bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Testing the Principle of Orthogonality in Language Design (Abstract Only)
Authors: Bowden Edward M. , Douglas Sarah A. , Stanford Cathryn A.
Published: January 2007

Formulating precise descriptions of human-computer interactions is
a prerequisite for the principled design, implementation and
evaluation of interactive systems. This paper reports an exercise
in interaction specification using Foley and Van Dam's (1982)
multilayered method of documenting the design of a user-computer
interface. The specification was used to communicate the intended
behaviour of a Forms Helper system from a design team to an
implementation team. The ease with which the interaction could be
represented at each of Foley and Van Dam's four levels of
abstraction is discussed, and recommendations are made for
improving the method in places where its guidance was unclear or
inadequate. The value of the method is examined prior to a
discussion of the potential role of such specifications in the
design and development cycle .
Some Lessons from an Exercise in Specification (Abstract Only)
Authors: Frohlich David M. , Luff Paul
Published: January 2007

Throughout the history of human-computer interface development one aspect has remained constant: output from computers has been almost entirely visual. A continued and increasing reliance on visual communication has had a disadvantageous effect on users who have visual disabilities. A visual interface is of no use to a user who is completely blind: communication must use one of the other senses, and hearing is an obvious candidate.A number of human-computer interfaces have been developed and adapted into an auditory form based on the use of synthetic speech. However, for modern interfaces which use more complex displays, synthetic speech is not sufficient. One attemptt o adapt such a mouse-based interface into an auditory form based on musical tones and synthetic speech is described. This project involved the development of a word processor called Soundtrack with an auditory interface. Evaluation of this application suggests that the approach is viable, but that it was difficult to use, and there are significant research questions still to be addressed.
Teaching user interface design based on usability engineering
Authors: Nielsen J. , Molich R.
Published: January 2007

For the last three years we have been teaching a course in user interface design at the Technical University of Denmark as part of the curriculum for the Master's Degree in computer science (courses for Bachelor's degrees are taught at another engineering school on campus). Here we describe our goals for the course and give a brief list of its contents. We discuss our use of mandatory laboratory assignments in more detail and also present results from studies of students' motivation for taking the usability course and their evaluation of different aspects of the course.
CHI '88 poster session papers and abstracts
Authors: Evans S. M.
Published: January 2007

Interactive Poster Sessions serve as a valuable forum for presenting late-breaking research in computer-human interaction and receiving feedback from an interested body of viewers. The poster sessions held at this year's CHI '88 conference, May 15--19 in Washington, D.C., was no exception.Fifty poster presentations, arranged by five topic areas, were located adjacent to the main conference room. Topic areas included user models, interface designs, interface analysis, tools and techniques for interface design, and CHI doctoral eonsortium participants. All 50 posters were on display for the duration of the conference, giving presenter and viewer ample time for interaction. In addition, all poster presenters were available for interaction during the catered opening reception held on Monday evening, May 16, when several hundred people filed through the display area to review poster exhibits and talk with the presenters.The poster exhibitors covered a range of topics as well as a range of countries, with Canada, Germany, England, Switzerland, and Japan represented in addition to the United States. Thirty-three of the participants were from universities, and 10 had also participated in the doctoral consortium held in conjunction with the conference.Abstracts submitted for the poster session were reviewed by a panel of judges which included Louis Blazy, U.S. Department of Defense; Fred Davis' Jr., Graduate School of Business Administration, The University of Michigan; Jay Elkerton, Department of lndustrial and Operations Engineering, The University of Michigan; Susan Evans, Vector Research, Inc.; and Fred Schott, Aetna Life Insurance Company.Additional abstracts and papers can bejbund in the July and October 1988 issues of the SIGCHI Bulletin.
Simplified task analysis and design for end-user interface design computing: implications for human/computer interface design (poster session)
Authors: Dubrovsky V. J.
Published: January 2007

The paper suggests a structured task analysis and design technique which is based on the "levels-stages" model of a user action. The analysis of existing user tasks employs a top-down strategy. The first stage, dictated by the action model, decomposes the tasks into functional subtasks. The second stage decomposes the subtasks into functionally primitive subtasks according to the structure of the object. At the third stage, the functionally primitive subtasks are described in terms of operations with the object elements.
Selection of a neural network system for visual inspection
Authors: Stomski P. J. , Elmaghraby A. S.
Published: January 2007

This paper provides a background to the field of neural networks with a particular focus on vision applications. It includes an extensive literature review and reports on preliminary work towards the implementation of a visual inspection application using neural network simulators.
Draft for ACM self-assessment procedure on human-computer interaction
Authors: Carey T.
Published: January 2007

