Software Configuration Management (SCM) is a concept of trying to group the changing artifacts of software development to try to manage the complexity of modern day software. This paper provides a roadmap for improving the SCM support process based on a meta-model. I developed a model that defines key practice...
The Sacagawea testbed has been designed to support testing and development of decision making models, and associated uncertainty management techniques, that are appropriate under real-time problem solving constraints. Conceptually, it provides a simulated temporal and spatial environment, the latter consisting of a terrain grid of elevation and tree cover data,...
Watering a lawn involves several factors such as laying out the sprinklers and valves, trenching, laying pipes, cables, etc. The primary goal is to ensure uniform watering subject to various constraints. We present some abstract problems involving sprinkler layout and some solutions with theoretical worst case bounds on their performance....
This project aims at building a Java application and a Java applet that would simulate a Stern-Gerlach laboratory in Quantum Mechanics. The project provides a tool for allowing the student to quickly design and run on the computer screen a number of experiments involving spin systems. This application could be...
Spreadsheet languages are widely used by end users for many different purposes. Previous research shows that spreadsheets often contain faults. To help end users test their spreadsheets, in previous research, a testing methodology for spreadsheets has been developed. Th.is methodology is supported by an automatic test case generation (ATCG) methodology....
This report describes "VIGRAM" (Visual Programming) which is a program understanding and complexity metric analysis tool for Pascal programs. VIGRAM is implemented on the Macintosh as one part of the "O.S.U." (Qregon Speedcode Universe) project. With VIGRAM, the source code of a Pascal procedure can be displayed as a visual...
Performance of a reliable storage subsystem for a centralized database system was studied by simulation. The reliable storage subsystem studied consists of three redundant disk units that are updated one at a time from a consistent database state to another consistent database state, Thus, even if a central processor and/or...
The demand for improved controllers creates the need for synthesis techniques which emphasize optimality. Optimality automatically infers stability. This thesis presents one such technique which is not limited to linear systems. The theory of dynamic programming is applied to the synthesis of optimal controllers with emphasis on missile flight control...
Wireless technologies advance rapidly in the recent time. The maJor initiative is the realization of the third generation wireless network that provides high bandwidth access to digital data on the Internet. Moreover, recent improvements in computer and embedded systems have enabled portable devices with sufficiently high computing capability.
The combination...
Monitoring the performance of electrical utility assets is a critical activity for power companies. Gas chromatography has long been established as the analytical technique of choice for assessment of transformer fault conditions by detection of the presence of key fault gases through analysis of transformer oil. Chromatography is one of...
'Search engine for a book library section' was developed for the Philosophy department. This Search Engine is a user interface application used for the purpose of searching for words or phrases as the need may be from a directory of books in a section of the Philosophy department library. The...
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...
Shape transformation is a technique for gradually changing one geometric shape to another. A recent approach presents the use of thin-plate radial basis functions as opposed to traditional "blobby sphere" implicit functions. Without the explicit evaluation of he energy function, this approach combined the two traditional steps into one by...
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...
This paper discusses Java Bytecode Obfuscation techniques that make the reverse engineering task more difficult. This paper is structured as follows: Java virtual machine and Java language specifications are discussed first. Then the paper talks about different techniques for protecting software and then details one promising approach named Obfuscation. The...
Personalization is defined as a process that facilitates interaction among consumers and providers such that individual consumers are enabled to more readily access the content and services of providers, and individual providers are enabled to more effectively and easily deliver their content and services to consumers. This project presents a...
This survey looks at five different polygon breaking algorithms and compares them. The criteria for comparison are:
1. Complexity of the algorithm.
2. The number and type of subpolygons produced.
3. The classes of input polygons that can be broken.
The best algorithm is then coded and a comparison is...
As XML becomes more and more popular, easy-to-use and powerful XML query languages are in great need. Xing is a visual query and restructuring language for XML documents. The objective of this project is to develop a basic version of Xing, including a user-oriented XML query interface and a simple...
The material in this paper is divided into the following four chapters for convenience. Chapter 1 explains, how the idea of fault testing changed from testing the machine instructions to testing the hardware in logic circuits. Chapters 2, 3 and 4 present the different approaches considered, namely:
1. Path sensitizing...
This project is about helping protein naturalists understand the protein structure. The database system developed here provides a convenient tool for scientists to explore conformational information in a database of known structures and thereby provide researchers with a deeper and wider view of the empirical data. In this way, it...
