9034586
An Agent for Intelligent Situation Assessment
Coordinating Search and Rescue (SAR) operations is a knowledge and information intensive task. Upon receiving an initial indication about a possible aircraft related problem, a Rescue Coordination Center (RCC) Controller sets out to find out more about the nature of the problem. This situation assessment phase is highly complex due to the diverse and sophisticated nature of the many information sources. In this paper, we present an intelligent agent architecture incorporating multiple, continual information planning agents for assisting the RCC controller in performing critical situation assessment tasks. The agents monitor the actions of the human controller and make their decisions on when and how to acquire more information to help the human controller, and to remind him of important steps that may have been overlooked. The system is designed based on several technologies, including hierarchical task networks, case based retrieval and intelligent agent systems.
13595177
Multiple-Goal Recognition from Low-Level Signals
Researchers and practitioners from both the artificial intelligence and pervasive computing communities have been paying increasing attention to the task of inferring users' high-level goals from low-level sensor readings. A common assumption made by most approaches is that a user either has a single goal in mind, or achieves several goals sequentially. However, in real-world environments, a user often has multiple goals that are concurrently carried out, and a single action can serve as a common step towards multiple goals. In this paper, we formulate the multiple-goal recognition problem and exemplify it in an indoor environment where an RF-based wireless network is available. We propose a goal-recognition algorithm based on a dynamic model set and show how goal models evolve over time based on pre-defined states. Experiments with real data demonstrate that our method can accurately and efficiently recognize multiple interleaving goals in a user's trace.
17216165
Cut-and-Pick Transactions for Proxy Log Mining
Web logs collected by proxy servers, referred to as proxy logs or proxy traces, contain information about Web document accesses by many users against many Web sites. This "many-to-many" characteristic poses a challenge to Web log mining techniques due to the difficulty in identifying individual access transactions. This is because in a proxy log, user transactions are not clearly bounded and are sometimes interleaved with each other as well as with noise. Most previous work has used simplistic measures such as a fixed time interval as a determination method for the transaction boundaries, and has not addressed the problem of interleaving and noisy transactions. In this paper, we show that this simplistic view can lead to poor performance in building models to predict future access patterns. We present a more advanced cut-and-pick method for determining the access transactions from proxy logs, by deciding on more reasonable transaction boundaries and by removing noisy accesses. Our method takes advantage of the user behavior that in most transactions, the same user typically visits multiple, related Web sites that form clusters. These clusters can be discovered by our algorithm based on the connectivity among Web sites. By using real-world proxy logs, we experimentally show that this cut-and-pick method can produce more accurate transactions that result in Web-access prediction models with higher accuracy.
9645876
Handling feature interactions in process-planning
Abstract The development of a successful approach to the integration of computer-aided design and computer-aided process-planning will require solutions to several fundamental problems in planning and geometric reasoning. In this article, we consider two such problems, both of which arise from interactions among machinable features. The first problem is that interactions can lead to several alternative interpretations of what the machinable features are. We address this problem by developing an algebra of features. The second problem is that interactions among features can cause problems in optimizing the process plans. For this problem, we have developed a branch-and-bound optimization algorithm with good heuristics to guide the search. This article presents the theory and mathematical framework for both problems and also the details of the implementation and experimental results.
5296157
A Novel Scalable Algorithm for Supervised Subspace Learning
Subspace learning approaches aim to discover important statistical distribution on lower dimensions for high dimensional data. Methods such as principal component analysis (PCA) do not make use of the class information, and linear discriminant analysis (LDA) could not be performed efficiently in a scalable way. In this paper, we propose a novel highly scalable supervised subspace learning algorithm called as supervised Kampong measure (SKM). It assigns data points as close as possible to their corresponding class mean, simultaneously assigns data points to be as far as possible from the other class means in the transformed lower dimensional subspace. Theoretical derivation shows that our algorithm is not limited by the number of classes or the singularity problem faced by LDA. Furthermore, our algorithm can be executed in an incremental manner in which learning is done in an online fashion as data streams are received. Experimental results on several datasets, including a very large text data set RCV1, show the outstanding performance of our proposed algorithm on classification problems as compared to PCA, LDA and a popular feature selection approach, information gain (IG).
