The FLEX/REFLEX paradigm is applied to the description of a computer program system. The paradigm is shown to be relevant and appropriate to computer program systems and to advantageously display and structure the general hierarchical characteristics of computer program systems. Program systems characterized in the paradigm are described both holistically...
Disk space fragmentation is the proliferation of small and
unusable gaps. This problem is considered within the context of
IBM's VM operating system.
Facing this problem, researchers resorted to using algorithms
based on memory management techniques, such as placement
strategies (first-fit, best-fit, and worst-fit). Solutions based on these
algorithms do...
An active object system is a transition-based object-oriented system suitable for the design of various concurrent systems. An AOS consists of a collection of interacting objects, where the behavior of each object is determined by the transition statements provided in the class of that object. A transition statement is a...
This thesis discusses a special type of a versatile, distributed control system, the Taskmaster II. It includes a detailed specification of a readily realizable Taskmaster system utilizing a layered communication among units, oriented on the ISO OSI seven layer model. The specification was developed from the analysis of previous research...
FLEX1 is a general model processor, patterned after Klir's
General Sequential System Paradigm (Figure 1). Specifically, the
processor is a discrete time flux oriented realization of the general
paradigm and can process non-linear, non-stationary, environmentally
controlled state variable system models with explicit memory. The
current version is restricted to not...
Users interested in customizing their Primo installation are required to configure specific settings, files, and code during the View setup process. A consequence of this is that unique customizations are not easily sharable between institutions. With the release of the new Primo User Interface, Ex Libris has enabled institutions to...
The inefficiency of time-shared computer systems compared to
batch processing systems is in the time lost in swapping operations.
The larger the allocated quantum size, the less swap time is incurred.
In order to guard against intolerable response time while lengthening
the quantum size, the response time of a common...
Allegro is a network database management system being developed at Oregon State University. This project adds a user friendly query facility to the system. The user is presented with pictorial display of the network records and a query interface modeled on the Query-By-Example system. By request the user may be...
Behavioral modeling is increasingly an imperative component of system design as the systems under construction become more and more complex. Without behavioral modeling available to the modern designer, design and verification of these systems would be much more laborious. Additionally, with the increasing computational power of today's modeling and simulation...
AE32000 microprocessor was developed mainly to address the need for the reduction in the amount of memory accesses in embedded applications. One of the primary goals of a computer architect is the design and construction of machines, that support the efficient execution of the programs that will run on them....
The general problem of application development of interactive GUI applications has been addressed by toolkits, libraries, user interface management systems, and more recently domain-specific application frameworks. However, the most sophisticated solution offered by frameworks still lacks a number of features which are addressed by this research: 1) limited functionality --...
The main goal of automated test generation is to improve the reliability of a program by exposing faults to developers. To this end, testing should cover the largest possible portion of the program given a test budget (i.e., time and resources) as frequently as possible. Coverage of a program entity...
The storage tube computer graphics terminal provides
high resolution, high speed, and comparatively low cost
graphics. Oregon State University currently supports
four such terminals under the OS-3 time sharing system.
The terminals are used for a wide variety of applications
in the physical sciences and engineering.
This thesis describes TEKPLOT...
Knowledge based systems can require large, highly complex and varied
forms of knowledge. An effective knowledge acquisition tool to support
such a system should allow the user to transfer and manipulate the different forms knowledge in a manner that is clear and intuitive. ASTEK is
a knowledge acquisition tool that...
This paper presents qualitative results from interviews with knowledge workers about their recovery strategies after interruptions. Special focus is given to when these strategies fail due to the nature of the interruption and existing computer support. Potential solutions offered by participants to overcome some of these problems are presented. These...
Parallel languages rarely specify parallel I/O constructs, and existing commercial systems provide the programmer with a low-level I/O interface. We present design principles for integrating I/O into languages and show how these principles are applied to a virtual-processor-oriented language. We show how machine-independent modes are used to support both high...
