14227060
Visualization of design knowledge component relationships to facilitate reuse
Within the software development process, reuse at the requirements level has become an increasingly more compelling notion. Following a human-centric approach, this work focuses on both requirements and design solution reuse using a design knowledge repository. In recent years, many improvements have been made to increase reuse through design knowledge repositories, but retrieval of knowledge in the context of design activities continues to be a formidable challenge. We propose a new system, called CERVi, to browse a repository through visualization by exploiting relationships between units of knowledge (in our case, claims). These relationships are key to finding the most appropriate reusable knowledge based on design conditions. Testing shows that CERVi enhances the design knowledge selection process and helps users proceed through structured design decision making. Our approach would be most useful to those interested in unlocking the potential of design knowledge reuse.
1218721
Toward introducing notification technology into distributed project teams
Software development can be thought of as the evolution of abstract requirements into a concrete software system. The evolution, achieved through a successive series of elaborations and refinements, is inherently a complex process. The complexity is not merely in the product - the complexity of managing the evolution of the product throughout the life of a project is proportional to the size and complexity of the product. Managing software project teams is a complex task complicated by the distribution of project teams. Distributed collaboration requires adequate support for team coordination and risk management. Human-computer interaction (HCI) combines technical concerns with human psychological concerns. Similarly, software project managers confront complexities in both of these dimensions. In this paper, we report on a collaborative design environment called LINK-UP being developed to guide the design process and facilitate reuse, We examine some Web-based project management tools in terms of their support for collaborative design and virtual team processes. We present a notification system approach to making the design record a natural by-product of the design process and a lever for knowledge reuse. Knowledge from past projects could then be used to automatically notify project teams of potential problems and suggest possible solutions.
5633682
On the Unimodality and Combinatorics of Bessel Numbers
The Bessel numbers are reparametrized coefficients of Bessel polynomials. The paper investigates the analogies between Stirling numbers and Bessel numbers. A generating function for the Bessel numbers is obtained, and a proof of their unimodality is given. Stirling numbers and Bessel numbers are applied to the enumeration of orbit decompositions of various powers of permutation representations.
14877105
Scalable multimedia delivery for pervasive computing
Growing numbers of pervasive devices are gaining access to the Internet and other information sources. However, much of the rich multimedia content cannot be easily handled by the client devices with limited communication, processing, storage and display capabilities. In order to improve access, we are developing a system for scalable delivery of multimedia. The system uses an InfoPyramid for managing and manipulating multimedia content composed of video, images, audio and text. The InfoPyramid manages the different variations of media objects with different fidelities and modalities and generates and selects among the alternatives in order to adapt the delivery to different client devices. We describe a system for scalable multimedia delivery for a variety of client devices, including PDAs, HHCs, smart phones, TV browsers and color PCs.
16792950
Task-structure analysis for knowledge modeling
n recent years there has been increasing interest in describing complicated information processing systems in terms of the knowledge they have, rather than by the details of their implementation. This requires a means of modeling the knowledge in a system. Several different approaches to knowledge modeling have been developed by researchers working in Artificial Intelligence (AI). Most of these approaches share the view that knowledge must be modeled with respect to a goal or task. In this article , we outline our modeling approach in terms of the notion of a task-structure, which recursively links a task to alternative methods and to their subtasks. Our emphasis is on the notion of modeling domain knowledge using tasks and methods as mediating concepts. We begin by tracing the development of a number of different knowledge-modeling approaches. These approaches share many features, but their differences make it difficult to compare systems that have been modeled using different approaches. We present these approaches and describe their similarities and differences. We then give a detailed description , based on the task structure, of our knowledge-modeling approach and illustrate it with task structures for diagnosis and design. Finally, we show how the task structure can be used to compare and unify the other approaches. A knowledge-based system (KBS) has explicit representations of knowledge as well as inference processes that operate on these representations to achieve a goal. An inference process consists of a number of inference steps, each step creating additional knowledge. The process of applying inference steps is repeated until the information needed to fulfill the requirements of the problem-solving goal or task is generated. Typically, both domain knowledge and possible inference steps have to be modeled and represented in some form. In one sense, knowledge is of general utility-the same piece can be utilized in different contexts and problems; so, unlike traditional procedural approaches, knowledge should not be tied to one task or goal. On the other hand, it is difficult to know what knowledge to put in a system without having an idea of the tasks the KBS will confront. In spite of claims of generality, all KBSs are designed with some task or class of tasks in mind. Similarly, they are designed to be operational across some range of domains. Thus, a clear understanding of the relationship between tasks, knowledge and inferences required to perform the task is needed before knowledge in …
18578929
Joint adaptive space and frequency basis selection
We develop a new method for building a representation of an image from a library of basis elements that is facilitated by a joint adaptive space and frequency (JASF) graph. The JASF graph combines partitionable frequency expansion and spatial segmentation of the image, symmetrically. We demonstrate by using a rate-distortion framework for basis selection that the JASF graph improves compression performance over recent wavelet packet and double-tree methods by offering exponentially more bases in which to represent the images.
45728102
Causal Identification in Design Networks
When planning and designing a policy intervention and evaluation, the policy maker will have to define a strategy which will define the (conditional independence) structure of the available data. Here, Dawid’s extended influence diagrams are augmented by including ‘experimental design’ decisions nodes within the set of intervention strategies to provide semantics to discuss how a ‘design’ decision strategy (such as randomisation) might assist the systematic identification of intervention causal effects. By introducing design decision nodes into the framework, the experimental design underlying the data available is made explicit. We show how influence diagrams might be used to discuss the efficacy of different designs and conditions under which one can identify ‘causal’ effects of a future policy intervention. The approach of this paper lies primarily within probabilistic decision theory.