instead, with the use of spatial displays, wide field of view and possibly high-resolution images of virtual objects can be integrated directly into the environ1nent. For example, the virtual objects can be realized …

Performance Surface Prediction For Wan-Based Clusters, Mark J. Clement, J. Kelly Flanagan, Glenn M. Judd, Bryan S. Morse, Joy L. Peterson

Faculty Publications

The last five years have been a period of exponential growth in the number of machines connected to the Internet and the speed at which these machines communicate. The infrastructure is now in place to consider a nationwide cluster of workstations as a viable parallel processing platform. In order to achieve acceptable performance on this kind of a machine, performance prediction tools must provide information on where to place computational objects. Incorrect object placement can result in poor performance and congestion in the network. This research develops a new paradigm for predicting performance in the Wide Area Network (WAN) based …

Harp: A Distributed Query System For Legacy Public Libraries And Structured Databases, Ee Peng Lim, Ying Lu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The main purpose of a digital library is to facilitate users easy access to enormous amount of globally networked information. Typically, this information includes preexisting public library catalog data, digitized document collections, and other databases. In this article, we describe the distributed query system of a digital library prototype system known as HARP. In the HARP project, we have designed and implemented a distributed query processor and its query front-end to support integrated queries to preexisting public library catalogs and structured databases. This article describes our experiences in the design of an extended Sequel (SQL) query language known as HarpSQL. …

Making Sharing Pervasive: Ubiquitous Computing For Shared Note Taking, James A. Landay, Richard C. Davis

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

As a variety of low-cost note-taking devices becomes pervasive, shared notes can help work groups better communicate ideas and information. To explore this idea further, we carried out three related case studies of how members of a large research group shared meeting notes. The group found value in combining personal notes and presentation slides with a single, unifying document, such as regular meeting minutes. The minutes provided structure when there were too many sources of notes. We used this insight in our design of NotePals, a note-sharing system with a lightweight process, an interface, and hardware that distinguish it from …

A Synthesis For Testability Scheme For Finite State Machines Using Clock Control, Kent L. Einspahr, Shashank K. Mehta, Sharad C. Seth

School of Computing: Faculty Publications

A new method is proposed for improving the testability of a finite state machine (FSM) during its synthesis. The method exploits clock control to enhance the controllability and observability of machine states. With clock control it is possible to add new state transitions during testing. Therefore, it is easier to navigate between states in the resulting test machine. Unlike prior work, where clock control is added to the circuit as a postdesign step, here, clock control is considered in conjunction with a symbolic scheme for encoding the states of the FSM. The encoding is shown to result in significant reductions …

A Dual Encryption Protocol For Scalable Secure Multicasting, Lakshminath R. Dondeti, Sarit Mukherjee, Ashok K. Samal

School of Computing: Conference and Workshop Papers

In this paper we propose a dual encryption protocol for scalable secure multicasting. Multicasting is a scalable solution for group communication. It howevel; poses several unique security problems. We use hierarchical subgrouping to achieve scalability. Third party hosts or members of the multicast group are designated as subgroup managers. They are responsible for secret key distribution and group membership management at the subgroup level. Unlike existing secure multicast protocols, our protocol need not trust the subgroup managers with the distribution of data encryption keys. The dual encryption protocol proposed in this paper distributes encrypted data encryption keys via subgroup managers. …

Routing And Wavelength Assignment (Rwa) With Power Considerations In All- Optical Wavelength-Routed Networks, Maher Ali, Byrav Ramamurthy, Jitender S. Deogun

School of Computing: Conference and Workshop Papers

Routing and wavelength assignment (RWA) is an important problem that arises in wavelength division multiplexed (WDM) optical networks. Previous studies have solved many variations of this problem under the assumption of perfect conditions regarding the power of a signal. In this paper, we investigate this problem while allowing for degradation of routed signals by components such as taps, multiplexers, and fiber links. We assume that optical amplifiers are preplaced. We investigate the problem of routing the maximum number of connections while maintaining proper power levels. The problem is formulated as a mixed-integer nonlinear program and two-phase hybrid solution approaches employing …

