We extend the Jinni mobile agent architecture with a multicast network transport layer, an agent-to-agent delegation mechanism and a reflection based Prolog-to-Java interface. To ensure that our agent infrastructure runs efficiently, independently of router-level multicast support, we describe a blackboard based algorithm for locating a randomly roaming agent. As part of the agent-to-agent delegation mechanism, we describe an alternative to code-fetching mechanism for stronger mobility of mobile agents with less network overhead. In the context of direct and reflection based extension mechanisms for Jinni, we describe the design and the implementation of a reflection based Prolog-to-Java interface. The presence of subtyping and method overloading makes finding the most specific method corresponding to a Prolog call pattern fairly difficult. We describe a run-time algorithm which provides accurate handling of overloaded methods beyond Java's reflection package's limitations.

Modern communication systems rely heavily upon microwave, radio, and other electromagnetic frequency bands as a means of providing wireless communication links. Although convenient, wireless communication is susceptible to electromagnetic interference. Solar activity causes both direct interference through electromagnetic radiation as well as indirect interference caused by charged particles interacting with Earth's magnetic field. The Solar Radio Burst Locator (SRBL) is a United States Air Force radio telescope designed to detect and locate solar microwave bursts as they occur on the Sun. By analyzing these events, the Air Force hopes to gain a better understanding of the root causes of solar interference and improve interference forecasts. This thesis presents methods of searching and analyzing events found in the previously unstudied SRBL data archive. A new web-based application aids in the searching and visualization of the data. Comparative analysis is performed amongst data collected by SRBL and several other instruments. This thesis also analyzes events across the time, intensity, and frequency domains. These analysis methods can be used to aid in the detection and understanding of solar events so as to provide improved forecasts of solar-induced electromagnetic interference.

As bandwidth constraints on LAN/WAN environments decrease, the demand for distributed services will continue to increase. In particular, the proliferation of user-level applications requiring high-capacity distributed file storage systems will demand that such services be universally available. At the same time, the advent of high-speed networks have made the deployment of application and communication solutions based upon an Intelligent Mobile Agent (IMA) framework practical. Agents have proven to present an ideal development paradigm for the creation of autonomous large-scale distributed systems, and an agent-based communication scheme would facilitate the creation of independently administered distributed file services. This thesis thus outlines an architecture for such a distributed file system based upon an IMA communication framework.

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.

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.

The C Navigational System (CNS) is a proposed programming environment for the C programming language. The introduction covers the major influences of programming environments and the components of a programming environment. The system is designed to support the design, coding and maintenance phases of software development. CNS provides multiple views to both the source and documentation for a programming project. User-defined and system-defined links allow the source and documentation to be hierarchically searched. CNS also creates a history list and function interface for each function in a module. The final chapter compares CNS and several other programming environments (Microscope, Rn, Cedar, PECAN, and Marvel).

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 research is the result of an effort to provide real-time machine recognition of hand-send Morse code through the use of the M6800 microcomputer. While the capability to recognize hand-send Morse code messages by machine has been demonstrated before on large scale special purpose computers, on minicomputers, and even on the M6800 microcomputer, the main contribution of this paper is to demonstrate it with relatively understandable hardware and software.

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.

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.

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 subject of this investigation is a specific set of parsers known as LR parsers. Of primary interest is a LR parsing method developed by DeRemer which specifies a translation method which can be defined by a Deterministic Push-Down Automation (DPDA). The method of investigation was to apply DeRemer's parsing technique to a specific language known as THIS Programming Language (TPL). The syntax of TPL was redefined as state diagrams and these state diagrams were, in turn, encoded into two tables--a State-Action table and a Transition table. The tables were then incorporated into a PL/l adaptation of DeRemer's algorithm and tested against various TPL statements.

Syntactic parsing is one of the best understood language processing applications. Since language and grammar have been formally defined, it is easy for computers to parse the syntactic structure of natural language text. Does meaning have structure as well? If it has, how can we analyze the structure? Previous systems rely on a one-to-one correspondence between syntactic rules and semantic rules. But such systems can only be applied to limited fragments of English. In this thesis, we propose a general-purpose shallow semantic parser which utilizes a semantic network (WordNet), and a frame dataset (FrameNet). Semantic relations recognized by the parser are based on how human beings represent knowledge of the world. Parsing semantic structure allows semantic units and constituents to be accessed and processed in a more meaningful way than syntactic parsing, moving the automation of understanding natural language text to a higher level.

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 …

In order to provide improved service quality to applications, networks need to address the need for reliability of data delivery. Reliability can be improved by incorporating fault tolerance into network routing, wherein a set of multiple routes are used for routing between a given source and destination. This thesis proposes a new fault-tolerant protocol, called the Multipath Fault Tolerant Protocol for Routing (MFTPR), to improve the reliability of network routing services. The protocol is based on a multipath discovery algorithm, the Quasi-Shortest Multipath (QSMP), and is designed to work in conjunction with the routing protocol employed by the network. MFTPR improves upon the QSMP algorithm by finding more routes than QSMP, and also provides for maintenance of these routes in the event of failure of network components. In order to evaluate the resilience of a pair of paths to failure, this thesis proposes metrics that evaluate the non-disjointness of a pair of paths and measure the probability of simultaneous failure of these paths. The performance of MFTPR to find alternate routes based on these metrics is analyzed through simulation.

