In software testing, it is often desirable to find test inputs that exercise specific program features. Finding these inputs manually, is extremely time consuming, especially, when the software being tested is complex. Therefore, there have been numerous attempts automate this process. Random test data generation consists of generating test inputs at random, in the hope that they will exercise the desired software features. Often the desired inputs must satisfy complex constraints, and this makes a random approach seem unlikely to succeed. In contrast, combinatorial optimization techniques, such as those using genetic algorithms, are meant to solve difficult problems involving simultaneous satisfaction of many constraints.

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.

It has been noticed in the past five years that the Internet use has been troubled by the lack of sufficient security and a legal framework to enable electronic commerce to flourish. Despite these shortcomings, governments, businesses and individuals are using the Internet more often as an inexpensive and ubiquitous means to disseminate and obtain information, goods and services. The Internet is insecure -- potentially millions of people have access, and "hackers" can intercept anything traveling over the wire. There is no way to make it a secure environment; it is, after all, a public network, hence the availability and affordability. In order for it to serve our purposes as a vehicle for legally binding transactions, efforts must be directed at securing the message itself, as opposed to the transport mechanism. Digital signatures have been evolved in the recent years as the best tool for ensuring the authenticity and integrity of critical information in the so called "paperless office". A model using XML digital signatures is developed and the level of security provided by this model in the real world scenario is outlined.

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?

This problem in lieu thesis is considering a TCP client H1 making a connection to distant server S and is downloading a file. In the midst of the downloading, if H1 crashes, the TCP connection from H1 to S is lost. In the future, if H1 restarts, the TCP connection from H1 to S will be reestablished and the file will be downloaded again. This cannot happen until host H1 restarts. Now consider a situation where there is a standby host H2 for the host H1. H1 and H2 monitor the health of each other by heartbeat messages (like SCTP). If H2 detects the failure of H1, then H2 takes over. This implies that all resources assigned to H1 are now reassigned or taken over by H2. The host H1 and H2 transmit data between each other when any one of it crashed. Throughout the data transmission process, heart beat chunk is exchanged between the hosts when one of the host crashes. In particular, the IP addresses that were originally assigned to H1 are assigned to H2. In this scenario, movement of the TCP connection between H1 and S to a connection between H2 and S without disrupting the TCP …

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.

On-line Analytical Processing (OLAP) is a very interesting platform to provide analytical power to the data present in the database. This paper discusses the system designed which handles integration of data from two remote legacy reservation systems to merge as one Integrated database server and also the design of an OLAP database and building an OLAP cube for the data warehousing. OLAP cube is useful for analysis of data and also for making various business decisions. The Data Transformation Services (DTS) in the Microsoft® SQL Server 2000 is used to integrate as a package the collection of data and also for refreshing data in the databases. On-line Analytical Processing (OLAP) cube is designed using Microsoft® Analysis Server.

The transmission of voice data over Internet Protocol (IP) networks is rapidly gaining acceptance in the field of networking. The major voice transmissions in the IP networks are involved in Internet telephony, which is also known as IP telephony or Voice Over IP (VoIP). VoIP is undergoing many enhancements to provide the end users with same quality as in the public switched telephone networks (PSTN). These enhancements are mostly required in quality of service (QoS) for the transmission of voice data over the IP networks. As with recent developments in the networking field, various protocols came into market to provide the QoS in IP networks - of them, multi protocol label switching (MPLS) is the most reliable and upcoming protocol for working on QoS. The problem of the thesis is to develop an IP-based virtual network, with end hosts and routers, implement MPLS on the network, and analyze its QoS for voice data transmission.

Power consumption is an important issue for mobile computers since they rely on the short life of batteries. Conservation techniques are commonly used in hardware design of such systems but network interface is a significant consumer of power, which needs considerable research to be devoted towards designing a low-power design network protocol stack. Due to the dynamic nature of wireless networks, adaptations are necessary to achieve energy efficiency and a reasonable quality of service. This paper presents the application of energy-efficient techniques to each layer in the network protocol stack and a feedback is provided depending on the performance of this new design. And also a comparison of two existing MAC protocols is done showing a better suitability of E2MAC for higher power conservation. Multimedia applications can achieve an optimal performance if they are aware of the characteristics of the wireless link. Relying on the underlying operating system software and communication protocols to hide the anomalies of wireless channel needs efficient energy consumption methodology and fair quality of service like E2MAC. This report also focuses on some of the various concerns of energy efficiency in wireless communication and also looks into the definition of seven layers as defined by International …

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.

Finite functions (also called maps) are used to describe a number of key computations and storage mechanisms used in software and hardware interpreters. Their presence spread over various memory and speed hierarchies in hardware and through various optimization processes (algorithmic and compilation based) in software, suggests encapsulating dynamic size changes and representation optimizations in a unique abstraction to be used across traditional computation mechanisms. We developed a memory allocator for testing the finite functions. We have implemented some dynamic finite functions and performed certain experiments to see the performance speed of these finite functions. We have developed some simple but powerful application programming interfaces (API) for these finite functions.

Server load balancing technology has obtained much attention as much business proceeded towards e-commerce. The idea behind is to have set of clustered servers that share the load as against a single server to achieve better performance and throughput. In this problem in lieu of thesis, I propose and evaluate an implementation of a prototype scalable server. The prototype consists of a load-balanced cluster of hosts that collectively accept and service TCP connections. The host IP addresses are advertised using the Round Robin DNS technique, allowing any host to receive requests from any client. Once a client attempts to establish a TCP connection with one of the hosts, a decision is made as to whether or not the connection should be redirected to a different host namely, the host with the lowest number of established connections. This problem in lieu of thesis outlines the history of load balancing, various options available today and finally approach for implementing the prototype and the corresponding findings.

Library information systems use different software applications and automated systems to gain access to distributed information. Rapid application development, changes made to existing software applications and development of new software on different platforms can make it difficult for library information systems to interoperate. Web services are used to offer better information access and retrieval solutions and hence make it more cost effective for libraries. This research focuses on how web services are implemented with the standard protocols like SOAP, WSDL and UDDI using different programming languages and platforms to achieve interoperability for libraries. It also shows how libraries can make use of this new technology. Since web services built on different platforms can interact with each other, libraries can access information with more efficiency and flexibility.