I present a new heuristic search approach to compute approximate answers for the probability query in belief nets. This approach can compute the 'best' bounds for a query in a period of any given time (if time permitted, it will get an exact value). It inherits the essence of Symbolic...
Knowledge compilation improves search-intensive problem-solvers that are easily specified but inefficient. One promising approach improves efficiency by constructing a database of problem-instance/best-action pairs that replace problem-solving search with efficient lookup. The database is constructed by reverse enumeration- expanding the complete search space backwards, from the terminal problem instances. This approach...
The purpose of the present investigation was to develop an adaptive teaching model for an interactive computer-assisted instruction (CAT) program and to evaluate the effectiveness of the implementation of individualized examples or individualized
examples in personalized contexts. Translating word problems into equations provided the context for the CAT investigation. Four...
Many important application problems in engineering can be formalized as nonlinear
optimization tasks. However, numerical methods for solving such problems
are brittle and do not scale well. For example, these methods depend critically
on choosing a good starting point from which to perform the optimization search.
In high-dimensional spaces, numerical...
We have developed SearchPak, a machine independent parallel searching tool on shared and distributed memory machines. It can be used for combinatorial optimization problems and OR-parallel computations as well. Both depth-first and best-first search of the state space can be performed using the SearchPak. With SearchPak, a user just provides...
High level data-parallel languages are easy to use and shield the programmer from machine specific details. A simple and efficient way of providing an interface to such languages is to develop a machine-independent compiler and a routing library, which isolates the low-level machine dependent communication functions, The compiler translates the...
In real-time control systems, the value of a control decision depends not
only on the correctness of the decision but also on the time when that decision
is available. Recent work in real-time decision making has used machine learning
techniques to automatically construct reactive controllers, that is, controllers
with little...
Reasoning about any realistic domain always involves a degree of uncertainty.
Probabilistic inference in belief networks is one effective way of reasoning under
uncertainty. Efficiency is critical in applying this technique, and many researchers
have been working on this topic. This thesis is the report of our research in this...
In this thesis, A nonlinear methodology for the control of the highly
maneuverable, high performance aircraft HARV (F-18) is studied by using sliding-mode
control (SMC). This control law, which takes a continuous function when the
input constraints are not considered, satisfies the reachability condition by which
concerned states are driven...
Dataparallel C has been designed for various kinds of architectures and was developed jointly at University of New Hampshire and Oregon State University.
This project dealt with porting the libraries to the nCUBE 2 system and helping a user compile his programs on nCUBE 2 directly from a Sun workstation...
In this paper we describe a fuzzy logic based control system implemented on a PC architecture. The rule based inference engine of this expert system is easily configured through an ascii text file and is demonstrated to be capable of controlling various simulations, including an inverted pendulum. The controller is...
A public key cryptosystem allows two or more parties to securely communicate
over an insecure channel without establishing a physically secure channel for key
exchange. The RSA cryptosystem is the most popular public key cryptosystem ever
invented. It is based on the difficulty of factoring large composite numbers. Once the...
With edge rates of high speed digital devices pushing into the sub-nano second
range, interconnections with the associated packages play a major role in determining
the speed, size and performance of digital circuits and systems. The purpose of this
study is to develop experimental techniques based on time domain peeling...
Many parallel machines, both commercial and experimental, have been/are being designed with toroidal interconnection networks. For a given number of nodes, the torus has a relatively larger diameter, but better cost/performance tradeoffs, such as higher channel bandwidth, and lower node degree, when compared to the hypercube. Thus, the torus is...
In this work, we first introduce a novel approach to the long term irrigation scheduling
using Genetic Algorithms (GAs). We explore the effectiveness of GAs in the context of
optimizing nonlinear crop models and describe application requirements and implementation of
the technique. GAs were found to converge quickly to near-optimal...
Probabilistic inference using Bayesian networks is now a well-established approach for reasoning under uncertainty. Among many e ciency-driven tech- niques which have been developed, the Optimal Factoring Problem (OFP) is distinguished for presenting a combinatorial optimization point of view on the problem. The contribution of this thesis is to extend...
We present a model for a distributed virtual market place that can be constructed on the Internet to support selling and buying requests, such as those found as classified advertisements. One requirement for a transaction to take place in the virtual market place is that a sell request and a...
Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) is an industry standard aimed to bring the web to handheld devices. The handheld devices are constrained by battery life and it becomes important that power is conserved across web transactions. The power consumed by the handheld device is directly proportional to the time taken for...
Structure Query Language (SQL) is widely used to access data stored in relational database systems. Although a powerful and flexible language, SQL can also be complex and hard to learn. For most new SQL users, it's easy to write SQL statement by following SQL grammar and syntax rules, but it's...
A video server is the multimedia equivalent of a data file server. As video goes digital video servers that support digital media are required for production and broadcasting in television companies. Grass Valley Group provides comprehensive digital video solutions through a range of video servers called Profiles.
The Profile Media...
In spite of wide spread adoption of the internet technology in teaching and learning, little research exists on the use and the effect of web incorporation in teaching and learning. Immediate clarification of how, when, and for whom the web integration in education is beneficial is needed. This qualitative study...
Recent work has shown that AdaBoost can be viewed as an algorithm that maximizes the margin on the training data via functional gradient descent. Under this interpretation, the weight computed by AdaBoost, for each hypothesis generated, can be viewed as a step size parameter in a gradient descent search. Friedman...
Analysis of programs forms an important activity in the field of software engineering. It is necessary to help understand the code, which facilitates comprehensive testing, maintenance and optimization of code. Aristotle is a tool for analyzing programs written in C. We have designed a system on similar lines for Java...
