Software Engineering Commons^™

Mpeg-4 Systems And Applications, Hari Kalva, Lai-Tee Cheok, Alexandros Eleftheriadis

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

MPEG-4, under the auspices of the ISO, is specifying tools to enable object-based audio-visual presentations [3]. These include tools to encode individual objects, compose presentations with objects, store these object-based presentations and access these presentations in a distributed manner over networks. The main distinguishing feature of object-based audio-visual presentations is the scene composition at the user terminal. The objects that are part of a scene are composed and displayed at the user end as opposed to encoding the composed scenes as is done in the case of MPEG-2. Such object-based representation and presentation has several benefits including compression efficiency and …

What Is Y2k And How Did The University Of Nevada System Solve It?, Diane R. Dietrich

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The turn of the century change from 1999 to 2000 will create chaos for the world's computer systems. This paper will discuss the causes of the Y2K problem, the reaction to this problem by the University of Nevada System Computer Services and possible repercussions of this problem for Nevada, the United States and the world.

A Simplified Model Of Wound Healing (With Particular Reference To The Critical Size Defect), J. A. Adam

Mathematics & Statistics Faculty Publications

This paper is an attempt to construct a simple mathematical model of wound healing/tissue regeneration which reproduces some of the known qualitative features of those phenomena. It does not address the time development of the wound in any way, but does examine conditions (e.g., wound size) under which such healing may occur. Two related one-dimensional models are examined here. The first, and simpler of the two corresponds to a "swath" of tissue (or more realistically in this case, bone) removed from an infinite plane of tissue in which only a thin band of tissue at the wound edges takes part …

Formal Representation And Application Of Software Design Information, Thomas M. Schorsch

Theses and Dissertations

Formal methods for developing software use mathematical frameworks to specify, develop and verify software systems, especially safety critical systems where error free software is a necessity. A transformation system is a formal method that refines a requirement specification into an implementation by successively adding design decisions in the form of precisely verified design information. Current algebraic representations of design information (specifications, morphisms, and interpretations) and methods for applying algebraic specification design information (diagram refinement) cannot correctly represent and apply design information involving higher level design information. This investigation develops innovative methods for constructing and refining structured algebraic requirement specifications, as …

Design Approaches To Model-Based Simulation In Intelligent Computer Assisted Instruction, Bjoern Helfesrieder, Venky Shankararaman

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Model-based simulation systems have been created in various fields of engineering to train personnel or students in operation, maintenance and troubleshooting of complex devices and systems. A review of literature indicates a lack of good overviews of the approaches to system design of model-based training simulations in Intelligent Computer Assisted Instruction (ICAI). Though single systems have to some extent been evaluated with regard to their performance, an organised evaluation, especially a comparative evaluation of the systems that have been created within the field is lacking. To be able to successfully conduct an in-depth review under these conditions, we concentrate and …

Xcert Software, Inc., Keng Siau

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Xcert’s business is in developing Internet and Intranet security enhancement technology. Xcert was founded in April 1996 by Andrew Csinger and Pat Richard and was headquartered in Vancouver, Canada. Xcert’s solution to Internet security was a public key infrastructure (PKI). PKI is a system of digital certi® cates, certi® cate authorities (CAs) and other registration authorities that verify and authenticate the validity of each party involved in an Internet transaction. Xcert’s PKI technology allows organizations of any size to issue digital certi® cates to their members. These organizations become their own CA and are empowered to issue digital certi® cates …

Some Notions Of Complex Adaptive Systems And Their Relationship To Our World, Jens G. Pohl

Collaborative Agent Design (CAD) Research Center

This paper assumes that the world we live in consists of many interwoven complex adaptive systems. In the literature such systems are characterized as comprising many moving parts and processes that interact significantly in a mostly non-linear manner. It is argued that the forces that act on such complex systems are not additive, and that their impact occurs along non-linear interactions within the system. In particular, many of these systems are adaptive in that they change their behavior (through their interactions) over time, so that if they are subjected to a similar force or event a second time they …

The Second Generation Integrated Collaborative Decision Making (Icdm) Model: A Three-Tier Approach To Agent-Based, Decision-Support Systems, Kym J. Pohl, Jens G. Pohl

