bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Refactoring of an Ada 95 library with a Meta CASE tool
Authors: Plantec Alain , Singhoff Frank
Published: January 2007

This paper presents the refactoring work of Cheddar, a set of Ada packages which aims at providing performance analysis tools for concurrent real time applications. CASE tools can be used for such a purpose. However, we chose to use a meta CASE tool called Platypus. It seems that few studies exist concerning Ada and meta-modelization. Then, in this paper, we investigate how to use a meta CASE tool in order to automatically produce some parts of an Ada 95 object oriented software.
Internet nuggets
Authors: Thorson Mark
Published: January 2007

This column consists of selected traffic from the
comp.arch
newsgroup, a forum for discussion of computer architecture on the Internet---an international computer network.As always, the opinions expressed in this column are the personal views of the authors, and do not necessarily represent the institutions to which they are affiliated.Text which sets the context of a message appears underlined or in italics; this is usually text the author has quoted from earlier messages. The code-like expressions below the authors' names are their addresses on Internet.
TEATIME at Boston ACM SIGGRAPH 2006
Authors: Grey Jen
Published: January 2007

SIGGRAPH 2006 presented The Teapot as Object and Icon "to showcase the long association of the teapot with the worlds of computer graphics, art, and our host city of Boston." The exhibition features juried and curated work by artists, crafts persons and scientists who create fascinating 2D and 3D teapots using computer graphic technologies or interactive techniques.
High dynamic range ("HDR") technology
Authors: Millar Hamish
Published: January 2007

HDR technology is the ability to display a wider range of light and dark colours on a screen. Both Valve and EA have produced videogames using HDR. Here is the scoop on what they had to say about HDR and their experiences using it.
Innovations in rendering
Authors: Debattista Kurt
Published: January 2007

SIGGRAPH is the major annual conference for innovation in graphics and interaction for academia and industry. This year's SIGGRAPH conference saw a wide range of novel techniques presented and a few of the older ones consolidated. The paper acceptance rate for the conference was 18% from nearly 500 papers submitted, underlining the strict adherence to quality and importance of SIGGRAPH within the graphics community.In the field of rendering, novel contributions were presented in the papers, sketches and posters session. Additionally, the courses helped highlight the current trends and techniques used in this field of graphics.
SWAG me, baby!
Authors: Bendis Jared
Published: January 2007

"Freebies", "giveaways", or just plain old "swag", you can't come home from SIGGRAPH without a suitcase full of junk that vendors are just dying to give you. More than just flyers and informational CDs, which truly are promotional, many would say that the freebies are getting out of control. While I hate to bite the hand that feeds me, I thought that it would be interesting to delve a little into this quirky but common business practice.
Towards a theory of networked computation
Authors: Feigenbaum Joan , Mitzenmacher Michael
Published: January 2007

The increasing prominence of the Internet, the Web, and large data networks in general has profoundly affected social and commercial activity. It has also wrought one of the most profound shifts in Computer Science since the field's inception. Traditionally, Computer-Science research focused primarily on understanding how best to design, build, analyze, and program computers. Research focus has now shifted to the question of how best to design, build, analyze, and operate networks. How can one ensure that a network created and used by many autonomous organizations and individuals functions properly, respects the rights of users, and exploits its vast shared resources fully and fairly?
SIGACT news complexity theory column 53
Authors: Hemaspaandra Lane A.
Published: January 2007

A way-cool new project and web site has been created by Greg Kuperberg. Greg is trying to graphically capture the known (for now, relativizable) relationships between classes, and to make clear to everyone what open questions remain. The starting point for Greg's "Complexity Zoology" site is www.math.ucdavis.edu/~greg/zoology/. Greg welcomes feedback, corrections, and (best of all) new or missed results.
A rendezvous of logic, complexity, and algebra
Authors: Chen Hubie
Published: January 2007

I am always looking for contributions. If you have any suggestion concerning the content of the Logic Column, or if you would like to contribute by writing a column yourself, feel free to get in touch with me.
One room, four meetings
Authors: Lister Raymond
Published: January 2007

Over the last couple of years, I have attended regular meetings with a group of colleagues who share my interest in computer education. After two years, I've realized that my colleagues and I are all in the same room, at the same time, but there are four different meetings going on at once. Only one of the meetings is about education research. As an education researcher, I often find the other meetings frustrating, but I have also come to see that there are positives to all four types of meetings. Each meeting has its weaknesses, including the research meeting, and these respective weaknesses are ameliorated by the other meeting types.
The ubiquity of computing may be education's biggest challenge
Authors: Kaczmarczyk Lisa
Published: January 2007