A skeleton version of this self-assessment was published in the
SIGCHI
Bulletin
, July 1988. That initial pilot version outlined the content, scope and question type planned. The comments received have been incorporated into the current version, which has questions on almost all the desired topics - the notable exception is a question on conceptual models. The purpose of this draft is to allow testing of the questions themselves, and subsequent revision. Note that the question format for an ACM self-assessment is constrained to ensure that individuals can assess the correctness of their answers. In practice this means multiple-choice questions are the favoured format, with some use of short answer questions. This imposes limitations on the self-assessment procedure, and not all topics in human-computer interaction fit well within these limitations. In some cases, I felt strongly that a topic must be included, even if the possible questions did not do it justice - for example, some of the questions asking for corrections to misconceptions.
Hypertext II
Authors: Nielsen Jakob
Published: January 2007

Hypertext II was the major conference in Europe this year in the hypertext field and attracted 200 participants. Actually it had "attracted" many more who were just not there but had been turned away because the organizers had committed the same mistake as the planners of the Hypertext'87 conference in North Carolina and placed the conference in a location which would only hold 200 people. Their original assumption was that a hypertext conference in the UK might attract 100 participants, but that was the underestimate of the year. Hypertext is
hot
these days.
Video and design
Authors: Henderson Austin
Published: January 2007

Four relations between video and design are identified. One, the role of video in support of the activity of design, is explored in some detail. It is asserted that more than one of these relations is present in the usual situation.
If there is artificial intelligence? Is there such a thing as artificial stupidity
Authors: Liebowitz J.
Published: January 2007

With AI applications being developed and used worldwide, an interesting question to ask is, "How smart are these AI systems?" Or another way of asking the question is, "How much 'artificial stupidity' do these systems possess?" This paper takes a look at the current limitations of the most practical application of AI -- expert systems. This paper provides a general idea of how expert systems could be improved.
An expert advising system with acoustic output
Authors: Trost Harald , Buchberger E. , Dorffner G.
Published: January 2007

In this paper we describe the application of natural language processing and speech techniques to improve the user-interface of expert systems. The particular goal of our project was to develop a German language interface for expert systems using speech input and output. The interface design was chosen in a way to provide for portability and flexibility. Possible application areas are domains where the user's vision is occupied by some task and where the dialogue is mostly system-driven, i.e., the user's answers can be restricted to a small set of utterances.
A Position Paper On
Authors: Lane Howard K.
Published: January 2007

Following the ACM/IEEE Design Automation Conference on June 16, 1988, a IEEE-DASS-VHDL Model Subgroup meeting was convened by the chairman Dr. James Armstrong, for soliciting VHDL model recommendations from industry, government and academia. This position paper has been prepared for the VHDL standard package sub-task group for development of a working draft of the standard as requested by the chairman.
Book Review: MICROPROGRAMMING AND FIRMWARE ENGINEERING METHODS by Stanley Habib, Editor:, Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1988
Authors: Milutinovic Veljko
Published: January 2007

During the Spring Semester 89, I had the pleasure to teach the microprogramming course at Purdue University from two textbooks of which one was "Microprogramming and Firmware Engineering Methods." Contributing authors for this book were selected among the nation's leading experts in the field, which greatly contributes to the depth and breath of the coverage.
Using partial fraction formulas to sum some slowly convergent series analytically for molecular integral calculations
Authors: Barnett M. P.
Published: January 2007

Two sets of rational expressions, needed for quantum chemical calculations, have been constructed by mechanical application of partial fraction and polynomial operations on a CYBER 205. The algorithms were coded in FORTRAN, using simple array manipulation. The results suggest extensions that could be tackled with general algebraic manipulation programs.
The risch algorithms of MACSYMA and SENAC
Authors: Schou W. C. , Broughan K. A.
Published: January 2007

The purpose of this paper is to report on a computer implementation of the Risch algorithm for the symbolic integration of rational functions containing nested exponential and logarithms. For the class of transcendental functions, the Risch algorithm [4] represents a practical method for symbolic integration. Because the Risch algorithm describes a decision procedure for transcendental integration it is an ideal final step in an integration package. Although the decision characteristic cannot be fully realised in a computer system, because of major algebraic problems such as factorisation, zero-equivalence and simplification, the potential advantages are considerable.
Discrete simulation by APL-GPSS: the best of two worlds
Authors: Baaren M. v. , Batenberg F. H. D. v. , Star H. P. T. v. d.
Published: January 2007

