6223153
Creating models of truss structures with optimization
We present a method for designing truss structures, a common and complex category of buildings, using non-linear optimization. Truss structures are ubiquitous in the industrialized world, appearing as bridges, towers, roof supports and building exoskeletons, yet are complex enough that modeling them by hand is time consuming and tedious. We represent trusses as a set of rigid bars connected by pin joints, which may change location during optimization. By including the location of the joints as well as the strength of individual beams in our design variables, we can simultaneously optimize the geometry and the mass of structures. We present the details of our technique together with examples illustrating its use, including comparisons with real structures.
62690966
Fast and Controllable Simulation of the Shattering of Brittle Objects
We present a method for the rapid and controllable simulation of the shattering of brittle objects under impact. An object is represented as a set of point masses connected by distance-preserving linear constraints. This use of constraints, rather than stiff springs, gains us a significant advantage in speed while still retaining fine control over the fracturing behavior. The forces exerted by these constraints during impact are computed using Lagrange multipliers. These constraint forces are then used to determine when and where the object will break, and to calculate the velocities of the newly created fragments. We present the details of our technique together with examples illustrating its use. 
 
An earlier version of this paper was presented at Graphics Interface 2000, held in Montreal, Canada.
7058627
Fast and Controllable Simulation of the Shattering of Brittle Objects
We present a method for the rapid and controllable simulation of the shattering of brittle objects under impact. An object to be broken is represented as a set of point masses connected by distance-preserving linear constraints. This use of constraints, rather than stiff springs, gains us a significant advantage in speed while still retaining fine control over the fracturing behavior. The forces exerted by these constraints during impact are computed using Lagrange multipliers. These constraint forces are then used to determine when and where the object will break, and to calculate the velocities of the newly created fragments. We present the details of our technique together with examples illustrating its use.
41462793
S-STIR: similarity search through iterative refinement
Similarity retrieval of images based on texture and color features has generated a lot of interests recently. Most of these similarity retrievals are based on the computation of the Euclidean distance between the target feature vector and the feature vectors in the database. Euclidean distance, however, does not necessarily reflect either relative similarity required by the user. In this paper, a method based on nonlinear multidimensional scaling is proposed to provide a mechanism for the user to dynamically adjust the similarity measure. The results show that a significant improvement on the precision versus recall curve has been achieved.
17816721
Triangle Guarding
We consider the problem of triangle guarding ( -guarding) a simple, 2D polygon Q. A polygon Q is -guarded if every point q of Q is contained in the convex hull of some three guards that can all see q. This rather odd condition approximates a desire, for example, to see all sides of q or to locate (via triangulation) q from at least two angularly well-separated views. If we restrict the guards to lie in Q and Q has a transparent boundary then the vertices of the convex hull of Q (CH (Q)) form the minimum set of -guards. We examine two other variations of the problem. In the first, the guards may be placed within a transparent border surrounding Q. For this variation, we describe a polynomial time algorithm, related to the classic algorithm for finding min-link separators, that finds a minimum set of -guards. In the second, we consider the case where Q’s boundary is opaque and show that, as in the traditional art gallery problem, finding a minimum set of vertex -guards is NP-hard. Transparent Fences Given simple polygons P and Q with Q contained in P , where |Q|+ |P | = n, what is the minimum number and placement of guards in P needed to -guard Q, assuming that both Q and P have transparent boundaries? Our algorithm for this problem is inspired by an algorithm for finding min-link separators between two convex polygons, one contained in the other [1]. The following basic lemmas motivate using this approach. Define legal regions to be regions of the outer polygon P , that are not contained in the interior of CH (Q) (Figure 1).
9694445
The architecture and implementation of a distributed hypermedia storage system
Our project is studying the process by which groups of individuals work together to build large, complex structures of ideas and is developing a distributed hypermedia collaboration environment (called ABC) to support that process. This paper focuses on the architecture and implementation of the Distributed Graph Storage (DGS) component of ABC. The DGS supports a graph-based data model, conservatively extended to meet hypermedia requirements. Some important issues addressed in the system include scale, performance, concurrency semantics, access protection, location independence, and replication (for fault tolerance).
18578929
Joint adaptive space and frequency basis selection
We develop a new method for building a representation of an image from a library of basis elements that is facilitated by a joint adaptive space and frequency (JASF) graph. The JASF graph combines partitionable frequency expansion and spatial segmentation of the image, symmetrically. We demonstrate by using a rate-distortion framework for basis selection that the JASF graph improves compression performance over recent wavelet packet and double-tree methods by offering exponentially more bases in which to represent the images.
37291538
The Ensembl genome database project
The Ensembl (http://www.ensembl.org/) database project provides a bioinformatics framework to organise biology around the sequences of large genomes. It is a comprehensive source of stable automatic annotation of the human genome sequence, with confirmed gene predictions that have been integrated with external data sources, and is available as either an interactive web site or as flat files. It is also an open source software engineering project to develop a portable system able to handle very large genomes and associated requirements from sequence analysis to data storage and visualisation. The Ensembl site is one of the leading sources of human genome sequence annotation and provided much of the analysis for publication by the international human genome project of the draft genome. The Ensembl system is being installed around the world in both companies and academic sites on machines ranging from supercomputers to laptops.