Web-based airline ticket booking system. (open access)

Web-based airline ticket booking system.

Online airline ticket booking system is one of the essential applications of E-commerce. With the development of Internet and security technology, more and more people begin to consume online, which is more convenient and personal than traditional way. The goal of this system is to make people purchase airline tickets easily. The system is written in JAVATM. Chapter 1 will introduce some basic conception of the technologies have been used in this system. Chapter 2 shows how the database and the system are designed. Chapter 3 shows the logic of the Web site. In Chapter 4 the interface of the system will be given. Chapter 5 tells the platform of this system.
Date: August 2004
Creator: Yu, Jianming
System: The UNT Digital Library
Case-Based Reasoning for Children Story Selection in ASP.NET (open access)

Case-Based Reasoning for Children Story Selection in ASP.NET

This paper describes the general architecture and function of a Case-Based Reasoning (CBR) system implemented with ASP.NET and C#. Microsoft Visual Studio .NET and XML Web Services provide a flexible, standards-based model that allows clients to access data. Web Form Pages offer a powerful programming model for Web-enabled user interface. The system provides a variety of mechanisms and services related to story retrieval and adaptation. Users may browse and search a library of text stories. More advanced CBR capabilities were also implemented, including a multi-factor distance-calculation for matching user interests with stories in the library, recommendations on optimizing search, and adaptation of stories to match user interests.
Date: December 2003
Creator: Hu, Demin
System: The UNT Digital Library
Machine Language Techniques for Conversational Agents (open access)

Machine Language Techniques for Conversational Agents

Machine Learning is the ability of a machine to perform better at a given task, using its previous experience. Various algorithms like decision trees, Bayesian learning, artificial neural networks and instance-based learning algorithms are used widely in machine learning systems. Current applications of machine learning include credit card fraud detection, customer service based on history of purchased products, games and many more. The application of machine learning techniques to natural language processing (NLP) has increased tremendously in recent years. Examples are handwriting recognition and speech recognition. The problem we tackle in this Problem in Lieu of Thesis is applying machine-learning techniques to improve the performance of a conversational agent. The OpenMind repository of common sense, in the form of question-answer pairs is treated as the training data for the machine learning system. WordNet is interfaced with to capture important semantic and syntactic information about the words in the sentences. Further, k-closest neighbors algorithm, an instance based learning algorithm is used to simulate a case based learning system. The resulting system is expected to be able to answer new queries with knowledge gained from the training data it was fed with.
Date: December 2003
Creator: Sule, Manisha D.
System: The UNT Digital Library
Refactoring FrameNet for Efficient Relational Queries (open access)

Refactoring FrameNet for Efficient Relational Queries

The FrameNet database is being used in a variety of NLP research and applications such as word sense disambiguation, machine translation, information extraction and question answering. The database is currently available in XML format. The XML database though a wholesome way of distributing data in its entireness, is not practical for use unless converted to a more application friendly database. In light of this we have successfully converted the XML database to a relational MySQL™ database. This conversion reduced the amount of data storage amount to less than half. Most importantly the new database enables us to perform fast complex querying and facilitates use by applications and research. We show the steps taken to ensure relational integrity of the data during the refactoring process and a simple demo application demonstrating ease of use.
Date: December 2003
Creator: Ahmad, Zeeshan Asim
System: The UNT Digital Library
Agent-Based Architecture for Web Deployment of Multi-Agents as Conversational Interfaces. (open access)

Agent-Based Architecture for Web Deployment of Multi-Agents as Conversational Interfaces.

Agent-based architecture explains the rationale and basis for developing agents that can interact with users through natural language query/answer patterns developed systematically using AIML (artificial intelligence mark-up language) scripts. This thesis research document also explains the architecture for VISTA (virtual interactive story-telling agents), which is used for interactive querying in educational and recreational purposes. Agents are very effective as conversational interfaces when used along side with graphical user interface (GUI) in applications and Web pages. This architecture platform can support multiple agents with or with out sharing of knowledgebase. They are very useful as chat robots for recreational purposes, customer service and educational purposes. This platform is powered by Java servlet implementation of Program D and contained in Apache Tomcat server. The AIML scripting language defined here in is a generic form of XML language and forms the knowledgebase of the bot. Animation is provided with Microsoft® Agent technology and text-to-speech support engine.
Date: May 2003
Creator: Pothuru, Ranjit Kumar
System: The UNT Digital Library
Benchmark-based Page Replacement (BBPR) Strategy: A New Web Cache Page Replacement Strategy (open access)

