Surface fitting methods play an important role in many scientific fields as well as in computer aided geometric design. The problem treated here is that of constructing a smooth surface that interpolates data values associated with scattered nodes in the plane. The data is said to be convex if there exists a convex interpolant. The problem of convexity-preserving interpolation is to determine if the data is convex, and construct a convex interpolant if it exists.

DNA sequence analysis involves precise discrimination of two of the sequence's most important components: exons and introns. Exons encode the proteins that are responsible for almost all the functions in a living organism. Introns interrupt the sequence coding for a protein and must be removed from primary RNA transcripts before translation to protein can occur. A pattern recognition technique called Finite Induction (FI) is utilized to study the language of exons and introns. FI is especially suited for analyzing and classifying large amounts of data representing sequences of interest. It requires no biological information and employs no statistical functions. Finite Induction is applied to the exon and intron components of DNA by building a collection of rules based upon what it finds in the sequences it examines. It then attempts to match the known rule patterns with new rules formed as a result of analyzing a new sequence. A high number of matches predict a probable close relationship between the two sequences; a low number of matches signifies a large amount of difference between the two. This research demonstrates FI to be a viable tool for measurement when known patterns are available for the formation of rule sets.

This research focused on the off-line cursive script recognition application. The problem is very large and difficult and there is much room for improvement in every aspect of the problem. Many different aspects of this problem were explored in pursuit of solutions to create a more practical and usable off-line cursive script recognizer than is currently available.

Genetic algorithm and artificial life techniques are applied to the development of challenging and interesting opponents in a combat-based computer game. Computer simulations are carried out against an idealized human player to gather data on the effectiveness of the computer generated opponents.

There are three main results in this dissertation. They are PLS-completeness of discrete Hopfield network convergence with eight different restrictions, (degree 3, bipartite and degree 3, 8-neighbor mesh, dual of the knight's graph, hypercube, butterfly, cube-connected cycles and shuffle-exchange), exponential convergence behavior of discrete Hopfield network, and simulation of Turing machines by discrete Hopfield Network.

The goal of a parallel algorithm is to solve a single problem using multiple processors working together and to do so in an efficient manner. In this regard, there is a need to categorize strategies in order to solve broad classes of problems with similar structures and requirements. In this dissertation, two parallel algorithm design strategies are considered: linked list ranking and parentheses matching.

Numerical methods are usually necessary in solving Hamiltonian systems since there is often no closed-form solution. By utilizing a general property of Hamiltonians, namely the symplectic property, all of the qualities of the system may be preserved for indefinitely long integration times because all of the integral (Poincare) invariants are conserved. This allows for more reliable results and frequently leads to significantly shorter execution times as compared to conventional methods. The resonant triad Hamiltonian with one degree of freedom will be focused upon for most of the numerical tests because of its difficult nature and, moreover, analytical results exist whereby useful comparisons can be made.

The study of multicomputer interconnection networks is an important area of research in parallel processing. We introduce vertex-symmetric Hamming-group graphs as a model to design a wide variety of network topologies including the hypercube network.

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.

This dissertation addresses the general problem of recognition of acoustic signals which may be derived from speech, sonar, or acoustic phenomena. The specific problem of recognizing speech is the main focus of this research. The intention is to design a recognition system for a definite number of discrete words. For this purpose specifically, eight isolated words from the T1MIT database are selected. Four medium length words "greasy," "dark," "wash," and "water" are used. In addition, four short words are considered "she," "had," "in," and "all." The recognition system addresses the following issues: filtering or preprocessing, training, and decision-making. The preprocessing phase uses linear predictive coding of order 12. Following the filtering process, a vector quantization method is used to further reduce the input data and generate a finite inductive sequence of symbols representative of each input signal. The sequences generated by the vector quantization process of the same word are factored, and a single ruling or reference template is generated and stored in a codebook. This system introduces a new modeling technique which relies heavily on the basic concept that all finite sequences are finitely inductive. This technique is used in the training stage. In order to accommodate the variabilities …

There have been a number of different versioning models proposed. The research in this area can be divided into two categories: object versioning and schema versioning. In this dissertation, both problem domains are considered as a single unit. This dissertation describes a unifying version model (UVM) for maintaining changes to both objects and schema. UVM handles schema versioning operations by using object versioning techniques. The result is that the UVM allows the OODBMS to be much smaller than previous systems. Also, programmers need know only one set of versioning operations; thus, reducing the learning time by half. This dissertation shows that UVM is a simple but semantically sound and powerful version model for both objects and schema.

The efficacy of a machine learning technique is domain dependent. Some machine learning techniques work very well for certain domains but are ill-suited for other domains. One area that is of real-world concern is the flexibility with which machine learning techniques can adapt to dynamic domains. Currently, there are no known reports of any system that can learn dynamic domains, short of starting over (i.e., re-running the program). Starting over is neither time nor cost efficient for real-world production environments. This dissertation studied a method, referred to as Experience Based Learning (EBL), that attempts to deal with conditions related to learning dynamic domains. EBL is an extension of Instance Based Learning methods. The hypothesis of the study related to this research was that the EBL method would automatically adjust to domain changes and still provide classification accuracy similar to methods that require starting over. To test this hypothesis, twelve widely studied machine learning datasets were used. A dynamic domain was simulated by presenting these datasets in an uninterrupted cycle of train, test, and retrain. The order of the twelve datasets and the order of records within each dataset were randomized to control for order biases in each of ten runs. …

The scope of the present dissertation is a deep lossy compression of still and moving grayscale pictures while maintaining their fidelity, with a specific goal of creating a working prototype of a software system for use in low bandwidth transmission of still satellite imagery and weather briefings with the best preservation of features considered important by the end user.

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.

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.

The device optimization is a very important element in semiconductor technology advancement. Its objective is to find a design point for a semiconductor device so that the optimized design goal meets all specified constraints. As in other engineering fields, a nonlinear optimizer is often used for design optimization. One major drawback of using a nonlinear optimizer is that it can only partially explore the design space and return a local optimal solution. This dissertation provides an adaptive optimization design methodology to allow the designer to explore the design space and obtain a globally optimal solution. One key element of our method is to quickly compute the set of all feasible solutions, also called the acceptability region. We described a polytope-based representation for the acceptability region and an adaptive linearization technique for device performance model approximation. These efficiency enhancements have enabled significant speed-up in estimating acceptability regions and allow acceptability regions to be estimated for a larger class of device design tasks. Our linearization technique also provides an efficient mechanism to guarantee the global accuracy of the computed acceptability region. To visualize the acceptability region, we study the orthogonal projection of high-dimensional convex polytopes and propose an output sensitive algorithm for …

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?

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.