GPSS is a discrete simulation language, suitable for queuing systems.Its main advantage is that it is very easy to learn and easy to use, but its disadvantages are that it is very clumsy and also very restricted in its arithmetic (for example it is integer-valued and has very few mathematical functions).For this reasons we designed a GPSS emulator in APL which combines the simple and intuitive syntax of GPSS with the powerful calculation capabilities of APL.The product of this combination is the simulation package APL-GPSS.
Workspace `Maze'
Authors: Camacho A.
Published: January 2007

Devised to solve a problem in the design of coloured mazes, the maze workspace strikingly improved the competitive advantage of Minotaur Designs.The differences between monochrome and coloured mazes call for unexpected variations in the processing.The system described was a finalist in the Peat Marwick Mitchell/PC User BenefIT awards competition in 1988.
A simulation tool for teaching CPU design and microprogramming concepts
Authors: Chua Y. S. , Winton C.
Published: January 2007

Courses in computer architecture, among other things, must address issues of CPU design and microprogramming. Real environments, if even available, provide very specialized, vendor specific architecture solutions. Computer architecture for this reason is often approached without the benefit of any hands-on experience. Simulation obviously provides a means of exploring "new" architectures. However, simulation tools in the architecture area tend to be highly specialized, typically dictating CPU design and microprogramming organization. If engineering-level concerns of speed or timing considerations are not at issue, APL provides a uniquely effective base for building a general simulation tool to implement both mundane and exotic microprogrammable CPU designs. The authors have conceived and developed such an environment using APL. Both students and instructor can use the simulation toolkit to "implement" CPU designs or install an existing CPU architecture. The user can specify registers and function modules activated by bits in the microinstructions. CPU bus structures, the microprogram store, main memory and its access scheme are user-definable. An interface guides the construction of microcode. The simulation can be operated one instruction at a time, one microinstruction at time, or integral multiples of either. A student-ready version has been successfully class tested during the 1989 Spring semester.
APL as a tool of research for the mathematical scientist
Authors: Danial E. J.
Published: January 2007

The simplicity and elegance of the APL language in helping the mathematical scientist think about decisions in serious research is clearly demonstrated. This is done by analyzing how the APL function INFDIV inspires the existence of the generalization of the sufficient conditions for a discrete random variable to be infinitely divisible. Documentations and sample outputs are presented.
A fusion of Lotus 1-2-3 and APL2
Authors: Friis E.
Published: January 2007

A fusion of the most popular computer program to date with one of the most. powerful and innovative programming language to date presents a great opportunity for synergy and accomplishment. Part of this synergy has been explored in the construction of an APL2 based prototype system called FUSION. The FUSION prototype has encompassed the ability to communicate with Lotus Development Corporation's 1-2-3 by way of the binary .WK1 file format.The following salient features of the FUSION prototype are discussed:• the modelling of a worksheet in APL2• the translation of Lotus 1-2-3 formulas to executable APL2 expressions• access to other host programs from the worksheet
Processing natural language syntactic and semantic mechanisms
Authors: Hagamen W. , Berry P. C. , Iverson K. E. , Weber J. C.
Published: January 2007

This paper describes a simple approach to language processing. Knowledge of the domain is stored in a three row numeric matrix or semantic net. The meaning of individual words is contained in pointers from each word to the objects in the environment and the relations between these objects. The intersections of these pointers resolves the ambiguity inherent in the multiple meanings of words. The input string is treated as a series of triads, where the result of processing one triad is passed as an argument for the next triad. Parsing into the required noun phrases and verb phrases is done by semantic means (intersection); when words have no semantic pointers, a syntactic parser is utilized.
Astrophysical APL - diamonds in the sky
Authors: Schneider G. , Paluzzi P. , Webb J.
Published: January 2007

Computational astrophysics seeks to develop numerical models which help elucidate the nature of astronomical systems. Such models must not only adequately describe the underlying physics which give rise to phenomena that have been observed, but must also be predictive in asserting what future observations might unfold. Any model which is in conflict with physical observations, clearly, must be discarded or amended to reflect reality. As a computational modelling tool we find
APL
useful for testing astrophysical hypotheses, and extending the domain of our observationally based knowledge. Using
APL
to build, test, and expand astrophysical models frees the investigator from the mechanical drudgery of computer programming, thereby allowing the researcher to concentrate on understanding the physical universe.As a quantitative example of how relatively complex astrophysical phenomena can be explored with ease using
APL,
we have developed a structure model for white dwarf stars. The model presented here considers such effects as Coulomb interactions between electrons and nucleons, inverse beta decays, and the effects of the general theory of relativity on the condition of hydrostatic equilibrium. This structure model is valid for zero-temperature stars of varying chemical compositions, ionic partitions, and central densities; and is applicable over a wide range of partial and total degeneracy regimes.
An on-line help facility for APL2
Authors: Sullivan J.
Published: January 2007

