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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
With sequential computing technology reaching its speed limits, parallel processing is emerging as the key to very-high-speed computation. However, developing a parallel program is by no means a simple task; neither is analyzing the performance of parallel programs.
C* is a high-level data-parallel language that hides explicit message passing and...
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...
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-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)....
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Top-performing approaches to embodied AI tasks like point-goal navigation often rely on training agents via reinforcement learning over tens of millions (or even billions) of experiential steps – learning neural agents that map directly from visual observations to actions. In this work, we question whether these extreme training durations are...
Advances in deep learning based image processing have led to their adoption for a wide range of applications, and in tow with these developments is a dramatic increase in the availability of high quality datasets. With this comes the need to accelerate and scale deep learning applications in order to...
We propose an approach for understanding control policies represented as recurrent neural networks. Recent work has approached this problem by transforming such recurrent policy networks into finite-state machines (FSM) and then analyzing the equivalent minimized FSM. While this led to interesting insights, the minimization process can obscure a deeper understanding...
It is common practice in the unsupervised anomaly detection literature to create experimental benchmarks by sampling from existing supervised learning datasets. We seek to improve this practice by identifying four dimensions important to real-world anomaly detection applications --- point difficulty, clusteredness of anomalies, relevance of features, and relative frequency of...
RNA structure prediction is a challenging problem, especially with pseudoknots. Recently, there has been a shift from the classical minimum free energy-based methods (MFE) to partition function-based ones that assemble structures based on base-pairing probabilities. Two typical examples of the latter group are the popular maximum expected accuracy (MEA) method...
Most database users do not know formal query languages, such as SQL, and prefer to express their information needs using usable query languages, such as keyword queries. Keyword queries, however, are inherently ambiguous and challenging for the database systems to understand and answer effectively. We propose a novel approach to...
Automatic music transcription (AMT) is the task, given an acoustic representation of music, to recover a symbolic notation of the written notes expressed by the sound. Transcribing music with multiple notes sounding simultaneously is difficult for both humans and machines. Much existing work on AMT has focused on suitable acoustic...
A series of laboratory experiments were conducted to study the wave field in the inner lagoon excited by ‘long’ incident waves. Three cases were considered: Cases A, B and C presenting incident waves of wavelength with factors of 1, 2 and 2.5 times the width of the reef respectively. The...
Changes in the global climate and forest management practices have given rise to increasing numbers and severity of wildfires. More than five million acres burned in the United States in 2017, while in Canada 7.4 million acres burned. In particular, an increasing amount of dead woody biomass is a key...
The Rust programming language is a systems programming language with a strong static type system. A central feature of Rust’s type system is its unique concept of “ownership”, which enables Rust to give a user safe, low-level control over resources without the overhead of garbage collection. In Haskell, most data...
Automatic event extraction from natural text is an important and challenging task for natural language understanding. Traditional event detection methods heavily rely on manually engineered rich features. Recent deep learning approaches alleviate this problem by automatic feature engineering. But such efforts, like tradition methods, have so far only focused on...
In Intense Pulsed Light (IPL) sintering, pulsed large-area visible light from a xenon lamp is absorbed by nanoparticle films or patterns and converted to heat, resulting in rapid sintering of the nanoparticles. This work experimentally characterizes IPL sintering of silver nanoparticle films. A newly observed turning point in the evolution...
Appropriate representations of variational software simplify the analysis of their properties.This thesis proposes tailored representations of two kinds variational softwares: difference files of merge commits in Git and feature models. For the former, we use the Choice Edit Model, which is based on the choice calculus, to represent changes introduced...
Software testing is the process of evaluating the accuracy and performance of software, and automated software testing allows programmers to develop software more efficiently by decreasing testing costs. We compared two advanced random test generators, a Feedback-Directed Random Test Generator (FDR) and a Feedback-Controlled Random Test Generator (FCR), for an...
Mutation testing is one of the effective approaches measuring test adequacy of test suites. It is widely used in both academia and industry. Unfortunately, the adoption and practical use of mutation testing for Python 2.x programs face three obstacles. First, limited useful mutation operators. Existing mutation testing tools support very...