Benchmark-based Page Replacement (BBPR) Strategy: A New Web Cache Page Replacement Strategy

World Wide Web caching is widely used through today's Internet. When correctly deployed, Web caching systems can lead to significant bandwidth savings, network load reduction, server load balancing, and higher content availability. A document replacement algorithm that can lower retrieval latency and yield high hit ratio is the key to the effectiveness of proxy caches. More than twenty cache algorithms have been employed in academic studies and in corporate communities as well. But there are some drawbacks in the existing replacement algorithms. To overcome these shortcomings, we developed a new page replacement strategy named as Benchmark-Based Page Replacement (BBPR) strategy, in which a HTTP benchmark is used as a tool to evaluate the current network load and the server load. By our simulation model, the BBPR strategy shows better performance than the LRU (Least Recently Used) method, which is the most commonly used algorithm. The tradeoff is a reduced hit ratio. Slow pages benefit from BBPR.
Date: May 2003
Creator: He, Wei
System: The UNT Digital Library
Content-Based Image Retrieval by Integration of Metadata Encoded Multimedia Features in Constructing a Video Summarizer Application. (open access)

Content-Based Image Retrieval by Integration of Metadata Encoded Multimedia Features in Constructing a Video Summarizer Application.

Content-based image retrieval (CBIR) is the retrieval of images from a collection by means of internal feature measures of the information content of the images. In CBIR systems, text media is usually used only to retrieve exemplar images for further searching by image feature content. This research work describes a new method for integrating multimedia text and image content features to increase the retrieval performance of the system. I am exploring the content-based features of an image extracted from a video to build a storyboard for search retrieval of images. Metadata encoded multimedia features include extracting primitive features like color, shape and text from an image. Histograms are built for all the features extracted and stored in a database. Images are searched based on comparing these histogram values of the extracted image with the stored values. These histogram values are used for extraction of keyframes from a collection of images parsed from a video file. Individual shots of images are extracted from a video clip and run through processes that extract the features and build the histogram values. A keyframe extraction algorithm is run to get the keyframes from the collection of images to build a storyboard of images. In …
Date: May 2003
Creator: Anusuri, Ramprasad
System: The UNT Digital Library
DICOM Image Scrubbing Software Library/Utility (open access)

DICOM Image Scrubbing Software Library/Utility

This software is aimed at providing user-friendly, easy-to-use environment for the user to scrub (de-identify/modify) the DICOM header information. Some tools either anonymize or default the values without the user interaction. The user doesn't have the flexibility to edit the header information. One cannot scrub set of images simultaneously (batch scrubbing). This motivated to develop a tool/utility that can scrub a set of images in a single step more efficiently. This document also addresses security issues of the patient confidentiality to achieve protection of patient identifying information and some technical requirements
Date: May 2003
Creator: Ponnam, Bhavani Srikanth
System: The UNT Digital Library
The Feasibility of Multicasting in RMI (open access)

The Feasibility of Multicasting in RMI

Due to the growing need of the Internet and networking technologies, simple, powerful, easily maintained distributed applications needed to be developed. These kinds of applications can benefit greatly from distributed computing concepts. Despite its powerful mechanisms, Jini has yet to be accepted in mainstream Java development. Until that happens, we need to find better Remote Method Invocation (RMI) solutions. Feasibility of implementation of Multicasting in RMI is worked in this paper. Multicasting capability can be used in RMI using Jini-like technique. Support of Multicast over Unicast reference layer is also studied. A piece of code explaining how it can be done, is added.
Date: May 2003
Creator: Ujjinihavildar, Vinay
System: The UNT Digital Library
Security problems in 802.11 wireless networks standard due to the inefficiency of wired equivalent privacy protocol. (open access)

Security problems in 802.11 wireless networks standard due to the inefficiency of wired equivalent privacy protocol.

Due to the rapid growth of wireless networking, the fallible security issues of the 802.11 standard have come under close scrutiny. Nowadays most of the organizations are eager to setup wireless local area networks to reduce the hassles of limited mobility provided by conventional wired network. There are serious security issues that need to be sorted out before everyone is willing to transmit valuable corporate information on a wireless network. This report documents the inherent flaws in wired equivalent privacy protocol used by the 802.11 standard and the ensuing security breaches that can occur to a wireless network due to these flaws. The solutions suggested in this report might not actually make the 802.11 standard secure, but will surely help in the lead up to a secure wireless network standard.
Date: May 2003
Creator: Samanthapudi, Varma
System: The UNT Digital Library
User Modeling Tools for Virtual Architecture (open access)