Online documentation is defined as "Communication designed to be presented on VDT screens on order to ease interactions between computer software and the individuals who manage, audit, operate or maintain it" [BRO1]. "It allows people to instantly go to the screen without stopping what they were doing to go to a manual. It better serves the needs of users" [MOR1].This paper sets out a way of interfacing on-line documentation with APL2 programs. It uses GDDM as the full-screen manager, and the text is stored in a VSAM file, although this is pure convenience and a BDAM file could be used by those sites where personnel are not trained in VSAM, or VSAM is not available.The HELP function is shown in the appendix together with the format of a HELP record from the file; these will show that the concept is beautifully simple. Feedback from staff in my organization has shown that this kind of on-line "HELP" facility has been most useful in assisting everybody from the rookie to the veteran to perform their tasks within the timescales laid down by the management team.
A paediatric management information system in APL
Authors: Sykes C. M. , Sykes A. M.
Published: January 2007

Many British hospitals contain 'special care baby units' designed for the careful and skilled nursing required to keep prematurely born babies alive. With the aid of much electronic monitoring equipment, the environment is carefully maintained to maximise the babies' survival chances. Nevertheless, most of the information recorded on the baby's progress is transitory and only temporarily available. Consequently there is no facility for the paediatrician to review his/her actions and validate the decisions made.This paper describes a continuing project in conjunction with Morriston Hospital, Swansea to provide the required paediatric information system to allow the paediatrician to reflect on decisions made and consequent behaviour of the child.
Generic binary trees in APL2
Authors: Thomson N.
Published: January 2007

The combination of APL2 constructs and direct definition notation makes the description and implementation of complex generic types easy and natural. This paper illustrates this with an APL2 paradigm for modelling binary trees. It considers the problems of constructing trees, inserting new items, searching for items, counting leaves, counting comparisons, and testing for equivalence.
In search of knowledge-based search tactics
Authors: Smith P. J. , Shute S. J. , Galdes D.
Published: January 2007

Knowledge-based search tactics are discussed in terms of their role in the functioning of a semantically-based search system for bibliographic information retrieval. This prototype system, EP-X, actively assists users in defining or refining their topics of interest. It does so by applying search tactics to a knowledge-base describing topics in a particular domain and a database describing the contents of individual documents.

This paper reviews the empirical studies that lead to the two central concepts implemented in EP-X:

Semantically-based search;

Knowledge-based search tactics.
Indexing medical reports in a multimedia environment: the RIME experimental approach
Authors: Berrut C. , Chiaramella Y.
Published: January 2007

This paper focuses on the RIME system aimed to the indexing of medical reports in a multimedia environment. This particular application is viewed as representative of a large set of still unanswered needs of large communities of users: domain experts dealing with on-line specialized documentation such as software engineers, medical specialists and so on. In this application textual information appears as an interesting media to access related pictures in the data base. After the presentation of the application and a study of the particular corpus involved we define a semantic model for the documents which is based on a Conceptual Language. Then we detail the indexing process and its various linguistic components which perform the translation of every medical report according to this semantic model.
How a personal document's intended use or purpose affects its classification in an office
Authors: Kwasnik B.
Published: January 2007

This paper reports on one of the findings of a larger case study that attempts to describe how people organize documents in their own offices. In that study, several dimensions along which people make classificatory decisions were identified. Of these, the use to which a document is put emerged as a strong determiner of that document's classification. The method of analysis is reviewed, and examples of different kinds of uses are presented, demonstrating that it is possible to describe a wide variety of specific instances using a closed set of descriptors. The suggestion is made that, in designing systems for organizing materials, it might be advantageous to incorporate information about contextual variables, such as use, since these seem to be particularly important in classification decisions made within personal environments.
Research toward the development of a lexical knowledge base for natural language processing
Authors: Amsler R. A.
Published: January 2007

This paper documents research toward building a complete lexicon containing all the words found in general newspaper text. It is intended to provide the reader with an understanding of the inherent limitations of existing vocabulary collection methods and the need for greater attention to multi-word phrases as the building blocks of text. Additionally, while traditional reference books define many proper nouns, they appear to be very limited in their coverage of the new proper nouns appearing daily in newspapers. Proper nouns appear to require a grammar and lexicon of components much the way general parsing of text requires syntactic rules and a lexicon of common nouns.
The performance implications of thread management alternatives for shared-memory multiprocessors
Authors: Anderson T. E. , Lazowska D. D. , Levy H. M.
Published: January 2007

Threads (“lightweight” processes) have become a common element of new languages and operating systems. This paper examines the performance implications of several data structure and algorithm alternatives for thread management in shared-memory multiprocessors. Both experimental measurements and analytical model projections are presented.