This dissertation addresses two fundamental problems in computer vision—namely,
multitarget tracking and event recognition in videos. These problems are challenging
because uncertainty may arise from a host of sources, including motion blur,
occlusions, and dynamic cluttered backgrounds. We show that these challenges can be
successfully addressed by using a multiscale,...
One of the commonly used simulation approaches is process orientation. This is based on the use of nodes (or blocks) that perform functions in series. In spite of the compactness and ease of learning that characterize process-based simulation, many languages are somewhat complex, primarily the result of the large number...
The AE32000 processor core, developed by Advanced Digital Chips Inc., Korea, is used primarily in the embedded processing environment. The AE32000 simulator models this embedded processor core having high code density. An enhanced simulator was developed to study the performance of the present Instruction Set Architecture after comparison with the...
Embedded processors are utilized in many applications with considerable time spent developing and maintaining functionality and performance. Performance being a key factor in adding features such as video and audio to a product. Configurable processors, such as X32V, allow the addition of functionality and performance without large increases in design...
Increasing automation and highly flexible manufacturing processes cause increasing complexity for manufacturing system. FMS (Flexible Manufacturing System) is an approach to solve this problem. Since the elements of the FMS and manufacturing process performance are closely interrelated, the application of simple modeling and emulation techniques in the planning stages for...
Expert systems is an area of artificial intelligence that shows promise for a wide
variety of applications, particularly in solving problems that have always been considered
too large and complex for solution by conventional approaches. However, the process of
eliciting expertise from an expert, knowledge acquisition, is recognized as the...
A method for improving performance/watt of an embedded single-instruction multiple-data (SIMD) architecture using application-guided a priori scheduling of hardware resources is presented. A multi-core architectural simulator is adopted that accurately estimates power, performance, and utilization of various processor components (logic, interconnect and memory). A greedy search is then performed on...
The widespread use of TCP as a transport layer protocol for mobile ad-hoc networks and wireline networks has motivated the need to make its implementation highly power efficient specially with respect to ad hoc radio networks. Over the past years many researchers have developed energy efficient protocols for mobile ad-hoc...
In data-centers, running multiple isolated workloads while getting the most performance out of available hardware is key. For many years Virtual Machines (VMs) have been an enabler, but native containers which offer isolation similar to virtual machines while reducing overhead costs associated with emulating hardware resources have become an increasingly...
The term "Intuitive use" has become a common phrase to describe interfaces and products, however it is rarely defined. Research regarding intuitive use is in its infancy, beginning primarily in 2003. With the development of new terms in Human Factors and Human-Computer Interaction, it is important for Designers and Users...
A high speed adaptive signal processing concept and several high
speed adaptive logic circuit elements are presented.
The adaptive signal processing system operates in a "goal" oriented
mode; the system tries to optimize its characteristics to
achieve a given goal in spite of unforeseen variations in the inputs,
the system,...
Automated Storage and Retrieval (AS/R) Systems
have had a considerable impact on manufacturing and
distribution processes. The configuration of AS/R systems
vary considerably, depending on the particular application.
The effect of different retrieval scheduling rules
is analyzed and compared for three different unit-load
AS/R systems operating under dual-command cycle. The...
Chemical equilibrium is a major factor in many natural and
industrial systems. The ability to predict ionic equilibrium is
extremely valuable in industry in solving problems without the costs
involved in full scale experiments. An example of an application in
the pulp and paper industry is the prediction of non-process...
"Expert systems" is an area in the field of
artificial intelligence which attempts to encode an
"expert's" heuristic knowledge and reasoning ability into
a computer program. The purpose of this study is to
investigate the applicability of using an "expert system"
in a closed-loop automatic control system.
An "expert system"...
The objective of this thesis is to present the architecture and
design of a neural network-based pattern classifier. The classifier
detects textual characters which have been translated, rotated, and
corrupted by noise. This form of pattern classifier differs
significantly from traditional pattern classifiers. The neural network
architecture used in implementing...
