28061461
An entity-relationship approach to schema evolution
A dynamically evolving information system supports changes to its database schema in order to facilitate the needs of new application programs. This paper presents an approach to schema evolution through changes to the entity-relationship schema of a database. This approach has the advantage of being closer to the designer's perception of data, rather than to the logical database schema which describes how data are stored in the database. The underlying database structure is re-organized, if necessary, to accommodate new data without the changes affecting existing objects. In this way and through the construction of views, modifications of existing programs are avoided while all objects in the database are accessible to all application programs, both new and old. Thus, the invariance of the programs' interface is preserved by the views.<<ETX>>
39945679
Iconic Language Design for People with Significant Speech and Multiple Impairments
34016873
Parsing 2D Languages by a Pictorial GLR Parser
35519508
Extending Visual Languages for Multimedia
Visual languages, which let users customize iconic sentences, can be extended to accommodate multimedia objects, letting users access media dynamically. Teleaction objects, or multimedia objects with knowledge structures, can be designed using visual languages to automatically respond to events and perform tasks like "find related books" in a virtual library.
15816324
Multi-level specification and protocol design for distributed multimedia communication
The major challenge in the design of an efficient distributed multimedia system is the integration and support of a wide variety of applications. Investigating the basic issues involved in the design and specification of distributed muttimcdia systems is the focus of this paper. A basic layered network architecture is proposed as the uniform framework for the investigation of different levels of functionality typically associated with the communication network that supports multimedia communication. Within this framework, we propose to identify the communication requirements for multimedia applications and characterize a set of communication primitives which specify different qualities of scrvicc to reflect different real-time rcquircmcnts. ‘Ilis investigation is guided by an efficient and flexible multi-level specification model. We will characterize this model and show that the model can be amenable to the construction of a set of communication primitives that support synchronization and communication of multimedia applications.
17298481
Iconic language design for people with significant speech and multiple impairments
We present an approach of iconic language design for people with significant speech and multiple impairments (SSMI), based upon the theory of Icon Algebra and the theory of Conceptual Dependency (CD) to derive the meaning of iconic sentences. An interactive design environment based upon this methodology is described.
18938523
A two-dimensional vector packing model for the efficient use of coil cassettes
We consider the problem of efficiently packing steel products, known as coils, into special containers, called cassettes for shipping. The objective is to minimize the number of cassettes used for packing all the given coils where each cassette has capacity limits on both total payload weight and size. We model this problem as a two-dimensional vector packing problem and propose a heuristic. We also analyze the worst-case performance of the proposed algorithm under a special condition which, in fact, holds for the particular real-world case that we handled. Our computational experiment with real production data shows that the proposed algorithm performs quite satisfactorily in practice.
7920215
The design of a secure and pervasive multimodal Web system
While most users currently receive Web services from Web browser interfaces, pervasive computing is emerging and offering new ways of accessing Internet applications from any device at any location (Satyanarayanan, 2002; Estrin et al., 2002), by utilizing various modes of interfaces to interact with their end users. The PC and its back-end servers remain important in a pervasive system, and the technology could involve new ways of interfacing with a PC and/or various types of gateways to back-end servers. In this research, cellular phone was used as the pervasive device for accessing an Internet application prototype, a multimodal Web system (MWS), through voice user interface technology (Anerousis and Panagos, 2002). This paper describes how MWS was designed to provide a secure interactive voice channel using an Apache Web server, a voice server, and a Java servlet engine. It was also shown that multimodal user-interface pages can be generated by using XSLT stylesheet which transforms XML documents into various formats including XHTML, WML, and VoiceXML.
44477744
Efficient selection of scheduling rule combination by combining design of experiment and ordinal optimization-based simulation
In a fab with heterogeneous machine groups, the number of scheduling policies grows in a combinatorial way because each machine group has its specific dispatching rules. In this paper, we design a fast simulation methodology by an innovative combination of the notions of ordinal optimization (OO) and design of experiments (DOE) to efficiently select a good scheduling policy for fab operation, Instead of finding the exact performance among scheduling policies, our approach compares their relative orders of performance to a specified level of confidence. The DOE method is exploited to largely reduce the number of scheduling policies to be evaluated by the OO-based simulation. Simulation results of applications to scheduling wafer fabrications show that most of the OO-based DOE simulations require 2 to 3 orders of magnitude less computation time than those of traditional approach, and the speedup is up to 7,000 times in certain cases.
20494586
The implementation of a secure and pervasive multimodal Web system architecture
While most users currently access Web applications from Web browser interfaces, pervasive computing is emerging and offering new ways of accessing Internet applications from any device at any location, by utilizing various modes of interfaces to interact with their end users. The PC and its back-end servers remain important in a pervasive system, and the technology could involve new ways of interfacing with a PC and/or various types of gateways to back-end servers. In this research, cellular phone was used as the pervasive device for accessing an Internet application prototype, a multimodal Web system (MWS), through voice user interface technology. This paper describes how MWS was developed to provide a secure interactive voice channel using an Apache Web server, a voice server, and Java technology. Securing multimodal applications proves more challenging than securing traditional Internet applications. Various standards have been developed within a context of Java 2 Micro Edition (J2ME) platform to secure multimodal and wireless applications. In addition to covering these standards and their applicability to the MWS system implementation, this paper also shows that multimodal user-interface page can be generated by using XSLT stylesheet which transforms XML documents into various formats including XHTML, WML, and VoiceXML.
44449006
Online and semi-online scheduling of two machines under a grade of service provision
We consider the online scheduling of two machines under a grade of service (GoS) provision and its semi-online variant where the total processing time is known. Respectively for the online and semi-online problems, we develop algorithms with competitive ratios of 53 and 32 which are shown to be optimal.