For applications with fine-grained parallelism, small differences in thread management are shown to have significant performance impact, often posing a tradeoff between throughput and latency. Per-processor data structures can be used to improve throughput, and in some circumstances to avoid locking, improving latency as well.

The method used by processors to queue for locks is also shown to affect performance significantly. Normal methods of critical resource waiting can substantially degrade performance with moderate numbers of waiting processors. We present an Ethernet-style backoff algorithm that largely eliminates this effect.
Finite buffers for fast multicast
Authors: Danzig P. B.
Published: January 2007

When many or all of the recipients of a multicast message respond to the multicast's sender, their responses may overflow the sender's available buffer space. Buffer overflow is a serious, known problem of broadcast-based protocols, and can be troublesome when as few as three or four recipients respond. We develop analytical models that calculate the expected number of buffer overflows that can be used to estimate the number of buffers necessary for an application. The common cure for buffer overflow requires that recipients delay their responses by some random amount of time in order to increase the minimum spacing between response messages, eliminate collisions on the network, and decrease the peak processing demand at the sender. In our table driven algorithm, the sender tries to minimize the multicast's latency, the elapsed time between its initial transmission of the multicast and its reception of the final response, given the number of times (rounds) it is willing to retransmit the multicast. It includes in the multicast the time interval over which it anticipates receiving the response, the round timeout. We demonstrate that the latency of single round multicasts exceeds the latency of multiple round multicasts. We show how recipients minimize the sender's buffer overflows by independently choosing their response times as a function of the round's timeout, sender's buffer size, and the number of other recipients.
Control and coordination policies for systems with buffers
Authors: Mitra D. , Mitrani I.
Published: January 2007

We study systems consisting of a number of service cells in tandem, each containing a finite buffer. Several policies governing the operation of such systems are described and compared. These include traditional and novel blocking schemes, with applications to computer communications and production lines. In particular, it is shown that
kanban
, a novel discipline for coordinating cells in a manufacturing context, is obtained by combining two, more basic, concepts: a blocking policy introduced here as
minimal blocking
, and
shared buffers
. The Kanban discipline is superior in terms of throughput to the ordinary transfer blocking policy.

A method for analyzing approximately the performance of the Kanban system is also presented. This is based on examining first a single cell in isolation and then combining the isolated cells through fixed-point equations. Some numerical results and comparisons with simulations are included.
Cost-effective design of application specific VLIW processors using the SCARCE framework
Authors: Mulder H. , Portier R. J.
Published: January 2007

Increasing the performance of application-specific processors by exploiting application-resident parallelism is often prohibited by costs; especially in the case of low-volume productions. The flexibility of horizontal-microcoded machines allows these costs to be reduced, but the flexibility often reduces efficiency. VLIW is a new and promising concept for the design of low-cost, high-performance parallel computer systems. We suggest that the VLIW concept can also be used as a basis for cost-effective design of application-specific processors which must exploit application-resident parallelism.

The SCARCE (SCalable ARChitecture Experiment) framework, an approach for cost-effective design of application-specific processors, provides features which allow the design of retargetable VLIW architectures. However, a retargetable VLIW architecture is only effective if there is a retargetable VLIW compiler. Since a VLIW compiler is an essential part of the VLIW architecture, tradeoffs must be made between the variety of VLIW architectures and the compiler complexity. We suggest that limiting the flexibility of the retargetable VLIW architecture does not necessary reduce the application space.

This paper discusses the issues related to the design of a retargetable VLIW processor architecture and compiler within the SCARCE framework.
“Combining” as a compilation technique for VLIW architectures
Authors: Nakatani T. , Ebcioğlu K.
Published: January 2007

Combining
is a local compiler optimization technique that can enhance the performance of global compaction techniques for VLIW machines. Given two adjacent operations of a certain class that are flow (read-after-write) dependent and that cannot be placed in the same micro-instruction, the combining technique can transform the operations so that the modified operations have no dependence. The transformed operations can be executed in the same micro-instruction, thus allowing the total execution time of the program to be reduced. In this paper, combining a pair of flow-dependent operations into a wide instruction word is suggested as an important compilation technique for VLIW architectures. Combining is particularly effective with software pipelining and loop unrolling since combinable operations can come together with a higher probability when these compilation techniques are used. We implemented combining in our parallelizing compiler for the wide instruction word architecture, which is now being built at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center. It is shown that ten percent speedup is obtained on the Stanford integer benchmarks and other sequential-matured C programs, in comparison to compaction techniques that do not use combining. For a class of inner loops, combining can remove the inter-iteration dependencies completely and can improve performance in the same ratio as the loop is unrolled.
Extended microcode error checking on a pipelined machine
Authors: Kovacs L. A. , Gilli S. F.
Published: January 2007