The potential for machine learning systems to improve via a mutually beneficial exchange of information with users has yet to be explored in much detail. Previously, we found that users were willing to provide a generous amount of rich feedback to machine learning systems, and that the types of some...
Traditional simulation languages and simulators do not
fully support the need to design, modify, and extend
simulation models of manufacturing systems, especially,
material handling systems. Since AGV systems, one type of
automated material handling systems, require complicated
control logic, flexible job routings, and frequent layout
modifications and extensions to correspond...
This thesis presents a study of applications and techniques for molecular dynamics simulations. Three studies are presented that are intended to improve our ability to simulate larger systems more realistically. A comparison study of two- and three-body potential models for liquid and amorphous Si0₂ is presented. The structural, vibrational, and...
In this report, I first introduce three areas of interest to collaborative filtering researchers, namely: (a) how to solve the sparsity and scalability problems in recommendation systems; (b) how to rapidly develop and test collaborative filtering algorithms; and (c) how to apply collaborative filtering to unbounded numeric preference data. In...
"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...
Streaming media and interactive television viewing experiences are becoming more commonplace with the introduction of services such as Netflix Streaming, the Apple TV, and Google TV aided by the increase adoption of broadband internet. As these services make their way into the living room, and developers struggle to accommodate more...
This dissertation investigates the use of a hardware mechanism called Eager Data Transfer (EDT) for achieving the reduction of communication latency for user-level network protocol. To reach the goal, the dissertation addresses the following research issues. First, the development of a communication system performance evaluation tool called Linux/SimOS is presented....
Trends in wireless networks are increasingly pointing towards a future with multi-hop
networks deployed in multi-channel environments. In this thesis, we present the design
for iMAC—a protocol targeted at medium access control in such environments. iMAC
uses control packets on a common control channel to faciliate a three-way handshake
between...
This study dealt with research problems at the landscape level. The objectives of this thesis were to develop tools to study and characterize landscapes and to interface with a geographic information system (GIS), to evaluate landscape indices, and to examine development of forest cutting patterns under different cutting methods and...
Deep learning has greatly improved visual recognition in recent years. However, recent research has shown that there exist many adversarial examples that can negatively impact the performance of such an architecture. Different from previous perspectives that focus on improving the classifiers to detect the adversarial examples, this work focuses on...
With the evolving popularity of new computing platforms such as Ultrabooks, Tablets, and Smart Phones, and the shift to multi-core computing, power is now the key performance limiter, a departure from the traditional frequency limitation. As such, increasingly low-power design solutions feature prominently in early architectural and design space exploration...
This thesis describes the design of a RISC architecture
for high speed data acquisition. The structure of existing
data acquisition systems is first examined. An instruction
set is created to allow the data acquisition system to serve
a wide variety of applications. The architecture is designed
to allow the execution...
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...
Scientists in the biological sciences need to retrieve information from a variety of data collections, traditionally maintained in SQL databases, in order to conduct research. Because current assistant tools are designed primarily for business and financial users, scientists have been forced to use the notoriously difficult command-line SQL interface, supplied...
A Graphic User Interface is developed to determine the existence of a
particular sequence of piano notes within a monophonic sound waveform.
Such waveforms are recorded within the Graphic User Interface and then
passed to the monophonic analysis engine. The first phase of analysis segments
the PCM sound data to...
To be competitive in domestic and international markets, manufacturing management is routinely faced with the decision to automate or replace existing production facilities with advanced manufacturing technologies. Installation of advanced manufacturing technologies requires high capital investment, and there is much evidence to suggest that automation for automation's sake has proven...
For many decades, production and assembly lines have played an important role in industrial manufacturing systems. In particular, they have proved to be an efficient way to organize the production of high volume products in many industries. In their effort to improve the efficiency of production lines, researchers encountered two...
This dissertation explores the idea of applying machine learning technologies to help computer users find information and better organize electronic resources, by presenting the research work conducted in the following three applications: FolderPredictor, Stacking Recommendation Engines, and Integrating Learning and Reasoning.
