New peripheral devices are being developed at an ever increasing rate. Before such accessories can be used in the UNIX environment (UNIX is a trademark of Bell Laboratories), they must be able to communicate with the operating system. This involves writing a device driver for each device. In order to do this, very detailed knowledge is required of both the device to be integrated and the version of UNIX to which it will be attached. The process is long, detailed and prone to subtle problems and errors. This paper presents a menu-driven utility designed to simplify and accelerate the design and implementation of UNIX device drivers by freeing developers from many of the implementation specific low-level details.

This investigation proposes a powerful formalization of common sense knowledge based on function-free normal deduction graphs (NDGs) which form a powerful tool for deriving Horn and non-Horn clauses without functions. Such formalization allows common sense reasoning since it has the ability to handle not only negative but also incomplete information.

A useful compiler has been designed that takes a high level neural network specification and constructs a low level configuration file explicitly specifying all network parameters and connections. The neural network model for which this compiler was designed is the adaptrode neuronal model, and the configuration file created can be used by the Adnet simulation engine to perform network experiments. The specification language is very flexible and provides a general framework from which almost any network wiring configuration may be created. While the compiler was created for the specialized adaptrode model, the wiring specification algorithms could also be used to specify the connections in other types of networks.