In a pipelined computer, there is a possibility of interaction between microwords. These interactions may cause the operation of the computer to slow down, or they may cause errors. An extended error checking tool is used to detect these cases and help the microcode be more correct and more efficient.
On inherent untestability of unaugmented microprogrammed control
Authors: Malaiya Y. K.
Published: January 2007

Effective and efficient testing of the control part of a processor has remained a difficult problem. While several approaches have been proposed in the literature for handling unaugmented control parts, they involve questionable assumptions, and the results have not been encouraging. Here it is shown that unless some DFT (Design for Testability) approaches are taken, microprogrammed control is inherently a poorly testable structure. The considerations include lack of an elegant fault model, presence of components with low random testability, the length of a checking sequence and information-theoretic considerations. The design approaches must therefore include DFT augmentations and/or removal of sub-functional logic.
A loop optimization technique based on scheduling table
Authors: Liu D. , Giloi W. K.
Published: January 2007

Loop optimization is an important aspect of microcode compaction to minimize execution time. In this paper a new loop optimization technique for horizontal microprograms is presented, which makes use of the cyclic regularity of loops.

We have extended the concept of reservation table, which is used to develop a pipeline control strategy, so that both data dependencies and resource conflicts are taken into account. Based on the analysis of the extended reservation table, or scheduling table, an optimal schedule can be obtained. The iterations of a loop are then rearranged to form a new loop body, whose length may be greater than that of the original one. But the average initiation latency between iterations is minimal.
A microprogramming teaching environment using the Macintosh computer
Authors: Sanchez E.
Published: January 2007

A microprogramming teaching environment is presented. It is composed of a hardware part (a 16 bit microprogrammable processor) and a software part, running on a Macintosh II computer.

The software includes 6 modules: two microassemblers - one uses a classical approach to generate microcode from a description in a register transfer language and the other one, which is more unusual, is menu-driven -; a disassembler; a monitor allowing one to display and modify the processor resources, as well as to control the execution; a memory loader and a simulator.

The interactive and convivial nature of the Macintosh computer, and especially the HyperCard application, are used thoroughly in order to facilitate a utilization of the system.
Multiple operation memory structures
Authors: Ertem M. C.
Published: January 2007

This paper describes architectures based on a new memory structure. Memory systems which can perform multiple transfers are described and issues in processor architecture are considered. A general model for memory operations is given, and the classical single transfer memory structures are described. Based on the generalized model, new structures which allow multiple transfers to be performed as a single processor operation are developed. Some architectural considerations at the processor level to support these kinds of memory systems are then discussed. The advantages and disadvantages of these new structures as compared to conventional memories are also discussed and a preliminary performance evaluation is done. This discussion generally refers to the random access, physical, main memory in the system, although many of the results are applicable to other storage devices.
MIES: a microarchitecture design tool
Authors: Nestor J. A. , Soudan B. , Mayet Z.
Published: January 2007

This paper describes MIES, a design tool for the modeling, visualization, and analysis of VLSI microarchitectures. MIES combines a graphical data path model and symbolic control model and provides a number of user interfaces which allow these models to be created, simulated, and evaluated.
Fortran 8X draft
Authors: Meissner Loren P.
Published: January 2007

Standard Programming Language Fortran.
This standard specifies the form and establishes the interpretation of programs expressed in the Fortran language. It consists of the specification of the language Fortran. No subsets are specified in this standard. The previous standard, commonly known as "FORTRAN 77", is entirely contained within this standard, known as "Fortran 8x". Therefore, any standard-conforming FORTRAN 77 program is standard conforming under this standard. New features can be compatibly incorporated into such programs, with any exceptions clearly indicated in the text of this standard.
Feature engineering for a gene regulation prediction task
Authors: Forman George
Published: January 2007

This paper describes an approach that won honorable mention for the gene regulation prediction task of the 2002 KDD Cup competition [1]. Our methodology used extensive cross-validation to direct the search for an appropriate problem representation and the selection of an 'off-the-shelf' induction algorithm. A prominent trait of the dataset is the presence of three hierarchical attributes, for each of which we generated a novel predictive feature: the percentage of positives hierarchically aggregated at the node specified by the instance.
An evaluation of XML-RPC
Authors: Allman Mark
Published: January 2007

