30291393
Formalization of computer supported cooperative work applications
From its first appearance in 1984, Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) has attracted a lot of research attention in distributed systems. Over the past decade, the CSCW community has developed a number of experimental systems and commercial products to support collaboration. However, much of the reported work is highly application-specific. There generally lacks a sound infrastructure to support the development of a wide variety of CSCW applications. It is essential to formalize the collaboration concepts, model the cooperative and communicative activities, erect CSCW-oriented architectures, and construct a flexible and extendable development environment for building CSCW applications.
8941164
Supporting agent-based distributed software development through modeling and simulation
In today's software engineering environment, it is becoming increasingly commonplace for team members and stakeholders to be distributed in multiple locations and time zones. Under these circumstances, the coordination of software development activities becomes increasingly more complex. One solution uses mobile agent-based tools to support collaborative software engineering tasks, such as requirements management. Despite the fact that development and validation of such tools would be facilitated by the use of modeling and simulation, very little work relating formal methods to agent-based system development has been performed. This paper therefore presents a hierarchical colored Petri Net (CPN) model as a formal framework for agent-based distributed software development, and demonstrates its usefulness by applying the framework to the development of a requirements management system.
1871945
Specifications in software prototyping
Abstract We explore the use of software specifications for software prototyping. This paper describes a process model for software prototyping, and shows how specifications can be used to support such a process via a cellular mobile phone switch example.
18643244
An Empirical Performance Study on PSIM
It is well known that errors caught in the early stages of system development life cycle greatly helped reduce the expense for later error fixing and mitigate risks and complications. Performance analysis is one of the methods to ensure satisfactory system performance that can avoid redesign and patch in the later stage of system development when performance problems emerge. Much work has been done to address such concerns collectively known as the 'performance engineering' problem. However, a comprehensive method is still needed to provide an end-to-end support for performance evaluation on software architecture design. Automated tools to support the method must be developed, and its validation must be carefully planned and conducted. In response to this need, we propose our approach, PSIM (performance simulation and modeling). PSIM is a performance simulation and modeling tool that integrated performance properties into software architecture specifications expressed in several major UML diagrams. PSIM models can be transformed into Colored GSPN (colored generalized stochastic Petri nets) via an automated tool. As a result, the Colored GSPN models can be simulated to perform model-based performance evaluation. In this paper PSIM is first briefly reviewed and illustrated through modeling a web-based electronic conferencing system, called M-Net, to derive performance metrics. We then conduct runtime performance testing to the implementation of M-Net and compare the simulation results against the runtime testing data. PSIM is shown to be effective in predicting system performance and in identifying system performance bottlenecks through this experimentation.
10317156
A research on Collaboration Net
We present research on computer-supported cooperative work by introducing an approach to the multimedia based net-centric conference environment-Collaboration Net. Some basic definitions of the distributed Web-based meeting are provided, and the properties of this kind of collaboration are given. We explain problems associated with the well-known yet old-fashioned parliamentary procedure, Robert's Rules of Order, which must be formally modeled and adapted to the modern net-centric virtual conference where time synchronism is hard to enforce. A prototype of our Web-browser based approach to developing the Collaboration Net is also briefly presented. Finally, research challenges in this area are highlighted.
15614662
Towards increasing web application productivity
In this paper we present and discuss a template/meta-data based partial code generation system supporting web application development. Seamlessly incorporating the recent top-notch technologies, the framework maximally exploits the capabilities of the underlying implementation technologies. Our approach primarily benefits the framework and code developers. In addition, the complete separation of data model, navigation model, and presentation model reflects on a more general conceptual process that would decouple the technique and methodology from its underlying technology choices. The decoupling between the generated code and the code that is necessarily added later on through other development pathways than the generator deals with the incremental changes and adaptations of the models in the face of an operational system, therefore further enhances the extensibility, maintainability, and reusability of the generated applications.
16066042
Level-of-detail representation of bidirectional texture functions for real-time rendering
This paper presents a new technique for rendering bidirectional texture functions (BTFs) at different levels of detail (LODs). Our method first decomposes each BTF image into multiple subbands with a Laplacian pyramid. Each vector of Laplacian coefficients of a texel at the same level is regarded as a Laplacian bidirectional reflectance distribution function (BRDF). These vectors are then further compressed by applying principal components analysis (PCA). At the rendering stage, the LOD parameter for each pixel is calculated according to the distance from the viewpoint to the surface. Our rendering algorithm uses this parameter to determine how many levels of BTF Laplacian pyramid are required for rendering. Under the same sampling resolution, a BTF gradually transits to a BRDF as the camera moves away from the surface. Our method precomputes this transition and uses it for multiresolution BTF rendering. Our Laplacian pyramid representation allows real-time anti-aliased rendering of BTFs using graphics hardware. In addition to provide visually satisfactory multiresolution rendering for BTFs, our method has a comparable compression rate to the available single-resolution BTF compression techniques.
553852
Creating a distributed environment using object oriented technology
The paper gives a detailed description of the development of a distributed environment. A brief description of an object oriented technology used in the development of the environment is also presented. The environment described is suitable for rapid prototyping of distributed applications and complete development of distributed software systems. This environment was used in the development of client/server applications and the simulation of a cellular system. The cellular system featured Call-Handoff Cell-spitting and the dynamic allocation of cellular phones in the system.
8773045
Characterizing and Exploiting Reference Locality in Data Stream Applications
In this paper, we investigate a new approach to process queries in data stream applications. We show that reference locality characteristics of data streams could be exploited in the design of superior and flexible data stream query processing techniques. We identify two different causes of reference locality: popularity over long time scales and temporal correlations over shorter time scales. An elegant mathematical model is shown to precisely quantify the degree of those sources of locality. Furthermore, we analyze the impact of locality-awareness on achievable performance gains over traditional algorithms on applications such asMAX-subset approximate sliding window join and approximate count estimation. In a comprehensive experimental study, we compare several existing algorithms against our locality-aware algorithms over a number of real datasets. The results validate the usefulness and efficiency of our approach.
11608556
MORF: A Distributed Multimodal Information Filtering System
The proliferation of objectionable information on the Internet has reached a level of serious concern. To empower end-users with the choice of blocking undesirable and offensive Web-sites, we propose a multimodal personalized information filter, named MORF. The design of MORF aims to meet three major performance goals: efficiency, accuracy, and personalization. To achieve these design goals, we have devised a multimodality classification algorithm and a personalization algorithm. Empirical study and initial statistics collected from the MORF filters deployed at sites in the U.S. and Asia show that MORF is both efficient and effective, compared to the traditional URL- and text-based filtering approaches.
1786671
Light field compression using disparity-compensated lifting and shape adaptation
We propose disparity-compensated lifting for wavelet compression of light fields. With this approach, we obtain the benefits of wavelet coding, such as scalability in all dimensions, as well as superior compression performance. Additionally, the proposed approach solves the irreversibility limitations of previous light field wavelet coding approaches, using the lifting structure. Our scheme incorporates disparity compensation into the lifting structure for the transform across the views in the light field data set. Another transform is performed to exploit the coherence among neighboring pixels, followed by a modified SPIHT coder and rate-distortion optimized bitstream assembly. A view-sequencing algorithm is developed to organize the views for encoding. For light fields of an object, we propose to use shape adaptation to improve the compression efficiency and visual quality of the images. The necessary shape information is efficiently coded based on prediction from the existing geometry model. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme exhibits superior compression performance over existing light field compression techniques.