8622581
BrickRoad: a light-weight tool for spontaneous design of location-enhanced applications
It is difficult to design and test location-enhancedapplications. A large part of this difficulty is due to the added complexity of supporting location. Wizard of Oz (WOz) has become an effective technique for the early stage design of location-enhanced applications because it allows designers to test an application prototype bysimulating nonexistent components such as location sensing. However, existing WOz tools 1) require nontrivial effort from designers to specify how a prototype should behave before it can be tested with end users, and 2)support only limited control over application behavior during a test. BrickRoad is a WOz tool for spontaneousdesign of location-enhanced applications. It lowers the threshold to acquiring user feedback and exploring a design space. With BrickRoad, a designer does not need to specify any interaction logic and can experiment on-the-fly with different designs during testing. BrickRoad is a valuable complement to existing tool support for the early stage design of location-enhanced applications.
44498059
Penbuilder: Platform for the Development of Pen-Based User Interface
Pen-based user interfaces is widely used in mobile computing environment, which provides natural, efficient interaction. It has substantial differences from any previous interface and it is difficult to be implemented. A well-designed platform will improve the development of pen-based user interface. In this paper, the architecture of Pen-Book-Page-Paper is presented, which is extended from the metaphor of Pen-Paper. Penbuilder is a development platform based on this architecture. Pen-based user interface can be constructed from three layers of Penbuilder: modal-primitive layer, task-primitive layer and task layer. Each layer provides different extent supports for flexibility and reusability. The components of the platform are discussed in detail and some properties of the platform are argued. Penbuilder is also compliant for the development of distributed user interface. In the section of discussion, we analyze the platform through task tree. The platform provides full supports for extensibility and new interactive devices can be easily added.
17836895
Binomial-Tree Fault Tolerant Routing in Dual-Cubes with Large Number of Faulty Nodes
A dual-cube DC(m) has m + 1 links per node where m is the degree of a cluster (m-cube), and one extra link is used for connection between clusters. The dual-cube mitigates the problem of increasing number of links in the large-scale hypercube network while keeps most of the topological properties of the hypercube network. In this paper, we propose efficient algorithms for finding a nonfaulty routing path between any two nonfaulty nodes in the dual-cube with a large number of faulty nodes. A node v ∈ DC(m) is called k-safe if v has at least k nonfaulty neighbors. The DC(m) is called k-safe if every node in DC(m) is k-safe. The first algorithm presented in this paper is an off-line algorithm that uses global information of faulty status. It finds a nonfaulty path of length at most d(s,t) + O(k2) in O(|F| + m) time for any two nonfaulty nodes s and t in the k-safe DC(m) with number of faulty nodes |F| < 2k(m + 1 – k), where 0≤ k ≤ m/2. The second algorithm is an online algorithm that uses local information only. It can find a fault-free path with high probability in an arbitrarily faulty dual-cube with unbounded number of faulty nodes.
6980198
A combined approach to checking web ontologies
The understanding of Semantic Web documents is built upon ontologies that define concepts and relationships of data. Hence, the correctness of ontologies is vital. Ontology reasoners such as RACER and FaCT have been developed to reason ontologies with a high degree of automation. However, complex ontology-related properties may not be expressible within the current web ontology languages, consequently they may not be checkable by RACER and FaCT. We propose to use the software engineering techniques and tools, i.e., Z/EVES and Alloy Analyzer, to complement the ontology tools for checking Semantic Web documents.In this approach, Z/EVES is first applied to remove trivial syntax and type errors of the ontologies. Next, RACER is used to identify any ontological inconsistencies, whose origins can be traced by Alloy Analyzer. Finally Z/EVES is used again to express complex ontology-related properties and reveal errors beyond the modeling capabilities of the current web ontology languages. We have successfully applied this approach to checking a set of military plan ontologies.
29006676
A Remote Resource Monitoring Approach in Active Networks
Monitoring the resource status in active network nodes is important both for the network administrator to maintain and deploy active networks and for the normal end-users to acquire better performance. Hence, a method that can monitor the resource status at a remote node is needed. Moreover, due to the complexity of the resource usage in active networks, the corresponding method should be able to monitor the status of various resources at remote node dynamically and in a user-specified way. This paper presents the design and implementation of such a resource monitoring method. The method adopts the active application technique to obtain the desired resource status information at a remote network node and transfer them back to the user in the user-specified way. It also allows the user to control the content, the procedure and the precise of the monitoring.
14562465
Bioinformatics on Embedded Systems: A Case Study of Computational Biology Applications on VLIW Architecture
Bioinformatics applications represent the increasingly important workloads. Their characteristics and implications on the underlying hardware design, however, are largely unknown. Currently, biological data processing ubiquitously relies on the high-end systems equipped with expensive, general-purpose processors. The future generation of bioinformatics requires the more flexible and cost-effective computing platforms to meet its rapidly growing market. The programmable, application-specific embedded systems appear to be an attractive solution in terms of easy of programming, design cost, power, portability and time-to-market. The first step towards such systems is to characterize bioinformatics applications on the target architecture. Such studies can help in understanding the design issues and the trade-offs in specializing hardware and software systems to meet the needs of bioinformatics market. This paper evaluates several representative bioinformatics tools on the VLIW based embedded systems. We investigate the basic characteristics of the benchmarks, impact of function units, the efficiency of VLIW execution, cache behavior and the impact of compiler optimizations. The architectural implications observed from this study can be applied to the design optimizations. To the best of our knowledge, this is one of the first such studies that have ever been attempted.
7190108
NaLIX: an interactive natural language interface for querying XML
Database query languages can be intimidating to the non-expert, leading to the immense recent popularity for keyword based search in spite of its significant limitations. The holy grail has been the development of a natural language query interface. We present NaLIX, a generic interactive natural language query interface to an XML database. Our system can accept an arbitrary English language sentence as query input, which can include aggregation, nesting, and value joins, among other things. This query is translated, potentially after reformulation, into an XQuery expression that can be evaluated against an XML database. The translation is done through mapping grammatical proximity of natural language parsed tokens to proximity of corresponding elements in the result XML. In this demonstration, we show that NaLIX, while far from being able to pass the Turing test, is perfectly usable in practice, and able to handle even quite complex queries in a variety of application domains. In addition, we also demonstrate how carefully designed features in NaLIX facilitate the interactive query process and improve the usability of the interface.