This paper explores the complexity and performance of the XML-RPC system for remote method invocation. We developed a program that can use either XML-RPC-based network communication or a hand-rolled version of networking code based on the java.net package. We first compare our two implementations using traditional object-oriented metrics. In addition, we conduct tests over a local network and the Internet to assess the performance of the two versions of the networking code using traditional internetworking metrics. We find that XML-RPC reduces the programming complexity of the software by roughly 50% (across various metrics). On the other hand, the hand-rolled java.net-based implementation offers up to an order of magnitude better network performance in some of our tests.
Dynamic modification of XML documents
Authors: Cingil Ibrahim , Dogac Asuman , Sevinc Ender , Cosar Ahmet
Published: January 2007

In this paper we describe a mechanism for invoking external applications from XML documents and returning the results back into the documents such that it becomes possible to create dynamic XML documents with content fetched from external resources such as remote databases or legacy applications. One possible application is to support dynamic electronic catalogs in XML where the catalog content is automatically and dynamically updated to contain the most recent data external to the document by accessing resources like legacy applications or databases each time it is parsed.The mechanism introduced involves a way of specifying applications to be invoked from an XML document through a new processing instruction, called EXECUTE. The proposed approach necessitates a "variable" mechanism to be able to pass input parameters to the invoked applications and to use the returned results. A variable mechanism is not readily available in XML therefore we have modified the code of an XML parser such that it became possible to redefine the values of XML entities and thus to use them as variables. XML-RPC from UserLand is used for remote method invocation.When it comes to integrating the returned results into the original document, as long as a single value is returned, it can be readily inserted into an XML document. However a piece of XML document may also be the result of the external application. In this case if a validating parser is being used, as in our case, then the DTD specified should be that of the final document.The paper concludes by discussing the future work.
TAC a trading agent competition
Authors: Strother Betsy
Published: January 2007

This paper is a report of the Trading Agent Competition (TAC) held during the Fourth International Conference on Multiagent System (ICMAS-00) in Boston on July, 8th of this year (2000).
Building E-commerce applications from object-oriented conceptual models
Authors: Pastor Oscar , Abrahão Silvia , Fons Joan
Published: January 2007

This paper introduces an extension to UML that takes care of web page navigation using the OO-Method, dynamic prototyping, and a new way of specifying the navigation design. Furthermore, a software production process for e-commerce applications design is described. This process is driven by an Object-Oriented Web-Solutions Modeling approach (OOWS), which provides mechanisms to deal with the development of web-based applications. In the proposed process, a system is completely specified using object-oriented conceptual modeling techniques to capture properly the specific functionality of an e-commerce application. We place special emphasis on a navigational model that provides abstraction primitives to capture and represent navigational semantics. With such an extended conceptual model, system functionality and navigational features are described within a unified framework. Once the system specification is completed (problem space level), a strategy to obtain the software components that will constitute the final software product (solution space level) is defined. We briefly discuss how to map these abstraction primitives to e-commerce applications in order to be able to go from the problem space to the solution space in a structured, automated way.
Using mobile agents for network resource discovery in peer-to-peer networks
Authors: Dunne Cameron Ross
Published: January 2007

Peer-to-Peer networks continue to grow in popularity. However network resource discovery still remains a substantial problem within them. In this paper we will cover some of the more popular current solutions to this problem. We will then propose a mobile agent based solution to allow for dynamic network resource discovery.
Software agents and wireless E-commerce
Authors: Maamar Zakaria , Yahyaoui Hamdi , Mansoor Wathiq , vd Heuvel Willem-Jan
Published: January 2007

Software agent technology will become a necessity to e-commerce (traditional or wireless) rather than luxury. We propose an agent-based environment, which we call E-Commerce through Wireless Devices (E-CWE), that allows users, stationary or mobile, to submit their requests for services offered by providers. The E-CWE environment consists of a reception platform including a repository of service descriptions. A supervisor-agent is in charge of this repository. Acting on behalf of their users, user-agents are dynamically created in this platform. In the E-CWE environment, security is achieved in two steps: securing service access and securing payment. A prototype of a Travel Planning Agent (TPA) system is proposed to evaluate the performance of the environment.
Commitments for agent-based supply chain management
Authors: Verdicchio Mario , Colombetti Marco
Published: January 2007