BIOMAP (Biogeochemistry model (BIOME-BGC) - Mapped Atmospheric Plant Soil System (MAPSS)) is a computer program that predicts ecosystem distribution and behavior over spatial grid cells of 10km at a daily timestep. It needs to consider events like fire for a more realistic prediction. This project involved integrating a new fire...
This paper presents the initial results from an empirical study of mechanical design engineers. In this study, six engineers were video-taped solving real mechanical design problems. Preliminary analysis of this protocol data has yielded several important findings, including (a) mechanical designers progress from systematic to opportunistic behavior as the design...
Acoustic position estimation is used where high accuracy navigation is required over a small area, such as for searching or for collecting gravitational or geomagnetic data. In this position estimation method, a surface ship or submersible periodically sends out a high-frequency acoustic 'ping' at a prearranged frequency. This ping is...
System architectures for interconnecting large numbers of processors are being widely studied [AG82,TH75,TR82]. Of particular interest in such architectures is the exploitation of concurrency among processors. This concurrency can be parallelism, in which different parts of a single data case are processed at the same time, or pipelining, in which...
This grant supported acquisition of a minicomputer system for departmental research. The equipment selected is a DEC VAX-11/750 system, installed in remodeled space in the Computer Science (formerly Farm Crops) Building. Grant funds for equipment acquisition were supplemented by support from the Tektronix Foundation.
After completion of the physical facilities...
Advanced computer architectures are centered around the parallel computer systems. This project is focused on the experiment on two parallel computer architectures : Sequent Balance 21000 shared memory multiprocessor and Cogent XTM distributed system.
A set of benchmark programs are implemented using "C" language and Dynix parallel programming library on...
Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA) is a lesser known field which has outgrown the bounds of statistics. It differs from ordinary, or “confirmatory”, data analysis. Originated by John Tukey, EDA aspires toward an open-ended meta-goal: to discover “all interesting” [nontrivial, normal form, valid] hypotheses about a domain that is represented by...
Recent advances in diagnostic expert systems have been limited by the crucial Knowledge Acquisition Problem: to bring expert heuristics into logical, conditional rule forms useful for computer aided diagnosis. Some automatic systems with potential biomedical relevance that do acquire knowledge are reviewed here, and analyzed from the standpoint of possible...
Three different approaches to type checking have been taken in object-oriented programming languages. Smalltalk-80 uses run-time type checking. C++ uses subtypes. A third alternative is to use parameterized types. We examine the difficulties of programming in an object-oriented fashion with compile-time type checking and argue that parameterized types are better...
There is disagreement about the role and importance of typographic style (source code formatting and commenting) in program comprehension. Results from experiments and opinions in programming style books are mixed.
This paper presents principles of typographic style consistent and compatible with the results of program comprehension studies. It introduces the...
X2 is an object-oriented programming language. Object-oriented programming models everything in the world as objects that have some local state that may vary with time. If the state of an object varies with time the object is mutable. If the state is time independent the object is immutable. Each object's...
A database to be used by electrical circuit design, test, and repair expert systems must support both structural data and inferential data about the circuit. It is well known that engineering databases must support dynamic schema (re)definition of the structural data and entity-based access to it. We analyze this requirement...
This paper presents the results of a controlled experiment comparing debugging abilities of novice, intermediate and skilled student programmers. Debugging performance differences were studied using two single-page Pascal programs: a binary search program and a median calculation program. Two types of semantic errors, array bounds and undefined variable, and two...
Many studies have shown that expert programmers are more effective at debugging programs than novice programmers. These studies have suggested that the major reason for this difference is due to the experts' superior comprehension of the program. This paper reports two experiments which investigated expert and novice student programmers program...
FORTRAN permits both explicit and implicit options for both data declaration and type conversion features. This study investigated the effects of explicit and implicit data declaration and type conversion features on a program comprehension task performed by FORTRAN programmers in an introductory programming course. The results indicated that both factors...
This study examined the UNIX command abbreviation schemes preferred by expert and novice UNIX programmers. The two parts of the conducted experiment were: subjective rating of UNIX command abbreviations for each of the six abbreviation categories (acronym, combination, contraction, identity, synonym, and truncation); subjects suggested descriptive command names for UNDC...