Collaborative Agent Design (CAD) Research Center

Ten years ago the CAD Research Center at California Polytechnic University in San Luis Obispo, California identified a standard framework for agent-based, decision support systems. Employing inter-process and inference engine technologies of the time, the CAD Research Center termed this ‘blueprint’ the Integrated Collaborative Decision-Making (ICDM) framework. Over the past twelve years ICDM has been successfully used as a foundation in several systems. These systems focus on a wide range of domains of application including architectural design and ship cargo stowage. Success of the ICDM framework in conjunction with the availability of newer technologies has prompted an evolutionary leap in …

Re-Engineering A Software Development Organization As A Complex Adaptive System, Steven J. Gollery, Jens G. Pohl

Collaborative Agent Design (CAD) Research Center

This paper proposes that it is possible and desirable to restructure a software development organization as a complex adaptive system. Such a structure would increase the possibility that the organization would be able to survive and prosper in a rapidly-changing market place by shortening response time, increasing flexibility in the face of new and unexpected circumstances, and allowing the organization to learn quickly from its experiences.

The paper shows how a common information repository can be used to provide decision support to developers and managers, and discusses the relationship between decision support systems and complex adaptive systems.

A Family Of Hierarchical Encoding Techniques For Image And Video Communications, Samah A. Senbel

Computer Science Theses & Dissertations

As the demand for image and video transmission and interactive multimedia applications continues to grow, scalable image and video compression that has robust behavior over unreliable channels are of increasing interest. These desktop applications require scalability as a main feature due to its heterogeneous nature, since participants in an interactive multimedia application have different needs and processing power. Also, the encoding and decoding algorithm complexity must be low due to the practical considerations of low-cost low-power receiver terminals. This requires image and video encoding techniques that jointly considers compression, scalability, robustness, and simplicity.

In this dissertation, we present a family …

Ismis: A Military Transportation Decision-Support Framework, Stephen Goodman, Jens G. Pohl

Collaborative Agent Design (CAD) Research Center

This paper discusses the challenges that the Information Revolution poses to transportation planning, execution and training in the US military services. Attention is drawn to the opportunities provided by global connectivity and the manner in which these opportunities can be applied to advantage in an integrated, collaborative, decision-support framework. The characteristics of military deployment operations are discussed in respect to system requirements such as parallel activities, internal representation of information (rather than data), intelligent assistance, and the integration of planning, execution and training functions.

The Integrated Strategic Mobility Interface System (ISMIS) is described as a framework that is designed to …

Routing And Caching Mechanisms For Mobile Ip Networks, Baher Ali Esmat

Archived Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.

Notepals: Lightweight Note Sharing By The Group, For The Group, Richard C. Davis, James A. Landay, Victor Chen, Jonathan Huang, Rebecca B. Lee, Francis Li, James Lin, Charles B. Morrey, Morgan N. Price, Bill N. Schilit

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

NotePals is a lightweight note sharing system that gives group members easy access to each others experiences through their personal notes. The system allows notes taken by group members in any context to be uploaded to a shared repository. Group members view these notes with browsers that allow them to retrieve all notes taken in a given context or to access notes from other related notes or documents. This is possible because NotePals records the context in which each note is created (e.g., its author, subject, and creation time). The system is lightweight because it fits easily into group members …

The Open Source Revolution: Transforming The Software Industry With Help From The Government, Mitchell L. Stoltz

Pomona Senior Theses

A new method for making software is stealthily gaining ground in the computer industry, offering a promise of better, cheaper software and the empowerment of the user. The open source movement could revolutionize the software industry...if it succeeds. Open source means software that you are allowed to copy, modify, and give to friends. Source code , the lists of instructions which tell computers how to run, is readily available, allowing you to look inside the workings of a program and change it to suit your needs. A group of programmers, companies, users, and activists have gathered in support of this …

Proceedings Of The 1999 Onr Decision-Support Workshop Series: A Decision-Making Tools Workshop, Collaborative Agent Design Research Center

Collaborative Agent Design (CAD) Research Center

The rationale of the Workshop rests on some very simple observations. It is well known that every situation encountered by individuals and organizations demands an appropriate response. The choice of such a response from among a multitude of options is the decision-making process. Simple situations that give rise to a small number of options allow the decision maker to decide on a course of action without great effort. This state of affairs changes dramatically when the situations are complex and involve a large number of factors. In this case, an extensive field of options is engendered that makes it impossible …