As supply chain networks are becoming more and more global, process coordination must be considered a crucial point for successful business management. The need for a suitable management and communication framework is thus becoming evident. We already have some examples showing that information sharing is a key-point at certain levels of a supply chain network. As there are several analogies between a company in a business network and an agent, the Multi-Agent System paradigm can be a valid approach for modelling supply chain networks. We consider commitment as a concept that underlies the whole multi-agent environment, that is, an interagent state, reflecting a business relation between two companies that make themselves represented by software agents. We present a data structure for commitments that can be used in the agent-based communication framework for the management of a supply chain. Business partnership between companies leads to the creation of a "channel" through which we can identify three different kinds of flow (products, money and information). We show how commitments that deal with these flows are related to one another and how they can affect the supply chain.
Reputation and endorsement for web services
Authors: Maximilien E. Michael , Singh Munindar P.
Published: January 2007

The web services set of standards promise the dynamic creation of loosely coupled systems, such as those that are required for e-commerce applications. However, current approaches for web services lack key functionality, especially to locate, select, and bind services meeting certain criteria of quality. We propose an approach wherein software agents assist in this task by disseminating reputations and endorsements through a specialized agency, which augments the capabilities of current standards.
A statistical analysis of the trading agent competition 2001
Authors: Lanzi Pier Luca , Strada Alessandro
Published: January 2007

We present a statistical analysis on the data from the Second Trading Agent Competition (TAC01). Our goal is to study the effectiveness of this competition as a testbed for the evaluation of trading strategies in artificial markets. Our results suggest that in TAC01 no agent performed
significantly
better than all the others, from a pure statistical viewpoint. Instead, it reveals groups of agents which performed
significantly
better than others. Thus, our results suggest that although this competition may not give a quantitative evaluation of the agents' trading strategies, it can still provide some useful qualitative evaluation.
Fair exchange in E-commerce
Authors: Ray Indrajit , Ray Indrakshi
Published: January 2007

Many business transactions over the Internet involve the exchange of digital products between two parties - electronic mails, digital audio and video, electronic contract signing and digital signatures, to name a few. Often these transactions occur between players that do not trust each other. To facilitate such transactions, a number of secure protocols have been proposed. The main objective of these protocols is: either both the parties obtain each other's items or none do. Sometimes it is not possible to meet the above objective and researchers have aimed for a weaker objective: gather evidence during protocol execution using which an honest party can prove his case. Protocols which meet any of the two objectives are collectively termed fair exchange protocols. In this paper we review some of the work done on such fair exchange protocols and identify areas that still need to be addressed.
Scenarios of using web services in M-commerce
Authors: Pilioura T. , Tsalgatidou A. , Hadjiefthymiades S.
Published: January 2007

The web service paradigm is a promising technology for developing applications in open, distributed and heterogeneous environments. The proliferation of this new technology has coincided with significant advances in the hardware and software capabilities of mobile devices. Due to the great benefits that come with the web service technology, such as interoperability, dynamic service discovery and reusability, there is a strong interest in making mobile devices capable of providing and consuming web services over wireless networks. This paper describes several scenarios of using web services in mobile devices and identifies their advantages, issues and challenges.
Specifying conflict of interest assertions in WS-policy with Chinese wall security policy
Authors: Hung Patrick C. K. , Qiu Guang-Sha
Published: January 2007

A Web service is defined as an autonomous unit of application logic that provides either some business functionality or information to other applications through an Internet connection. Web services are based on a set of XML standards such as Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI) and Web Services Description Language (WSDL). The benefits of adopting Web services over traditional business-to-business applications include faster time to production, convergence of disparate business functionalities, a significant reduction in total cost of development, and easy to deploy business applications for trading partners. However, Web services architectures are built on an insecure, unmonitored and shared environment, which is open to events such as security threats. Security concerns are the major barrier that prevents many business organizations from implementing or employing Web services. This article discusses one of the classical security policies that deal with conflict of interest - the Chinese wall security policy. The article then extends this concept into specifying and implementing conflict of interest assertions in the newly developed WS-Policy. WS-Policy is an XML representation that provides a grammar for expressing Web services policies, to allow service locators to have a common interpretation of security requirements in the matchmaking process.
The Interface'98 conference
Authors: Elder John F.
Published: January 2007

The annual
Symposium on the Interface between Computer Science and Statistics
is the statistical conference likely to be of greatest interest to quantitative practitioners of KDD.
The MP13 approach to the KDD'99 classifier learning contest
Authors: Vladimir Miheev , Alexei Vopilov , Ivan Shabalin
Published: January 2007

The MP13 method is best summarized as recognition based on voting decision trees using "pipes" in potential space.
KDD'99 competition
Authors: Georges Jim , Milley Anne H.
Published: January 2007

In this paper, we expand on the 1998 KDD cup competition findings: exploratory data analysis reveals unusual data anomalies; a two-stage prediction model yields superior results those obtained in the 1998 competition; we use a decision tree better understand the model (the decision boundary); and we apply a confidence interval to establish a range upon which we can reasonably judge model performance.