FolderPredictor is an intelligent desktop software tool that helps...
Functional programming is concerned with referential transparency, that is, given a certain function and its parameter, that the result will always be the same. However, it seems that this is violated in applications involving uncertainty, such as rolling a dice. This thesis defines the background of probabilistic programming and domain-specific...
Hardware cryptography offers a reliable way to provide security for data that is sent over networks. Security processors have taken the stage in the movement for secure computing. Some of the more prominent security processors belong to the S1 family created by Motorola. The primary goal of this thesis is...
A remote Digital Signal Processing (DSP) lab for the Internet is developed to give students the opportunity to work together online with a remotely located Digital Signal Processor (DSP). Students in different locations can work together with the DSP as if they were present in the lab. To make this...
Ad Hoc networks are multi-hop wireless networks consisting of mobile hosts. They do not have any pre-existing network infrastructure and are characterized by constantly changing topology, limited battery power and bandwidth. Typical applications of such networks are battlefield networks, medical relief during natural calamities or disasters, conference room networking, and...
This thesis describes the implementation of an interface for querying established correspondences between anatomical structures across species. I was the main developer of this query engine, called the Comparative Anatomy Information System. My work involved developing methods to query the knowledge base, perform the specified comparison, display the anatomical hierarchies...
Improving the quality of the medical system has always been of great importance but has not always made the largest advances. A significant percentage of medical errors are due to wrong, missed, or delayed medical diagnosis. Diagnostic errors are among the most preventable categories of medical errors, but when an...
If basic assumptions about how knowledge workers conceptualize and use work units are wrong, then any solutions resting on those assumptions are unlikely to be successful since, instead of decreasing costs, they will lead to increasing them. This paper reports on how knowledge workers understand, use and switch between units...
We describe the design of a domain-specific language (DSL) for the specification of generic ocean modeling tools, and we describe the
implementation of its compiler. The goal of the DSL is to allow the specification of widely usable tools for ocean modeling once, and to allow its translation into different...
This work presents improvements to a multi-core performance/power simulator. The improvements which include updated power models, voltage scaling aware models, and an application specific benchmark, are done to increase the accuracy of power models under voltage and frequency scaling. Improvements to the simulator enable more accurate design space exploration for...
Geographical datasets are large, complex, and can be difficult for users to navigate and derive meaning from. These datasets, as well as the unique insights derived from them, provide tremendous opportunity for social change -- many of the global challenges humankind is currently facing can benefit from analytics or visualization...
The current state of research on gossip techniques for wireless broadcasting is very limited because past research efforts have mostly focused on using gossip techniques for multicast communication. On the other hand, those research efforts that have focused on using gossip techniques for wireless broadcast communications ignore energy efficiency and...
Multiagent learning with cooperative coevolutionary algorithms is a critical area of research, and is relevant to many real-world applications including air traffic control, distributed sensor network control, and game-theoretic applications such as border patrol. A key difficulty in multiagent learning is the credit assignment problem, where the impact of each...
Air traffic flow management over the U.S. airpsace is a difficult problem. Current management approaches lead to hundreds of thousands of hours of delay, costing billions of dollars annually. Weather and airport conditions may instigate this delay, but routing decisions balancing delay with congestion contribute significantly to the propagation of...
This paper discusses the design, construction, and use of a prototype expert system shell, EXE. EXE is non-conventional in that it does not provide a traditional forward or backward chaining inference mechanism. Instead, it allows the domain expert to control the logic flow of the system in a dynamic fashion....
Most general purpose protocols are found to suffer from
inefficiency in an Ethernet LAN environment when used for large
volume data transfer. This is especially true with the TCP/IP family
which was designed for a wide area network. This research work
presents a proof of this inefficiency and proposes a...
GEMS (Graphical Ethernet Monitoring System) is an
enhancement to the SU-PC/IP NETWATCH program, for the
graphical display and recording of computer network packets.