In this short paper, we present an implementation method for a distributed commit/ termination protocol for a distributed database system. The protocol, which handles both commit and termination processing of distributed transactions, is represented by communicating Moore machines. Several advantages of our approach are discussed.
A theory for resiliency control of distributed database systems is developed, and schemes that preserve the consistent global database state in the presence of site crashes and message link failures are discussed. The schemes can at least theoretically be paired with any concurrency control scheme that produces y-serializable executions. Further,...
A typical database system maintains target data, which contain information useful for users, and access path data, which facilitate faster accesses to target data. Further, most large database systems support concurrent processing of multiple transactions. For a static database system model, where units of concurrency control are not dynamically created...
It is highly desirable for a distributed database system to achieve logically continuous operation even if some sites or message links fail. In this paper, we describe a scheme that can automatically reconfigure a fully-replicated distributed database system upon subsystem failures. The scheme can tolerate total failures of some sites....
An execution of a database system is considered correct if its net effect is as if transactions were executed serially, and such an execution is called serializable. In this short paper we show that the serializability test problem can be reduced to a simple pebbling problem. Our characterization is intuitive...
A concurrency and resiliency control scheme for a distributed database system with replicated data is discussed. The scheme, true-copy token scheme, uses true-copy tokens in order to designate the physical data copies (true copies) that can be identified with the current logical data that are globally unique, and then it...
In this paper, the current demands for veterinary mobile and emergency services in the state of Oregon will be reviewed as well as how the human EMS model can be translated into veterinary triage and workflow. The proposed idea for Veterinary Emergency Mobile services consists of several potential working models,...
Machine learning models are powerful tools which may aid in the prediction of survival outcomes of cancer patients. This study evaluated eight classification models and eight regression models on their ability to predict survival outcomes on breast cancer and prostate cancer data sets from the SEER database. The most accurate...
Microprogramming has evolved since its introduction in 1951 by Maurice Wilkes. The most significant change that has taken place is the recent growth of interest in user microprogramming. However, user microprogramming is a difficult task because of various complex and intricate features of the host processors. A microprogrammer must be...
Tbc expanding complexity of database application worlds, and the accelerating pace of change of these worlds mandate data models which support some of the tasks of data interpretation which formerly were borne by the applications programs. Chief among these are the support for virtual data, definition of transactions, and enforcement...
This tutorial discusses one of the oldest problems in computing: how to search and retrieve keyed information from a list in the least amount of time. Hashing - a technique that mathematically converts a key into a storage address - is one of the best methods of finding and retrieving...
The "style metric" of Berry and Meekings is purported to quantify the lucidity of software written in the C programming language. We used a modification of this metric to try and identify error-prone software. Our results indicate that this metric seems to bear little relationship to the density of errors...
Contemporary database systems are used in a variety of business applications requiring rapid retrieval of online data. When records contain unique information indexed by a single key, the retrieval operation can be simplified. However, when added generality and flexibility is needed, inverted files and sophisticated data models result in a...
During the past year the rapid increase in the cost of copper and aluminum has led operating companies to investigate the feasibility of using iron and steel conductors for transmission and distribution purposes where small blocks of power are to be served. This Thesis gives the results of tests on...
ELGDF (Extended Large Grain Data Flow) is a design language that allows representation of a wide variety of parallel programs. The syntax is graphical and hierarchical to allow construction and viewing of realistically sized programs. ELGDF language facilitates describing parallel programs in a natural way for both shared memory model...
New parallel algorithms for solving the decomposed linear programs are developed. Direct parallelization of the sequential algorithm results in very limited performance improvement using multiple processors. By redesigning the algorithm, we achieved more than 2*P times performance improvement over the sequential algorithm, where P is the number of processors used...
A denotational semantics is presented for a language that includes multiple-valued functions (essentially Lisp S-expressions), which map from ground values into the power domain of ground values. The domain equations are reflexive. and fixed points of all functions are defined. Thus, it is possible to specify an operating system as...
The WEPP (Water Erosion Prediction Project) application computes soil loss and sediment yield from a field based on the data on crops, management practices, and operations. In order to make WEPP, which is a Windows-based application, easily accessible, Web WEPP (Web-based WEPP) was developed by our research group.
Web WEPP...
We demonstrate an approach to transform keyword queries automatically into queries that combine keywords appropriately by boolean operations, such as and and or. Most current search engines will preprocess the queries before they really use these queries to search locally stored files or web pages. However, the search engines usually...