32457716
Downward Refinement and the Efficiency of Hierarchical Problem Solving
Abstract Analysis and experiments have shown that hierarchical problem solving is most effective when the hierarchy satisfies the downward refinement property (DRP), whereby every abstract solution can be refined to a concrete-level solution without backtracking across abstraction levels. However, the DRP is a strong requirement that is not often met in practice. In this paper we examine the case when the DRP fails, and provide an analytical model of search complexity parameterized by the probability of an abstract solution being refinable. Our model provides a more accurate picture of the effectiveness of hierarchical problem solving. We then formalize the DRP in Abstrips -style hierarchies, providing a syntactic test that can be applied to determine if a hierarchy satisfies the DRP. Finally, we describe an algorithm called Highpoint that we have developed. This algorithm builds on the Alpine algorithm of Knoblock in that it automatically generates abstraction hierarchies. However, it uses the theoretical tools we have developed to generate hierarchies superior to those generated by Alpine . This superiority is demonstrated empirically. 2
854297
Performance of Cache Memories for Vector Computers
Abstract Recent studies [5] have shown that the memory system is the major bottleneck of vector computers. Performance measurements on CRAY-2 computers indicate that as much as a factor of 4.4 performance degradation results from memory latency. In this paper, we study the performance of incorporating cache memories into vector computers. Two cache organizations that we proposed [22] are considered: direct-mapped cache and prime-mapped cache. We analyze the caching behavior of three typical blocked algorithms for numerical applications: matrix multiplication, Gaussian elimination, and FFT. By analyzing the algorithm structures in conjunction with system architectures, we develop analytical models based on real applications rather than on statistical estimates. Our performance models give the expected value of execution time of an algorithm averaged over a wide range of problem sizes. Performance measurements of the algorithms on a real machine are carried out to validate our analysis. Numerical results show that the prime-mapped cache minimizes the cache miss ratio caused by line interferences that are critical for numerical applications.
20437986
Design and analysis of multiple-bus arbiters with different priority schemes
The authors present four multiple-user and multiple-server arbiter designs of multiple-bus multiprocessors. All designs are based on decentralized control, which has the advantage of good reliability and potentially high throughput. The priority protocols considered are fixed priority, rotating priority, round-robin priority, and equal priority. For the first two priority protocols, lookahead techniques are used to speed up the arbitration process. The round-robin protocol is based on the decentralized daisy-chain idea and is operated in an asynchronous fashion. Analytical models are developed for the four different priority protocols to evaluate the performance of the different designs. The analyses are based on a probabilistic model for the synchronous case and simple queuing analysis for the asynchronous system. Numerical results obtained from the proposed model show that the equal priority protocol performs better than the others in the system with a few buses. The performance difference is not significant when the number of buses is relatively large.<<ETX>>
8600912
Performance Evaluation of Distributed Web Server Architectures under E-Commerce Workloads
One of the central and key components to make the ECommerce a success is high performance and highly reliable web server architectures. Extensive research has been sparked aiming at improving web server performance. Fundamental to the goal of improving web server performance is a solid understanding of behavior and performance of web servers. However, very little research is found on evaluating web server performance based on realistic workload representing E-Commerce applications which are usually exemplified by a large amount of CGI (Common Gateway Interface), ASP (Active Server Page), or Servlet (Java Server-side interface) calls. This paper presents a performance study under the workload with a mixture of static web page requests, CGI requests, Servlet requests, and database queries. System throughputs and user response times are measured for five different server architectures consisting of PCs that run both a web server program and a database. We observed that performance behaviors of the web server architectures considered under this mixed workload are quite different from that under static page workload and sometimes counter-intuitive. Our performance results suggest that there is a large room for potential performance improvement for web servers.
13076928
Coverage Algorithm and Protocol in Heterogeneous Sensor Networks
One fundamental issue in wireless sensor networks is the coverage problem. In heterogeneous sensor networks composed of different types of sensors, the difference of the sensing radius of nodes augments the computation difficulty of coverage degree. In this paper, we analyze the features of heterogeneous sensor networks and discuss the approaches to guarantee and calculate the coverage degree of the region deployed by heterogeneous sensor networks. Based on our analysis, a Distributed Coverage Optimization Algorithm by which each node in the network can determine whether it should be turn active/inactive is proposed. Simulation shows that our algorithm can make the extraneous nodes inactive and minimize the number of nodes need to remain active.
36641724
A new and efficient FFT algorithm for distributed memory systems
This paper presents a new and optimal parallel implementation of multidimensional fast Fourier transform algorithm on distributed memory multiprocessors. Its optimality is obtained by minimizing the number of message passings necessary, at the cost of increase in message length. This distinctive feature of the new algorithm effectively utilizes the important architectural property of most of today's distributed memory multiprocessors-wormhole routing for interprocessor communications. By using the algebra of stride permutations and tenser products as a mathematical tool, we are able to derive and formulate an efficient data partition and communication scheme that reduces communication cost from O(N/sup 2/) required for the best known FFT to O(N) on an N/sup 2/-processor machine. Our data partition scheme is natural and efficient for solving discretized boundary value problems such as partial differential equations and finite element analysis. To evaluate the actual performance of our new algorithm in comparison with other existing parallel FFT algorithms, we have carried out implementation experiments on the Intel's Touchstone Delta machine.