10932878
Thread Transparency in Information Flow Middleware
Applications that process continuous information flows are challenging to write because the application programmer must deal with flow-specific concurrency and timing requirements, necessitating the explicit management of threads, synchronization, scheduling and timing. We believe that middleware can ease this burden, but middleware that supports control-flow centric interaction models such as remote method invocation does not match the structure of these applications. Indeed, it abstracts away from the very things that the information-flow centric programmer must control
2348760
Adaptive live video streaming by priority drop
In this paper we explore the use of priority progress streaming (PPS) for video surveillance applications. PPS is an adaptive streaming technique for the delivery of continuous media over variable bit-rate channels. It is based on the simple idea of reordering media components within a time window into priority order before transmission. The main concern when using PPS for live video streaming is the time delay introduced by reordering. In this paper we describe how PPS can be extended to support live streaming and show that the delay inherent in the approach can be tuned to satisfy a wide range of latency constraints while supporting fine-grain adaptation.
10826012
Agent-based workflow management in collaborative product development on the Internet
Product development is collaborative, involving multi-disciplinary functions and heterogeneous tools. Teamwork is essential through seamless tool integration and better co-ordination of human activities. This paper proposes to use workflow management as a mechanism to facilitate the teamwork in a collaborative product development environment where remote Web-based Decision Support Systems (TeleDSS) are extensively used by team members who are geographically distributed. The workflow of a project is modelled as a network. Its nodes correspond to the work (packages), and its edges to flows of control and data. The concept of agents is introduced to define nodes and the concept of messages to define edges. As a sandwich layer, agents act as special-purpose application clients for the remote TeleDSS application servers. Agents are delegated to manipulate the corresponding TeleDSS on behalf of their human users. Details of the proceedings are recorded by agents as their properties for future references or shared uses by other team members. Through flow messages, agents are able to share input and output data and request for remote services. One of the major contributions is that agents, once defined, can be reused for different projects without any changes.
12118210
Reconciling Agent Ontologies for Web Service Applications
Because there is still no agreed-upon global ontology, Web services supplied by different providers typically have individual and unique semantics, described by independently developed ontologies. The seamless connection of these distributed Web services for business-to-business applications depends heavily on reconciling the disparate semantics, possibly by integrating the ontologies. In this paper, we describe an approach to reconcile ontologies from distributed Web services. Our approach is totally automated, and features the following: i) alignment of the ontologies is performed without previous agreement on the semantics of the terminology in each ontology; ii) both linguistic and contextual features are considered; iii) the use of WordNet for linguistic analysis; iv) integration of heuristic knowledge for contextual analysis; and v) inference of new relationships by applying several rules based on domain-independent relationships and property lists. Experiments have been carried out to show the promising results of our system.
14811510
Specification back-propagation and its application to DC fault simulation for analog/mixed-signal circuits
In this paper we present the specification backpropagation technique which enables one to derive the constraint of an internal functional block with respect to a given DC specification for an analog/mixed-signal system. Based on this technique, we implement an efficient fault simulator which reduces the required efforts by (1) removing undetectable faults from the fault list, and (2) performing fault simulation only locally for the fault block. Simulation results on an industrial design show a speedup factor of 7.2 with 98% correct classification of detected and undetected faults as compared with full-chip DC fault simulation.
3242205
OmniSeer: A Cognitive Framework for User Modeling, Reuse of Prior and Tacit Knowledge, and Collaborative Knowledge Services
This paper describes the current state of the OmniSeer system. OmniSeer supports intelligence analysts in the handling of massive amounts of data, the construction of scenarios, and the management of hypotheses. OmniSeer models analysts with dynamic user models that capture an analyst's context, interests, and preferences, thus enabling more efficient and effective information retrieval. OmniSeer explicitly represents the prior and tacit knowledge of analysts, thus enabling transfer and reuse of such knowledge. Both the user and cognitive models employ a Bayesian network fragment representation, which supports principled probabilistic reasoning and analysis. An independent evaluation of OmniSeer was carried out at NIST and will be used to guide further development.
9961789
Interactively visualizing procedurally encoded scalar fields
While interactive visualization of rectilinear gridded volume data sets can now be accomplished using texture mapping hardware on commodity PCs, interactive rendering and exploration of large scattered or unstructured data sets is still a challenging problem. We have developed a new approach that allows the interactive rendering and navigation of procedurally-encoded 3D scalar fields by reconstructing these fields on PC class graphics processing units. Since the radial basis functions (RBFs) we use for encoding can provide a compact representation of volumetric scalar fields, the large grid/mesh traditionally needed for rendering is no longer required and ceases to be a data transfer and computational bottleneck during rendering. Our new approach will interactively render RBF encoded data obtained from arbitrary volume data sets, including both structured volume models and unstructured scattered volume models. This procedural reconstruction of large data sets is flexible, extensible, and can take advantage of the Moore's Law cubed increase in performance of graphics hardware.