Recently several minimal perfect hashing functions far small static word sets have been developed. However, they are limited to sets of 50 words or less. In this paper, a Two Level Minimal Perfect Hash Function for large data sets is given. It partitions a large static set into small sets...
It is widely believed that there is not enough experimentation in the field of computer science. One area in particular in which additional experimentation is needed involves regression testing of large, real software. Regression testing is the expensive process of validating changes made to previously tested software. One reason why...
The goal of this project is to design and implement an information system for self-service chemistry stockroom at Oregon State University. The system will have the following major functionalities: (1) Recording inventory purchases and sales; (2) Customer account administration and periodic billing of customers; (3) Inventory monitoring; ( 4) Allowing...
The State of Oregon possesses a tumultuous relationship with the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) and currently experiences one of the lowest participation rates in the country despite attempting several policy reforms. The State of Washington has exhibited a comparatively similar relationship. However, it has adopted a distinctive policy supplementation...
A complete approach to reasoning under uncertainty requires support for both identification of the appropriate hypothesis space and ranking hypotheses based on available evidence. We present a hybrid reasoning scheme which combines symbolic and numeric methods for uncertainty management to provide efficient and effective support for both of these tasks....
A software system to study network algorithms was implemented on UNIX. Each part of a network algorithm can be written as a single C program which becomes a virtual node in the network. During a simulation all virtualized nodes run as separate processes on a single PDP 11/44. Inter-node communication...
It is difficult to build intelligent computer-aided design (ICAD) programs using available expert system shells and AI programming languages. To build ICAD programs, tools are needed that support (a) generative search of design spaces, (b) deep search of design spaces to evaluate alternative designs, (c) simultaneous exploration of alternative designs...
When Newell introduced the concept of the knowledge level as a useful level of description for computer systems, he focused on the representation of knowledge. This paper applies the knowledge level notion to the problem of knowledge acquisition. Two interesting issues arise. First, some existing machine learning programs appear to...
This report describes of current research in Artificial Intelligence at Oregon State University. The five areas of active research are ( a) intelligent aids for mechanical engineering design, (b) active experimentation as a method in machine learning, ( c) techniques for combining logic programming and assumption-based truth maintenance, ( d)...
This report reviews the 31 papers on machine learning that were presented at the Ninth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-85) held in Los Angeles during August, 1985. The papers are grouped according to a taxonomy of the various subareas of machine learning research. The areas receiving the most...
This chapter develops a taxonomy of learning methods using techniques based on Newell’s knowledge level. Two properties of each system are defined: knowledge level predictability and knowledge level learning. A system is predictable at the knowledge level if the principle of rationality can be applied to predict its behavior. A...
Authentication is a means of developing an electronic signature that works like a written signature. It assumes that your data is publicly known but nevertheless ensures that the message is not tampered with and that you have an audit trail.
This project discusses the techniques and concepts used to design...
Drought is a major concern for producers of food and forage crops. According to the U.S. Drought monitor, Central and Eastern Oregon in particular, are in severe drought. In the early 1990's, a trial was conducted to determine the yield per inch of water applied to 5 cereal species: barley,...
This PNW Extension publication provides an overview of various types of powderpost beetles, the symptoms associated with their damage, as well as tips for prevention and control.
Oregon State University (OSU) faculty members have supported the success of agriculture producers and their businesses for more than 100 years. Through research, education and community engagement, OSU faculty have helped agriculture producers and value-added operators respond to threats and opportunities in a manner that has brought vitality and sustainability...
The Oregon Sea Grant Visitor Center at Hatfield Marine Science Center attracts 150,000 visitors a year and does not require an admission fee. Surveying visitors, 39% of all people indicated that half or more of their reason for coming to the Oregon coast was to visit the Visitor Center.
The Community Action Partnership of Oregon (CAPO) approached Oregon State University to assist in developing statewide indicators which help local agencies better utilize data for continuous improvement. The project was expanded to include Washington and Idaho. This report summarizes the project's findings.
This presentation summarizes a collaborative effort of the Wallowa Resources, Northeast Oregon Economic Development District and Oregon State University faculty members jointly affiliated with Extension Service and the Rural Studies Program to develop indicators of Wallowa County community vitality in a way that reflects the goals and values of the...