Data distribution management (DDM) is a High Level Architecture/Run-time Infrastructure (HLA/RTI) service that manages the distribution of state updates and interaction information in large-scale distributed simulations. The key to efficient DDM is to limit and control the volume of data exchanged during the simulation, to relay data to only those hosts requiring the data. This thesis focuses upon different DDM implementations and strategies. This thesis includes analysis of three DDM methods including the fixed grid-based, dynamic grid-based, and region-based methods. Also included is the use of multi-resolution modeling with various DDM strategies and analysis of the performance effects of aggregation/disaggregation with these strategies. Running numerous federation executions, I simulate four different scenarios on a cluster of workstations with a mini-RTI Kit framework and propose a set of benchmarks for a comparison of the DDM schemes. The goals of this work are to determine the most efficient model for applying each DDM scheme, discover the limitations of the scalability of the various DDM methods, evaluate the effects of aggregation/disaggregation on performance and resource usage, and present accepted benchmarks for use in future research.

An overwhelming number of models in the literature use average inter-cell interference for the calculation of capacity of a Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) network. The advantage gained in terms of simplicity by using such models comes at the cost of rendering the exact location of a user within a cell irrelevant. We calculate the actual per-user interference and analyze the effect of user-distribution within a cell on the capacity of a CDMA network. We show that even though the capacity obtained using average interference is a good approximation to the capacity calculated using actual interference for a uniform user distribution, the deviation can be tremendously large for non-uniform user distributions. Call admission control (CAC) algorithms are responsible for efficient management of a network's resources while guaranteeing the quality of service and grade of service, i.e., accepting the maximum number of calls without affecting the quality of service of calls already present in the network. We design and implement global and local CAC algorithms, and through simulations compare their network throughput and blocking probabilities for varying mobility scenarios. We show that even though our global CAC is better at resource management, the lack of substantial gain in network throughput and …

Many human papilloma virus (HPV) types are sexually transmitted and HPV DNA types 16, 18, 31, and 45 account for more than 75% if all cervical dysplasia. Candidate vaccines are successfully completing US Federal Drug Agency (FDA) phase III testing and several drug companies are in licensing arbitration. Once this vaccine become available it is unlikely that 100% vaccination coverage will be probable; hence, the need for vaccination strategies that will have the greatest reduction on the endemic prevalence of HPV. This thesis introduces two discrete-time models for evaluating the effect of demographic-biased vaccination strategies: one model incorporates temporal demographics (i.e., age) in population compartments; the other non-temporal demographics (i.e., race, ethnicity). Also presented is an intuitive Web-based interface that was developed to allow the user to evaluate the effects on prevalence of a demographic-biased intervention by tailoring the model parameters to specific demographics and geographical region.

The problem of programming a parallel processor is discussed. Previous methods of programming a parallel processor, analyzing a program for parallel paths, and special language features are discussed. Graph theory is used to define the three basic programming constructs: choice, sequence, repetition. The concept of mechanized programming is expanded to allow for total separation of control and computational sections of a program. A definition of a language is presented which provides for this separation. A method for developing the program graph is discussed. The control graph and data graph are developed separately. The two graphs illustrate control and data predecessor relationships used in determining parallel elements of a program.

Computer systems which interact with human users to collect, update or provide information are growing more complex. Additionally, users are demanding more thorough testing of all computer systems. Because of the complexity and thoroughness required, automation of interactive systems testing is desirable, especially for functional testing. Many currently available testing tools, like program proving, are impractical for testing large systems. The solution presented here is the development of an automated test system which simulates human users. This system incorporates a high-level programming language, ATLIS. ATLIS programs are compiled and interpretively executed. Programs are selected for execution by operator command, and failures are reported to the operator's console. An audit trail of all activity is provided. This solution provides improved efficiency and effectiveness over conventional testing methods.

This paper reviews numerous theoretical results on control structures and demonstrates their practical examples. This study deals with the design of run-time support routines by using top-down structured programming technique. A number of examples are given as illustration of this method. In conclusion, structured programming has proved to be an important methodology for systematic program design and development.

This research explores the concepts of defensive programming as currently defined in the literature. Then these concepts are extended and more explicitly defined. The relationship between defensive programming, as presented in this research, and current programming practices is discussed and several benefits are observed. Defensive programming appears to benefit the entire software life cycle. Four identifiable phases of the software development process are defined, and the relationship between these four phases and defensive programming is shown. In this research, defensive programming is defined as writing programs in such a way that during execution the program itself produces communication allowing the programmer and the user to observe its dynamic states accurately and critically. To accomplish this end, the use of defensive programming snap shots is presented as a software development tool.

The Internet became a standard way of exchanging business data between B2B and B2C applications and with this came the need for providing various services on the web instead of just static text and images. Web services are a new type of services offered via the web that aid in the creation of globally distributed applications. Web services are enhanced e-business applications that are easier to advertise and easier to discover on the Internet because of their flexibility and uniformity. In a real life scenario it is highly difficult to decide which J2EE application server to go for when deploying a enterprise web service. This thesis analyzes the various ways by which web services can be developed & deployed. Underlying protocols and crucial issues like EAI (enterprise application integration), asynchronous messaging, Registry tModel architecture etc have been considered in this research. This paper presents a report by analyzing what various J2EE application servers provide by doing a case study and by developing applications to test functionality.

I experimented with Hopfield networks in the context of a voice-based, query-answering system. Hopfield networks are used to store and retrieve patterns. I used this technique to store queries represented as natural language sentences and I evaluated the accuracy of the technique for error correction in a spoken question-answering dialog between a computer and a user. I show that the use of an auto-associative Hopfield network helps make the speech recognition system more fault tolerant. I also looked at the available encoding schemes to convert a natural language sentence into a pattern of zeroes and ones that can be stored in the Hopfield network reliably, and I suggest scalable data representations which allow storing a large number of queries.