Remote sensing is the most practical way to acquire large amounts of land cover data for monitoring and understanding environmental change, so it is important to be able to map land cover from imagery. Maps defining land cover patches as polygons rather than pixels greatly improve processing efficiency in models...
Voltage converters or charge pumps find their use in many circuits. They are extensively used in hand held devices as cell phones, pagers, PDA's and laptops. Some of the important issues relating to design of voltage regulators for handheld devices are size, efficiency and noise. Another important factor to be...
We have developed a web-based software tool for evaluating the potential risk of pesticides on the surrounding environment. The software tool is called Web-based Pesticide Screening Tool (Web-PST). It uses the formulas and standards specified by the Soil/Pesticide Interaction Screening Procedure Version II (SPISP II). Web-PST closely models the stand-alone...
Regression testing is an expensive testing process used to validate changes made to previously tested software. Different regression testing techniques can have different impacts on the cost-effectiveness of testing. This cost-effectiveness can also vary with different characteristics of test suites. One such characteristic, test suite granularity, reflects the way in...
Component based software technologies are viewed as essential for creating the software systems of the future. However the use of externally provided components has serious drawbacks for a wide range of software engineering activities often because of a lack of information about the components. One such drawback involves validation of...
Component based software technologies are viewed as essential for creating the software systems of the future. However, the use of externally provided component has serious drawbacks for a wide range of software engineering activities often because of a lack of information about the components. One such drawback involves validation of...
Web-Site Generator 3 (WebSiteGen3) is a rapid application development (RAD) tool that generates ASP.NET forms to insert, query, update and delete data stored in the user tables in a SQL Server 2000 database. WebSiteGen3 uses a graphical user interface to show the user tables in a hierarchical tree based on...
Revised Universal Soil Loss Equation (RUSLE) is a standard for estimating soil loss caused by rainfall and overland flow. The current software tool that implements this standard is RUSLE 1.06b, which is a stand-alone DOS application. In this project, we converted the DOS application to a Web application, which we...
We have developed a framework for Web-based GIS/database applications which allow users to insert, update, delete, and query data with a map interface displayed by Web browsers. The framework was designed so that a Web-based GIS application that uses ArcIMS as a map server can be easily created, customized, and...
Environmental and regulatory concerns are causing confined animal feeding operations (CAFO's) to account for phosphorous content when applying wastewater to agricultural fields for disposal. In most cases this requires more land to spread the waste onto so that the phosphorous needs of the crop are not exceeded. A mobile process...
Regression testing is an expensive software engineering activity intended to provide confidence that modifications to a software system have not introduced faults. Test case prioritization techniques help to reduce regression testing cost by ordering test cases in a way that better achieves testing objectives. In this thesis, we are interested...
We have developed a prototype web-based GIS application for tracking the locations of moving entities. This application, which is called the Responder application, consists of two parts: the Responder client and the Responder server. The Responder client is a .NET application written in C#. It reads the location data from...
CREEDA-BG (Crop Rotation Economic and Environmental Decision-Aid Budget Generator) is a web-based enterprise budgeting tool that allows a user to manage information on her fields, rotations, crops, and operations, and to view estimates of income and expenses. The user can then use this information to evaluate alternative plans and make...
Web-based Pesticide Screening Tool (Web-PST) is a web-based software application for evaluating the potential risk of pesticides on the surrounding environment. It uses the formulas and standards specified by the Soil/Pesticide Interaction Screening Procedure Version II (SPISP II). Web-PST closely models the stand-alone Windows application Windows Pesticide Screening Tool (WIN-PST)....
Image segmentation continues to be a fundamental problem in computer vision and image understanding. In this thesis, we present a Bayesian network that we use for object boundary detection in which the MPE (most probable explanation) before any evidence can produce multiple non-overlapping, non-self-intersecting closed contours and the MPE with...
End users develop more software than any other group of programmers, using software authoring devices such as e-mail filtering editors, by-demonstration macro builders, and spreadsheet environments. Despite this, there has been only a little research on finding ways to help these programmers with the dependability of the software they create....
"Collaborative filtering algorithms’ performances have been evaluated using a variety of metrics.
These metrics, such as Mean Absolute Error and Precision, have often ignored recommendations for
which they do not have data. Ignoring these recommendations has provided numbers which do not
accurately represent the user experience. Qualitatively we have seen...
The appropriate separation of concerns is a fundamental engineering principle. A concern, for software developers, is that which must be represented by code in a program; by extension, separation of concerns is the ability to represent a single concern in a single appropriate programming language construct. Advanced separation of concerns...
Protein secondary structure prediction plays a pivotal role in predicting protein folding in three-dimensions. Its task is to assign each residue one of the three secondary structure classes helix, strand, or random coil. This is an instance of the problem of sequential supervised learning in machine learning. This thesis describes...
The thesis focuses on model-based approximation methods for reinforcement
learning with large scale applications such as combinatorial optimization problems.
First, the thesis proposes two new model-based methods to stablize the
value–function approximation for reinforcement learning. The first one is the
BFBP algorithm, a batch-like reinforcement learning process which iterates between...
Software maintenance accounts for a large portion of the software development cost, particularly the process of updating programs either to adapt for requirement change or to enhance design or efficiency. Currently, program updates are generally performed manually by programmers using text editors. This is an unreliable
method because syntax and...
Accessing information on the Web has become ingrained into our daily lives, and we seek information from many different sources, including conference and journal publications, personal web pages, and others. Increasingly, web-based information retrieval systems such as web-based search engines, library on-line catalog systems, and subscription-based federated search systems are...
Domain-independent automated planning is concerned with computing a sequence of actions that can transform an initial state into a desired goal state. Resource production domains form an interesting class of such problems, in that they typically require reasoning about concurrent durative-actions with continuous effects while minimizing some cost function. Although...