This report details a collaborative effort of the Wallowa Resources, Northeast Oregon Economic Development District and Oregon State University faculty members jointly affiliated with Extension Service and the Rural Studies Program to develop indicators of Wallowa County community vitality in a way that reflects the goals and values of the...
This document summarizes a collaborative effort of the Wallowa Resources, Northeast Oregon Economic Development District and Oregon State University faculty members jointly affiliated with Extension Service and the Rural Studies Program to develop indicators of Wallowa County community vitality in a way that reflects the goals and values of the...
This document is a report on the Baseline Vital Vernonia Indicator Project, an effort aimed at exploring community vitality in Vernonia, particularly in light of recent catastrophic floods and subsequent rebuilding and community development initiatives. The Vital Vernonia Indicator Project is a collaboration of Oregon State University Extension Service, Rural...
This document is a report on the Baseline Vital Vernonia Indicator Project, an effort aimed at exploring community vitality in Vernonia, particularly in light of recent catastrophic floods and subsequent rebuilding and community development initiatives. The Vital Vernonia Indicator Project is a collaboration of Oregon State University Extension Service, Rural...
A product of the Vital Tillamook Indicator Project.
This executive summary provides an overview of a collaborative effort of the Tillamook County Futures Council and Oregon State University faculty members jointly affiliated with Extension Service and the Rural Studies Program developed 50 indicators of Tillamook County: 2020 Strategic Vision in...
A product of the Vital Tillamook Indicator Project.
This report details a collaborative effort of the Tillamook County Futures Council and Oregon State University faculty members jointly affiliated with Extension Service and the Rural Studies Program developed 50 indicators of Tillamook County: 2020 Strategic Vision in order to gain insight...
Part of the Vital Tillamook Indicator Project.
This presentation summarizes a collaborative effort of the Tillamook County Futures Council and Oregon State University faculty members jointly affiliated with Extension Service and the Rural Studies Program developed 50 indicators of Tillamook County: 2020 Strategic Vision in order to gain insight into...
The main objective of this project was to compare on-farm measurement techniques for estimating N-contributions from cover crops using 1) separated species lab tests (a standard experimental method), 2) bulked species lab tests, 3) fresh weight, 4) dry weight and 5) canopy height and density. We also recorded relative weed...
This Guidebook follows a holistic approach to adaptation planning called community-driven climate resilience planning. Community-driven climate resilience planning is “the process by which residents of vulnerable and impacted communities define for themselves the complex climate challenges they face, and the climate solutions most relevant to their unique assets and threats.”...
One of the most popular topologies is the hypercube, that has n = 2ᵏ processors, numbered 0 to 2ᵏ -1 and connected in such a way that there is a link between any two if and only if they differ in one bit. Its popularity is due to the fact...
A tour of a graph (digraph, or sequential machine) is a sequence of nodes from the graph such that each node appears at least once and two nodes are adjacent in the sequence only if they are adjacent in the graph. Finding the shortest tour. of a graph is known...
In this paper we will describe two known strategies for static processors allocation in an n-cube multiprocessor, namely the buddy system strategy and the gray code strategy and then propose a new strategy that outperforms the first by (n-k+1) and the second by (n-k+1)/2 in cube recognition. Furthermore, our strategy...
A complete approach to uncertainty management requires support for interactive and incremental problem formulation, inference, hypothesis ranking, and decision making. In addition, computational models must allow for time and resource bounds. Current approaches to uncertainty management concentrate primarily on inference, provide little or no support for the larger issues in...
Test incorporations are program transformations that improve the performance of generate-and-test procedures by moving information out of the "test" and into the "generator." The test information is said to be "incorporated" into the generator so that items produced by the generator are guaranteed to satisfy the incorporated test. This article...
A general model of interactive problem solving is described. The model views interactive problem solving to be the product of cooperating subsystems. The operative subsystem selectively attends to and manipulates problem relevant information in search of a solution. The descriptive subsystem is capable of interpreting this behavior and of discussing...
A computer program complexity measure is a measure of how easy the program is to understand, test, modify, maintain, etc. Many of these measures are derived from the control or flow graph of the program. We describe these measures graph theoretically, indicate what aspect or aspects of the program they...
Recently generalized Fibonacci numbers have received increasing attention. Some properties that are well known for traditional Fibonacci numbers do not generalize easily, some others do not generalize at all. In this paper we report some properties that we have generalized. Section 1 introduces the notation and a theorem due to...