45814871
A Multimedia Information System for Home Health-Care Support
The author describes Guardian, a knowledge based home health-care support system in the domain of childhood leukaemia. Guardian is part of a joint project between IBM Research and the New England Medical Center for building a prototype home-care system for children with leukaemia. The prototype system consists of a set of applications, including consultation and symptoms analysis, procedure guidance, emotional support, and communications, implemented in Smalltalk/OS2. This article focuses on the knowledge-based system, which helps parents better understand the symptoms or problems their child is experiencing and provides them with relevant therapeutic information.
20698705
Home health care support
We describe an ap@ication to interconnect health care providers and thew patients in the home. The application includes information services, symptom analy SIS, ~idance in the performance of procedures, emotmnal support, and communications among the health care providers, patients and caretakers.
6041360
Modeling timed user-interactions in multimedia documents
Interactive multimedia documents (or systems) can be characterized by active user participation and the diversity of multimedia information accessed at various levels of granularity. They need to support extensive user participation in selecting and tailoring the information and its presentation. Multimedia information fragments may vary from portions of video, pieces of audio, newspaper quotations or chapters of a book. Effectively managing the creation, evolution and complexity of multimedia documents formed by combining media fragments is an essential capability. We consider the hyperstory model of a multimedia document, where a document is structured hierarchically in three dimensions: time, space and asynchrony. The model provides a layered approach in structuring multimedia documents, thus reducing the complexities of large systems. The hyperstory model supports user interactions that are timed, and also supports preemptive resuming. Timed user interactions with the document are modeled with a newly introduced timed Petri-net (TPN*). TPN* is used to infer the behavior of the system. This paper describes TPN*'s modeling and analysis and its application to the hyperstory model.
18630917
Multimedia documents with elastic time
Time is an essential component in interactive multimedia documents (or systems). We present the elastic time model for multimedia documents. Using the metaphor of a spring system, it allows authors to associate with each multimedia object a minimum and a maximum length and a length at rest. Authors can connect the (elastic) objects by de ning temporal relationships among them. If the given specication is consistent, a document is produced which is also elastic, with a minimum, a maximum, and an optimal length. As such, our elastic model associates with a document a range of feasible solutions in addition to an optimal one. The author can then select from the acceptable range an alternative length for the document, and the system will compute a revised solution that takes the additional global constraint into e ect. The system can answer questions, such as: \Can I show this multimedia presentation in 10 minutes? If so, how should all the objects be scheduled?" Furthermore, the system also takes fairness into consideration and distributes any necessary stretching or shrinking across multimedia objects contained in a document. As such, the elastic time model provides expressive power and exibility in document auThe author's current address is: University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742, JUNESONG @ CS.UMD.EDU thoring and browsing. The proposed approach has been implemented in Smalltalk/OS2.
193488
Synchronized Disk Interleaving
A group of disks may be interleaved to speed up data transfers in a manner analogous to the speedup achieved by main memory interleaving. Conventional disks may be used for interleaving by spreading data across disks and by treating multiple disks as if they were a single one. Furthermore, the rotation of the interleaved disks may be synchronized to simplify control and also to optimize performance. In addition, check- sums may be placed on separate check-sum disks in order to improve reliability. In this paper, we study synchronized disk interleaving as a high-performance mass storage system architecture. The advantages and limitations of the proposed disk interleaving scheme are analyzed using the M/G/1 queueing model and compared to the conventional disk access mechanism.
1475409
An ethnographic study of copy and paste programming practices in OOPL
Although programmers frequently copy and paste code when they develop software, implications of common copy and paste (C&P) usage patterns have not been studied previously. We have conducted an ethnographic study in order to understand programmers' C&P programming practices and discover opportunities to assist common C&P usage patterns. We observed programmers using an instrumented Eclipse IDE and then analyzed why and how they use C&P operations. Based on our analysis, we constructed a taxonomy of C&P usage patterns. This paper presents our taxonomy of C&P usage patterns and discusses our insights with examples drawn from our observations. From our insights, we propose a set of tools that both can reduce software maintenance problems incurred by C&P and can better support the intents of commonly used C&P scenarios.
8330560
Shape Comparison of the Hippocampus Using a Multiresolution Representation and ICP Normalization
It is known that deformation of the hippocampus shape is involved with several neurological diseases. In this paper, we propose a hybrid shape representation scheme, which consists of multiresolution skeletons, voxels and meshes for the shape analysis of the hippocampus. Initially, a hippocampal surface model is reconstructed from MRI and then it is placed into a canonical coordinate system, where the position, orientation and scaling are normalized. From the voxel representation of the hippocampus, multiresolution skeletons are extracted and Iterative Closest Point normalization is carried out. Then the shape similarity of two hippocampal models is computed with a hierarchical fashion. In addition, we have implemented a neural network based classifier to discriminate whether a hippocampal model is normal or not. Results indicate that the proposed hybrid representation and the skeleton-based normalization using ICP are very effective in 3D shape analysis of the hippocampus.
3207967
ArrayXPath: mapping and visualizing microarray gene-expression data with integrated biological pathway resources using Scalable Vector Graphics
Biological pathways can provide key information on the organization of biological systems. ArrayXPath (http://www.snubi.org/software/ArrayXPath/) is a web-based service for mapping and visualizing microarray gene-expression data for integrated biological pathway resources using Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG). By integrating major bio-databases and searching pathway resources, ArrayXPath automatically maps different types of identifiers from microarray probes and pathway elements. When one inputs gene-expression clusters, ArrayXPath produces a list of the best matching pathways for each cluster. We applied Fisher's exact test and the false discovery rate (FDR) to evaluate the statistical significance of the association between a cluster and a pathway while correcting the multiple-comparison problem. ArrayXPath produces Javascript-enabled SVGs for web-enabled interactive visualization of pathways integrated with gene-expression profiles.
26955217
On Temporal Aggregate Processing Based on Time Points
Temporal aggregation is an extension of conventional aggregate on the domain and range of aggregates to include the time concept. In this paper, we propose a new tree-based temporal aggregation processing method. The time complexity of the proposed method is better than those of the existing methods. The experimental results indicate that our proposed method ourperforms the existing methods.
8963340
Understanding and Aiding Code Evolution by Inferring Change Patterns
Evolution continues to play an ever-increasing role in software engineering. Although changing a program is the core of software evolution, program change patterns have not been considered as a first class entity in most classic studies of software evolution. Past empirical studies of software evolution primarily relied on quantitative and statistical analyses of a program over time, but did not focus on semantic and qualitative change patterns of a program. We hypothesize that by treating change patterns as first class entities we can better understand software evolution and also aid programmers in changing software. Our goal is to infer clone evolution patterns from a set of program versions stored in a source code repository. We defined a set of common clone evolution patterns based on our insights from the copy and paste study.