User Modeling Tools for Virtual Architecture

As the use of virtual environments (VEs) is becoming more widespread, user needs are becoming a more significant part in those environments. In order to adapt to the needs of the user, a system should be able to infer user interests and goals. I developed an architecture for user modeling to understand users' interests in a VE by monitoring their actions. In this paper, I discussed the architecture and the virtual environment that was created to test it. This architecture employs sensors to keep track of all the users' actions, data structures that can store a record of significant events that have occurred in the environment, and a rule base. The rule base continually monitors the data collected from the sensors, world state, and event history in order to update the user goal inferences. These inferences can then be used to modify the flow of events within a VE.
Date: May 2003
Creator: Uppuluri, Raja
System: The UNT Digital Library
Control Mechanisms and Recovery Techniques for Real-Time Data Transmission Over the Internet. (open access)

Control Mechanisms and Recovery Techniques for Real-Time Data Transmission Over the Internet.

Streaming multimedia content with UDP has become popular over distributed systems such as an Internet. This may encounter many losses due to dropped packets or late arrivals at destination since UDP can only provide best effort delivery. Even UDP doesn't have any self-recovery mechanism from congestion collapse or bursty loss to inform sender of the data to adjust future transmission rate of data like in TCP. So there is a need to incorporate various control schemes like forward error control, interleaving, and congestion control and error concealment into real-time transmission to prevent from effect of losses. Loss can be repaired by retransmission if roundtrip delay is allowed, otherwise error concealment techniques will be used based on the type and amount of loss. This paper implements the interleaving technique with packet spacing of varying interleaver block size for protecting real-time data from loss and its effect during transformation across the Internet. The packets are interleaved and maintain some time gap between two consecutive packets before being transmitted into the Internet. Thus loss of packets can be reduced from congestion and preventing loss of consecutive packets of information when a burst of several packets are lost. Several experiments have been conducted with …
Date: August 2002
Creator: Battula, Venkata Krishna Rao
System: The UNT Digital Library
Field Programmable Devices and Reconfigurable Computing (open access)

Field Programmable Devices and Reconfigurable Computing

The motivation behind this research has been the idea of the capability of the computing device to dynamically reconfigure itself. The goal of this work is to measure the computational power of reconfigurable machines rather in an abstract manner by proposing a model the FPGAs abstract computing machines. Modeling FPGAs in terms of Automata Theory would give a base to answer more fundamental questions about the capabilities and possible answers. If a Finite State Machine (FSM) or a Turing Machine (TM) has the capability of reconfiguring its finite control, does this ability give the abstract computing device new computational power. In other words is a reconfigurable FSM, TM or a Cellular Automata more powerful than their corresponding non-configurable versions?
Date: December 1995
Creator: Koyuncu, Osman
System: The UNT Digital Library
The Telecommunications Network Configuration Optimization Problem (open access)

The Telecommunications Network Configuration Optimization Problem

The purpose of telecommunication network configuration optimization is to find the best homing relationship between tandems and switches so as to minimize interswitch traffic, or equivalently to maximize intraswitch traffic. Note that, since minimal interswitch traffic implies minimal IMT utilization, communication costs will also be minimal.
Date: August 1995
Creator: Azizoglu, Mustafa C.
System: The UNT Digital Library
Merlin Classifier System (open access)

Merlin Classifier System

There is a natural tendency for biological systems to change as their environments change. The fittest in the biological systems survive, adapt to their environment, and multiply while the weakest in the environment diminish. There have been attempts in computer science to model the processes of natural selection and survival which occur in biological systems in order to obtain more efficient and effective machine-learning algorithms. Genetic algorithms are the result of these attempts.
Date: May 1991
Creator: Pantermuehl, Brenda N.
System: The UNT Digital Library
Multiple Window Editor (open access)

Multiple Window Editor

This paper is written to present the design purpose and design process of the Multiple Window Editor. Multiple Window Editor is a software which allows the user to edit or view different files or the same file on the screen by the window facilities provided by this software. All the windows can be dynamically created, changed, moved, and destroyed. The main purpose of this program is to improve the programming environment for the users. The design motivations will be introduced through the comparison of the present existing window facilities and the editor components. The design process will be introduced by analyzing the design decision, design tradeoffs and implementation problems.
Date: June 1986
Creator: Alphy, Yu Cherng-Der
System: The UNT Digital Library
Design and Implementation of a Parser for the DBase II Query Language (open access)