SU-PC/IP (Stanford University Personal Computer/Internet
Protocol) NETWATCH displays one line of information per
packet, including the packet type, IP addresses, packet
size, and protocol type, etc. This...
A new and improved stabilizer was developed for the variable speed generation (VSG) system. The VSG system exhibits periodic oscillations which sometimes leads to a loss of synchronism. After careful study, a simple but effective strategy to stabilize the system was implemented with real time digital feedback control. The VSG...
An experimental investigation of factors effecting
scheduling a system of parallel, non-identical processors
using a series of experimental designs was carried out.
System variables included were processor capacities
relationships, sequencing and assignment rules, job size, and
product demand distributions. The effect of the variables was
measured by comparing mean flow...
The main focus of this work is on the problem of existence of nonlinear optimal controllers
realizable by artificial neural networks. Theoretical justification, currently
available for control applications of neural networks, is rather limited. For example,
it is unclear which neural architectures are capable of performing which control
tasks. This...
The growth of applications for embedded processors has spawned a need for highly configurable devices. Custom microprocessors have long life cycles for a fast paced market, where as off-the-shelf designs often do not provide the level of configuration, nor the ability to allow system-on-chip designs. This paper presents a description...
Identifying the most relevant items in an e-commerce site is becoming more and more
difficult nowadays because of the heavy overload of information. A Java Recommender
System that uses Collaborative Filtering techniques has been developed to reduce such
information overload and even personalize the information to the individual’s preference.
The...
The problem of ensuring Quality of Service (QoS) on a TCP/IP based fixed-infrastructure network has been well studied and several working proposals exist. An allied problem is that of ensuring QoS on an ad-hoc wireless network, where the requirements are similar, but the operating conditions are different enough to warrant...
Today's manufacturing environment is characterized by competition and
continuous change in product and process requirements. The concept of
"design for manufacturability" integrates product specifications with
manufacturing capabilities by considering the design and manufacturing
phases as an integrated system, evaluating the combined system during
the design phase of a product ,...
Software engineers often need help with discovering and learning how to use APIs. For example, software engineers who are starting to learn Java, and they want to implement a certain feature in a program, they might want to reuse existing APIs in order to save time versus rewriting it themselves...
The focus of this research is to design and develop a microcomputer-based information management and production planning system for a discrete parts manufacturing facility. The information management module is based on relational database concepts. This information is used by the scheduling module to generate initial production schedules based on manufacturing...
Expert systems have been suggested as a solution
for difficult problems, including FMS scheduling. As
one of the aspects of artificial intelligence (AI), expert
systems have achieved considerable success in recent
years in medical science, chemistry, and engineering.
However, building an expert system is a difficult
task, the most crucial...
Modern commercial air travel is considered by most transportation specialists to be the safest of all forms of transportation. While safe, any loss of life is tragic and the only really acceptable state of commercial air transport safety is that of 'zero-tolerance' where no accident is acceptable.
Research has demonstrated...
Extensive studies have been undertaken on the transient stability of large interconnected
power systems with flexible ac transmission systems (FACTS) devices installed.
Varieties of control methodologies have been proposed to stabilize the postfault system
which would otherwise eventually lose stability without a proper control. Generally speaking,
regular transient stability is...
Recent work has shown humanoid robots with spinal columns, instead of rigid torsos, benefit from both better balance and an increased ability to absorb external impact. Similarly, snake robots have shown promise as a viable option for exploration in confined spaces with limited human access, such as during power plant...
The proliferation of mobile users and internet content has advanced a plethora of research areas. Among these areas include mobile networks, transport layer protocols, and smart cities. Research shows that global mobile data traffic will increase sevenfold reaching 49 exabytes per month by 2021, most of which will be mobile...
Recent blackout events consistently show that a variety of mechanisms are involved in cascading outages. These cascading mechanisms are irregularly modeled and validated within the existing literature and industry practices. Understanding the relative significance of these different mechanisms is important for choosing which one(s) needs to be modeled for specific...