Routing Algorithms For All-Optical Networks With Power Considerations: The Unicast Case, Maher Ali, Byrav Ramamurthy, Jitender S. Deogun

School of Computing: Conference and Workshop Papers

In this paper, we investigate the problem of routing connections in all-optical networks while allowing for degradation of routed signals by different optical components. To overcome the complexity of the problem, we divide it into two parts. First, we solve the pure RWA problem using fixed routes for every connection. Second, power assignment is accomplished by either using the smallest-gain first (SGF) heuristic or using a genetic algorithm. Numerical examples on a wide variety of networks show that (a) the number of connections established without considering the signal attenuation was most of the time greater than that achievable considering attenuation …

Transition From Research To Operations: Arktos - A Knowledge-Based Sea Ice Classification System, Cheryl Bertoia, Denise Gineris, Kim Partington, Leen-Kiat Soh, Costas Tsatsoulis

School of Computing: Conference and Workshop Papers

ARKTOS is a fully automated intelligent system that classifies sea ice and that is now being used by the U.S. National Ice Center (NIC) for daily operations related to the NIC’s task of mapping the ice covered oceans. In this paper we describe the process of taking a research project and transitioning it to an operational environment. We discuss the theoretical methodologies implemented in ARKTOS, and how ARKTOS was developed, tested, and finally moved to operations.

Search For Charged Higgs Bosons In E+E- Collisions At √S = 181-184 Gev, Barate, R.; Et Al., M. Thulasidas

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

No abstract provided.

A 2d Dwt Architecture Suitable For The Embedded Zerotree Wavelet Algorithm, James Martinez

Theses : Honours

Digital Imaging has had an enormous impact on industrial applications such as the Internet and video-phone systems. However, demand for industrial applications is growing enormously. In particular, internet application users are, growing at a near exponential rate. The sharp increase in applications using digital images has caused much emphasis on the fields of image coding, storage, processing and communications. New techniques are continuously developed with the main aim of increasing efficiency. Image coding is in particular a field of great commercial interest. A digital image requires a large amount of data to be created. This large amount of data causes …

Embed[D]Ed Zerotree Codec, Karma Wangdi

Theses : Honours

This thesis discusses the findings of the final year project involving the VHDL (V= Very High Speed Integrated Circuit, Hardware Description Language) design and simulation of an EZT (Embedded Zero Tree) codec. The basis of image compression and the various image compression techniques that are available today have been explored. This provided a clear understanding of image compression as a whole. An in depth understanding of wavelet transform theory was vital to the understanding of the edge that this transform provides over other transforms for image compression. Both the mathematics of it and how it is implemented using sets of …

Multiple Stochastic Learning Automata For Vehicle Path Control In An Automated Highway System, Cem Unsal, Pushkin Kachroo, John S. Bay

Electrical & Computer Engineering Faculty Research

This paper suggests an intelligent controller for an automated vehicle planning its own trajectory based on sensor and communication data. The intelligent controller is designed using the learning stochastic automata theory. Using the data received from on-board sensors, two automata (one for lateral actions, one for longitudinal actions) can learn the best possible action to avoid collisions. The system has the advantage of being able to work in unmodeled stochastic environments, unlike adaptive control methods or expert systems. Simulations for simultaneous lateral and longitudinal control of a vehicle provide encouraging results

Web-Based Interlibrary Loan System, Ee Peng Lim, Schubert Foo, Cheng Hai Tan, Kwang-Yong Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Interlibrary loan (ILL) system is one of the important library services provided by most public libraries. Through ILL, public libraries share their collections of reading material and library users are able to access library resources beyond their affiliated libraries. However, the present manual ILL process is inconvenient, inefficient and error-prone. In this project, we developed a system that automated many tedious procedures in the existing ILL system. The new ILL system is realized by a number of Java applets customized for librarians and library users. The new ILL system allows library users to submit ILL requests at any time using …