Design and Implementation of a Parser for the DBase II Query Language

In this paper the DBase II query language of an RDBMS for personal computers is discussed. Other languages will be provided by large and sophisticated DBMS will not be discussed here. The reason for selecting the DBase II query language for discussion are as follows: 1. It is a simple language that can be learned easily [TOWN 84, DINE 84]. Within a short period, users can learn all of the facilities and manage the system very well. 2. It is a language suitable for interactive programming and execution like BASIC. 3. It provides adequate facilities for a small data base system and serves as an introductory guide for more sophisticated systems.
Date: December 1985
Creator: Chan, Kin Pong
System: The UNT Digital Library
A Comparison of Meansort and Quicksort (open access)

A Comparison of Meansort and Quicksort

The main purpose of this project is to compare a new sorting method- Meansort with its preceding sorting method- Quicksort. Meansort uses the mean value for each key to determine the partition of the file, but Quicksort selects at random. Experiments proved that in some ways Meansort is superior to Quicksort but is still not perfect since it always needs a mean value for each key. This project implements these two methods and determines the situations under which each of these methods outperforms the other.
Date: November 1985
Creator: Tsang, Pey Betty
System: The UNT Digital Library
ADA Tasking Facilities for Concurrent and Real-Time Programming (open access)

ADA Tasking Facilities for Concurrent and Real-Time Programming

This paper describes multitasking facilities of Ada in concurrent and real-time programming. Synchronization and process communication mechanisms are discussed in detail, also, a new mechanism to solve the scheduling problem is developed. In the concurrent programming aspect, a comparison is made between Ada's rendezvous and Pascal's Monitor concept. In the real-time programming aspect, the differences between the Ada multitasking and the traditional "cyclic executive approaches are contrasted and their associated costs/benefits analyzed.
Date: April 1984
Creator: Chang, Ming-Chu
System: The UNT Digital Library
Design and Implementation of a Text Editor Under Music Interactive Operating System (open access)

Design and Implementation of a Text Editor Under Music Interactive Operating System

An interactive text editor is a computer program that allows a user to create and revise a target document such as program statements, manuscript text, and numeric data through an online terminal and the computer. It allows text to be modified and corrected many orders of magnitude faster and more easily than would manual correction. The most important characteristic of the text editor is its convenience for the user. Such convenience requires a simple, mnemonic command language which is easy to use and understand.
Date: March 1984
Creator: Hwa, Shu-Jen
System: The UNT Digital Library
Development of a Text Formatted Under VAX/VMS Operating System (open access)

Development of a Text Formatted Under VAX/VMS Operating System

No matter how extended the use of the computer is, the printed document is still the primary medium for the presentation information, and will continue to be for some time. The use of computing facilities for preparation and production of the document is becoming as prevalent as their use for numeric computation. Commercially, document preparation systems are now a standard facility at research institution, and they have become quite common on each computer program. A conventional document preparation system usually contains two parts: a text editor used to create, enter, update, and maintain the text and control words that comprise the document in its "input" form, and a text formatter used to process that input and produce the final document.
Date: March 1984
Creator: Chow, Perng
System: The UNT Digital Library
Mini-ADA Compiler Project (open access)

Mini-ADA Compiler Project

The Ada language is one of the most controversial topics in computer science today. Ada was originally designed as a solution to the software maintenance problems encountered by the United States Department of Defense[2], and as a multi-purpose language to be used particularly in an embedded computer system[7]. Never before has a project been undertaken. The Ada language does not simply entail the construction of a new compiler or a new language definition, it is this and a great deal more.
Date: October 1983
Creator: Chang, Kai
System: The UNT Digital Library
The NTSU School of Music Practice Room Scheduling System (open access)

The NTSU School of Music Practice Room Scheduling System

This is a report concerning the project I completed for my 590 (special problem) credit. The subject of this project was a system for interactive practice room scheduling by music students at NTSU. This system was created in the fall semester of 1982 as a class project for software Development (CSCI 553) with Dr. Irby. The system was not completely finished, and I received permission from Dr. Irby to finish it and help implement its use at the Music department. I was able to observe three usages of the system: Spring, Summer I, and Summer II semesters of 1983. This report details the problems encountered during each of these usages, and changes made to the system due to them. Results of a first-use survey, under documentation, and complete final code listings were also included.
Date: August 1983
Creator: Reed, Susan C.
System: The UNT Digital Library
Text Processing for Thai Characters (open access)

Text Processing for Thai Characters

The purpose of this project is 1) to create a Thai character set for text processing, 2) to write a text processing program for the character set, and 3) to allow users to create and save the text.
Date: August 1983
Creator: Tarapoom, Nirut
System: The UNT Digital Library