A system which allows the computer to capture sketches
made by a mechanical designer is described. The system not
only recognizes basic features as they are sketched, but it
also reasons the spatial relationships between features and
builds a high level abstract representation (feature model)
of the artifact. The temporal...
Culprit Tracking is a technique to make lazy evaluation in a programming language even lazier. We sought to develop such a technique after noting poorly-distributed performance characteristics of graphical user interfaces (GUIs) programmed in lazy languages. A characteristic aspect of GUI programs is the intensive screen I/O. These programs are...
Although much effort has been invested to build applications that support group work, collaborative applications have not found easy success. The cost of adopting and maintaining collaborative applications has prevented their widespread use, especially among small distributed groups. Application developers have had difficulties recognizing the extra effort required by groups...
Multi-level decision feedback equalization (MDFE) is an effective sampled signal processing technique to remove inter-symbol interference (ISI) from disk read-back signals. Parallelism which doubles the symbol rate can be realized by utilizing the characteristic of channel response and decision feedback equalization algorithm.
A mixed-signal IC implementation has been chosen for...
This work presents a residential load simulation framework that allows the user to test the effectiveness of peak reduction, peak shifting, and valley filling load management strategies on a representative residential load prior to physical smart sensor and load control deployment. The simulation methodology uses household occupancy, appliance time-of-use, and...
Since its introduction in the early 1990s, the quick growth of the World Wide Web
(WWW) traffic raises the question of whether past Local Area Network (LAN) packet
traces still reflect the current situation or whether they have become obsolete. For this
thesis, several LAN packet traces were obtained by...
Natural disasters could result in unnecessary loss of life and disproportionate suffering to families and communities if evacuation plans are not in place or understood by the public. In the Pacific Northwest, a magnitude 9.0 earthquake and tsunami from the Cascadia Subduction Zone (CSZ) represents one of the most pressing...
The objective of this research was to provide a definitive description of the processes within the physician-patient encounter in an office setting. This description would take the form of a formal process model of the encounter in a provider's office setting, as this represents the most common situation during patient...
Infrastructure systems are a critical component supporting today's modern society. From
power grids to traffic networks, we rely on these systems to perform as intended, despite
the various sources of uncertainty present in their operation. Designing for system
robustness can help mitigate the impact of failures caused by unexpected events....
Electric grid is a critical cyber-physical infrastructure that serves as lifeline for modern society. With the increasing trend of cyber-attacks, electric grid security has become a significant concern. Electric grid operators are working hard to reduce the risk of these attacks towards the system. Having security metrics for monitoring the...
Degradation of watersheds is a major concern in areas where adverse climate effects and unsustainable use of the natural resources have caused extensive stresses to watershed systems (e.g., increased floods, increased droughts, worsened in-stream water quality) through the years. While considerable efforts are being made to generate technical solutions that...
The complexity of designing and testing today's system on chip (SOC) is increasing due to greater integrated circuit (IC) density and higher IO and memory frequencies. SOCs for the mobile phone and tablet market have the unique challenge of short product development windows, at times less than six months, and...
The primary objective of a grid is to maintain a balance between generation and load. If these quantities are not in balance with each other, severe damages such as voltage fluctuations, low power quality, power outages or even cascaded blackouts may occur. Hence one of the primary factors that holds...
Participation in physical activity has important health benefits among individuals with disabilities, whereas inactive lifestyles may lead to secondary limiting health conditions. However, few people with disabilities regularly participate in the recommended amount of health-related physical activities. Low rate of participation may be related to low motivation due to interconnected...
Production planning in fish processing is heavily dependent on the raw material supply. Because of the uncertainties associated with the quantity of catch and its composition, planning for production is a difficult task. Until recently the fish processing plants in Iceland also had to accept the entire loads of fishing...
Traditional approaches to streaming H.264 video over a network typically rely on a single method of transport (i.e., reliable or unreliable) and/or use static values for parameters that can have a significant negative impact on the perceptual quality of the received video. This dissertation presents a dynamic method for wireless...