Collaborative Decision-Support And The Human-Machine Relationship, Jens G. Pohl

Collaborative Agent Design (CAD) Research Center

Human beings are inquisitive creatures who seek explanations for all that they observe and experience in their living environment. While this quest for understanding is central to our success in adapting to a changing environment, it is also a major cause of our willingness to accept partial understandings and superficial explanations when the degree of complexity of the problem situation confounds our current cognitive capabilities. In other words, a superficial or partial explanation is considered better than no explanation at all. As flawed as this approach may be, it has helped us to solve difficult problems in stages. By first …

An Interview With Sadie Plant, Switch Staffs

SWITCH

The interview is conducted with Sadie Plant in a variety of subjects. Plant discusses the topic of centralized and distributed organizational structures. Practical implementation of organizations will tend to have elements of both centralized and distributed structures. Additionally, it is beneficial to mainstream organizations to incorporate or recuperate activist or grassroots distributed elements in order to bring in new energies, thoughts, and ideas. The discussion then shifts to drugs and information control. Plant argues that drugs and information have similar characteristics in that both have the ability to change perception and thoughts. The tools that governments use to control and …

An Interactive Tool For Refining Software Specifications From A Formal Domain Model, Gary L. Anderson

Theses and Dissertations

This work examines the process for refining a software specification from a formal object-oriented domain model. This process was implemented with interactive software to demonstrate the feasibility and benefits of automating what has been a tedious and often error-prone manual task. The refinement process operates within the framework of a larger Knowledge-Based Software Engineering system. A generic object-oriented representation is used to store a domain model, which allows the specification tool to access, select, and manipulate the required objects to form a customized specification. The specification is also stored as an object-oriented model, which in turn can be accessed by …

The Window Distribution Of Idealized Tcp Congestion Avoidance With Variable Packet Loss, Archan Misra, Teunis J. Ott

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper analyzes the stationary behavior of the TCP congestion window performing ideal congestion avoidance when the packet loss probability is not constant, but varies as a function of the window size. By neglecting the detailed window behavior during fast recovery, we are able to derive a Markov process that is then approximated by a continuous-time, continuous state space process. The stationary distribution of this process is analyzed and derived numerically and then extrapolated to obtain the stationary distribution of the TCP window. This numerical analysis enables us to predict the behavior of the TCP congestion window when interacting with …

Transforming Aggregate Object-Oriented Formal Specifications To Code, John A. Kissack

Theses and Dissertations

The feasibility of a transformational formal-based software engineering tool has been the focus of AFIT research for several years. Until now, the main research emphasis has been placed on the individual components that would comprise such a transformational system; therefore, this research demonstrates how a representative collection of aggregate objects would be transformed from specification to code. The research focused on critical integration issues associated with a formal-based software transformation system, such as the source specification, the problem space architecture, design architecture, design transforms, and target software transforms. Software is critical in today's Air Force, yet its specification, design, and …

Websearch: A Configurable Parallel Multi-Search Web Browser, Jason Lin

Theses Digitization Project

No abstract provided.

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

Xcert Software, Inc., Keng Siau

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The case on Xcert Software, Inc., illustrates the operational and strategic issues encountered by a startup IT company in the Internet security business. Xcert faces difficulty in a number of areas: (1) finances, (2) future direction and leadership, (3) organizational structure, experience and size, and (4) marketing. This is a discussion case that introduces students to the competitive world of Internet business and provides them an opportunity to discuss and debate the myriad issues facing the founders of Xcert.

Development Of An Operations Research Software Package For Army Divisions, Blane C. Wilson

Theses and Dissertations

There exists great potential for applying operations research techniques to solve specific problems in the areas of operations, installation support, and training at the Army division level. Because of the operational tempo of today's active-duty and reserve component units, command must focus on accomplishing the daily missions. Also, due their limited knowledge of the field, planners may not be aware of how operations research can be used to enhance planning and operations. Time, training funds, resources, safety, personnel, and equipment are all critical factors in this process. Operations research techniques could be used to improve division-level operations by saving time, …