With the development of technologies in genome sequencing and variant detection, a huge number of variants are detected. To further analyze the variants, it requires an efficient tool to annotate the functional effect of variants. This project managed to develop an efficient program to annotate the functional effect of variants...
Autonomous multiagent teams can be used in complex exploration tasks to both expedite the exploration and improve the efficiency. However, use of multiagent systems presents additional challenges. Specifically, in domains where the agents' actions are tightly coupled, coordinating multiple agents to achieve cooperative behavior at the group level is difficult....
We model the popular board game of Clue as an MDP and evaluate Monte-Carlo policy rollout in a simulated environment pitting different agents and policies against each other. We describe the choices we made in the representation, along with some of the problems we encountered along the way. We find...
The Open Modeling Environment (OME) is a tool developed to address some known shortcomings in ecological System Dynamics (SD) modeling research. OME provides a common set of methods for interacting directly with spatial information, reducing the need for modelers to create their own methods for doing so. The environment is...
Direct red Solid Oxide Fuel Cell (SOFC) Turbine hybrid plants have the potential to dramatically increase power plant efficiency, decrease emissions, and provide fast response to transient loads. The US Department of Energy's (DOE) Hybrid Performance Project is an experimental hybrid SOFC plant, built at the National
Energy Technology Laboratory...
Monte-Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) is an online-planning algorithm for decision-theoretic planning in domains with stochastic and combinatorial structure. The general applicability of MCTS makes it an ideal first choice to investigate when developing planners for complex applications requiring automated control and planning. The first contribution of this thesis is to...
Automatic analysis of American football videos can help teams develop strategies and extract patterns with less human effort. In this work, we focus on the problem of automatically determining which team is on offense/defense, which is an important subproblem for higher-level analysis. While seemingly mundane, this problem is quite challenging...
We investigate the data collection problem in sensor networks. The network consists of a number of stationary sensors deployed at different sites for sensing and storing data locally. A mobile element moves from sites to sites to collect data from the sensors periodically. There are different costs associated with the...
Constructing a panorama from a set of videos is a long-standing problem in computer vision. A panorama represents an enhanced still-image representation of an entire scene captured in a set of videos, where each video shows only a part of the scene. Importantly, a panorama shows only the scene background,...
Pedestrian distraction at roadway crossings has been correlated with a higher risk of pedestrian-vehicle collisions due to the pedestrian's cognitive, visual, and motor attention being drawn to a wide variety of secondary tasks.
This study is different from previous field studies of pedestrian midblock crossings in that the geometric layout...
The purpose of this article is to explore student reasoning with regard to problems in logic, particularly those related to the Principle of Mathematical Induction (PMI). The five case studies presented build off of work done by other researchers, most notably Dubinsky and Harel, who both looked at how students'...
Easy-first, a search-based structured prediction approach, has been applied to many NLP tasks including dependency parsing and coreference resolution. This approach employs a learned greedy policy (action scoring function) to make easy decisions first, which constrains the remaining decisions and makes them easier. This thesis studies the problem of learning...
Auctions are used to solve resource allocation problem between many agents and many items in real-world settings. Unfortunately, in most cases, it is possible for selfish agents to manipulate the system for their own interest at the expense of the social welfare. Such manipulation can be prevented using the Vickrey-Clarke-Groves...
Novelty detection plays an important role in machine learning and signal processing. This
project studies novelty detection in a new setting where the data object is represented as
a bag of instances and associated with multiple class labels, referred to as multi-instance
multi-label (MIML) learning. Contrary to the common assumption...
Physical activity recognition using accelerometer data is a rapidly emerging field with many real-world applications. Much of the previous work in this area has assumed that the accelerometer data has already been segmented into pure activities, and the activity recognition task has been to classify these segments. In reality, activity...
Markov Decision Process (MDP) is a well-known framework for devising the optimal decision making strategies under uncertainty. Typically, the decision maker assumes a stationary environment which is characterized by a time-invariant transition probability matrix. However, in many real-world scenarios, this assumption is not justified, thus the optimal strategy might not...