2500932
Mediating electronic meetings
Electronic meeting control has been the focus of many research efforts; however, extensively adopted standards are still unavailable. In this paper, we present a generic model for electronic meeting control. Our model is based on the formal meeting protocol commonly known as the parliamentary procedure or Robert's Rules of Order (RRO). Capturing the essential features of traditional RRO, we suggest extension mechanisms in order to exploit the capabilities of electronic media. Centered on the concept of a discussion thread, our extended RRO model can handle concurrent meeting activities, multiple floors, amendment nesting, and discussion hierarchies. M-Net, an electronic meeting system, is introduced as an example supported by our model.
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.
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.
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.
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.
9710130
A specification language for real-time distributed systems
The authors introduce a design specification method, extended modified Petri nets (EMPN), and its description language (EMPNDL). The specification is based on a stochastic Petri-net model and is suitable for modeling real-time distributed systems. The syntax of the language is formally described in BNF grammar while the semantics is based on that for stochastic Petric nets. In addition to the modeling capability of EMPN and EMPNDL, methods for verification and validation of such systems are also discussed. EMPN and EMPNDL have been extensively used to the specification of a prototype switching system, UICPBX. Based on the presented formulation, verification and validation of UICPBX can be automated to a great extent.<<ETX>>
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.
9167410
Computing curricula 2001 how will it work for you?
In the fall of 1998, the ACM Education Board and the Educational Activities Board of the IEEE Computer Society appointed representatives to a joint task force to prepare Computing Curricula 2001 (CC2001), the next installment in a series of reports on the undergraduate computer science curriculum that began in 1968 and was then updated in 1978 and 1991. Interim reports on the initial planning of the curriculum were presented at the SIGCSE symposium and the IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference in both 1999 and 2000. The CC2001 Task Force released its first draft report at the 2000 SIGCSE conference and plans to release its penultimate draft at SIGCSE 2001. The purpose of this session is to describe how we expect the recommendations of the report to apply in practice. The panelists represent a range of institutions and can therefore speak to the questions that audience members from similar institutions might have.
14995712
Applying Pattern Mining to Web Information Extraction
Information extraction (IE) from semi-structured Web documents is a critical issue for information integration systems on the Internet. Previous work in wrapper induction aim to solve this problem by applying machine learning to automatically generate extractors. For example, WIEN, Stalker, Softmealy, etc. However, this approach still requires human intervention to provide training examples. In this paper, we propose a novel idea to IE, by repeated pattern mining and multiple pattern alignment. The discovery of repeated patterns are realized through a data structure call PAT tree. In addition, incomplete patterns are further revised by pattern alignment to comprehend all pattern instances. This new track to IE involves no human effort and content-dependent heuristics. Experimental results show that the constructed extraction rules can achieves 97 percent extraction over fourteen popular search engines.
34152454
Self-organizing topological tree
The self-organizing maps (SOM) introduced by Kohonen implemented two important operations: vector quantization (VQ) and a topology-preserving mapping. In this paper, a tree structured SOM algorithm named self-organizing topological tree (SOTT) is proposed. Unlike the conventional tree structured SOMs as stated in T. Kohonen (2001), P. Koikkalainnen and E. Oja (1990) and P. Koikkalainnen (1994), every layer of the proposed SOTT is organized simultaneously instead of layer by layer. A reduction of computational complexity from O(N) to O(logN) is achieved by the tree structured search in both the training phase and the test phase. Furthermore, such topological tree that maintains both intra-layer and inter-layer topologies during and after learning can be seen as endowing the SOM topological map with the progressive decoding and multi-resolution capabilities.