23414354
An iconic query system with intensional feedback capabilities
In recent years the issue of the interaction between casual users and database systems has become increasingly important. Moreover, the introduction of multimedia and distributed databases has necessitated the design of querying systems capable of reducing unnecessary and costly accesses. The authors address these issues by proposing a visual query system based on (1) the extensive utilization of icons and natural language in order to facilitate the access and the understanding of the database and (2) the use of knowledge, or the intensional part of the database, in order to reduce the physical access to the actual data (extensional part). In their query system the perception of the database structure is made particularly easy by introducing the concept of generalized attribute.<<ETX>>
15816324
Multi-level specification and protocol design for distributed multimedia communication
The major challenge in the design of an efficient distributed multimedia system is the integration and support of a wide variety of applications. Investigating the basic issues involved in the design and specification of distributed muttimcdia systems is the focus of this paper. A basic layered network architecture is proposed as the uniform framework for the investigation of different levels of functionality typically associated with the communication network that supports multimedia communication. Within this framework, we propose to identify the communication requirements for multimedia applications and characterize a set of communication primitives which specify different qualities of scrvicc to reflect different real-time rcquircmcnts. ‘Ilis investigation is guided by an efficient and flexible multi-level specification model. We will characterize this model and show that the model can be amenable to the construction of a set of communication primitives that support synchronization and communication of multimedia applications.
34016873
Parsing 2D Languages by a Pictorial GLR Parser
39945679
Iconic Language Design for People with Significant Speech and Multiple Impairments
35519508
Extending Visual Languages for Multimedia
Visual languages, which let users customize iconic sentences, can be extended to accommodate multimedia objects, letting users access media dynamically. Teleaction objects, or multimedia objects with knowledge structures, can be designed using visual languages to automatically respond to events and perform tasks like "find related books" in a virtual library.
17298481
Iconic language design for people with significant speech and multiple impairments
We present an approach of iconic language design for people with significant speech and multiple impairments (SSMI), based upon the theory of Icon Algebra and the theory of Conceptual Dependency (CD) to derive the meaning of iconic sentences. An interactive design environment based upon this methodology is described.
43612588
Priority-Based Internet Access Control for Fairness Improvement and Abuse Reduction
In this paper, we exploit a prioritized-service architecture and apply a priority based traffic control scheme to reduce abusive Internet access, improve fairness among users and study users' behavior under a prioritized service for Internet access. The Internet access by dormitory users of National Taiwan University (NTU) serves as a conveyer problem. There are two classes of service. The regular class has a volume quota for each user, which is designed to meet majority users' essential demands while limiting abusive usage of quality service. The custody class is lower in service priority with no volume quota limitation. Our mathematical models for design and analysis include individual and aggregate user demand models and a network performance model. The priority control scheme is implemented over an existing NTU dormitory network with additions of a QoS router, a meter reading server, an accounting server and a user interface server. The control leads to 48.9% reduction in average packet drop rate, 42.2% improvement in a fairness measure, reduction of abusive Internet access by 57.82% and 145.09% Internet access increase in majority users. Such results are quite consistent with predictions of our mathematical models.
44477744
Efficient selection of scheduling rule combination by combining design of experiment and ordinal optimization-based simulation
In a fab with heterogeneous machine groups, the number of scheduling policies grows in a combinatorial way because each machine group has its specific dispatching rules. In this paper, we design a fast simulation methodology by an innovative combination of the notions of ordinal optimization (OO) and design of experiments (DOE) to efficiently select a good scheduling policy for fab operation, Instead of finding the exact performance among scheduling policies, our approach compares their relative orders of performance to a specified level of confidence. The DOE method is exploited to largely reduce the number of scheduling policies to be evaluated by the OO-based simulation. Simulation results of applications to scheduling wafer fabrications show that most of the OO-based DOE simulations require 2 to 3 orders of magnitude less computation time than those of traditional approach, and the speedup is up to 7,000 times in certain cases.
7920215
The design of a secure and pervasive multimodal Web system
While most users currently receive Web services from Web browser interfaces, pervasive computing is emerging and offering new ways of accessing Internet applications from any device at any location (Satyanarayanan, 2002; Estrin et al., 2002), by utilizing various modes of interfaces to interact with their end users. The PC and its back-end servers remain important in a pervasive system, and the technology could involve new ways of interfacing with a PC and/or various types of gateways to back-end servers. In this research, cellular phone was used as the pervasive device for accessing an Internet application prototype, a multimodal Web system (MWS), through voice user interface technology (Anerousis and Panagos, 2002). This paper describes how MWS was designed to provide a secure interactive voice channel using an Apache Web server, a voice server, and a Java servlet engine. It was also shown that multimodal user-interface pages can be generated by using XSLT stylesheet which transforms XML documents into various formats including XHTML, WML, and VoiceXML.
15655721
The Worst-case Analysis of the MULTIFIT Algorithm for Scheduling Nonsimultaneous Parallel Machines
Abstract In this paper we consider the nonsimultaneous multiprocessor scheduling problem, or NMSP for short. The NMSP is a makespan minimization scheduling problem which involves the nonpreemptive assignment of independent jobs on m parallel machines with different starting times. It is well known that the longest processing time (LPT) algorithm and the modified LPT(MLPT) algorithm yield schedules with makespans bounded by 3 2 − 1 2m and 4/3 times the optimum makespan, respectively. In this paper, we show that the best known worst-case performance bound, 4/3 of the MLPT, is tight by constructing a worst-case example. Then, we employ the bin-packing heuristic algorithm called the MULTIFIT to solve the NMSP and show that the makespan of the schedule generated by the MULTIFIT algorithm is bounded by 9/7+2−k times the optimum makespan, where k is the selected number of the major iterations in the MULTIFIT. This worst-case bound of the MULTIFIT algorithm is, so far, the best bound for the NMSP and the tightness of the bound is still an open question.
16824799
A heuristic method for self‐healing ring design in a single‐homing cluster
In this paper, we consider a SONET (Synchronous Optical NETwork) USHR (Uni‐directional Self‐Healing Ring) design problem for a single‐homing cluster, i.e., a cluster with a single designated hub. The problem is formulated as a nonlinear integer programming problem and a branch and bound heuristic method based on the Lagrangian relaxation and subgradient optimization technique is proposed to handle the problem. In solving any ring design problem, we should deal with two different aspects of the ring design, namely, the ring routing aspect and the ring loading aspect. Both of these two aspects are well integrated and represented in our model. Such an integrated formulation has not been proposed in the existing literature mainly due to its computationally intractable complexity. In order to cope with such complexity, a preprocessing technique for reducing the complexity and several branch and bound strategies are proposed. The efficiency of the proposed method is tested through computational experiments. For the computational experiments, test problems are generated using the data obtained from the actual topologies in Seoul, Korea. The computational experiments show that the proposed method yields near‐optimum designs within reasonable computation time.