Coming up with creative ideas is like making coffee the old fashioned way. Accumulate information (acquire coffee grounds and water), give it mental space (put them in the pot, turn on stove and walk away), and ideas percolate to the surface (delicious brew is ready when the brown bubbles bounce around vigorously under the little glass lid). Sometimes the coffee is awful. But sometimes it is sublime. I won't know until I sip it.
Active and cooperative learning
Authors: McConnell Jeffrey J.
Published: January 2007

Active and cooperative learning can energize the instructor, students, and the classroom. This fourth and final article in a series on active and cooperative learning discusses the design and evaluation of classroom exercises. Additional suggestions to manage an active and cooperative learning environment are discussed.
A singular choice for multiple choice
Authors: Frandsen Gudmund S. , Schwartzbach Michael I.
Published: January 2007

How should multiple choice tests be scored and graded, in particular when students are allowed to check several boxes to convey partial knowledge? Many strategies may seem reasonable, but we demonstrate that five self-evident axioms are sufficient to determine completely the correct strategy. We also discuss how to measure robustness of the obtained grades. Our results have practical advantages and also suggest criteria for designing multiple choice questions.
Using a machine language simulator to teach CS1 concepts
Authors: Stone Jeffrey A.
Published: January 2007

The use of computer architecture simulators has become common practice in courses designed to teach computer organization. However, little research has been done to test the effectiveness of such simulators in learning introductory programming concepts. In this paper I will discuss the use of a simple architecture and machine language simulator to teach the CS1 concepts of conditional selection and iteration, along with the results of a pilot study on its effectiveness in a structural programming-based CS1 course. Possible other uses for the tool are also considered.
Analogies for teaching parallel computing to inexperienced programmers
Authors: Neeman Henry , Lee Lloyd , Mullen Julia , Newman Gerard
Published: January 2007

Parallel computing is increasingly a requirement of Computational Science and Engineering (CSE) software because problems of interest are very large and hardware systems are becoming parallel through multicore technologies. Inexperienced programmers-non-computer scientists with one semester to a few years of programming experience-are crucial to CSE software development because academic research teams rely on them as application developers. For this group, the basic concepts of parallelism can be explained by analogies rather than through exploring the specifics of various technologies. These analogies are also useful for computer scientists who are new to parallel computing.
Teaching database in an integrated oracle environment
Authors: Udoh Emmanuel
Published: January 2007

This paper describes the approach used to teach the database course to undergraduate majors. The curriculum is structured to provide two courses in sequence to teach the database technology to both the computer science (CS) and information systems (IS) majors in an integration-driven Oracle environment. In a team-oriented approach, a comprehensive project is tackled by beginning with part project at the introductory database level, which culminates in the integration of the whole project at the advanced database level. There is strong evidence, especially from the student evaluation, that the approach has resulted in better acquisition of database concepts and practice.
McKinley's Amazon
Authors: Ben-Ari Mordechai (Moti)
Published: January 2007

The internet is considered to have revolutionized our lives and the future is predicted to be even more revolutionary. I would like to place one aspect of modern technology---ecommerce---within an historical perspective. I examine the Sears mail-order catalog from 1897 and compare their products and services with those ecommerce pioneer Amazon.com. Amazon benefits from faster communications and transportation, but in terms of remote commerce it continues a venerable tradition, demonstrating that the internet offers few new
capabilities
for remote commerce that did not already exist a century ago.
A computing perspective on the Bologna process
Authors: Fuller Ursula , Pears Arnold , Amillo June , Avram Chris , Mannila Linda
Published: January 2007

The Bologna process is intended to culminate in the formation of the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) by 2010. Its aim is to facilitate the mobility of people, the transparency and recognition of qualifications, quality and development of a European dimension to higher education, and the attractiveness of European institutions for third country students.This paper provides an overview of progress towards implementation in EHEA member states using official documents and interview data from faculty teaching computing in countries represented at the ITiCSE 2006 meeting. The key areas where the structures established by the Bologna process are problematic for computing education arise from the rapidly changing nature of the curriculum. It seems that the maturity and capability criteria, as well as the manner in which learning outcomes are specified, being developed within the Bologna process are too general. This endangers the properties of transparency and mobility that the process intends to promote.Progression and prerequisite knowledge in computing degrees can be very specific. For instance, generic learning outcomes for an introductory programming course quite rightly will not specify the programming language, or languages, used to implement algorithms. However, suppose a student intends to study an advanced algorithms and data structures course in which Java is the language of implementation which has an introductory course in programming as a prerequisite. If the introductory course language was Standard ML it is not clear that the prerequisite course actually provides the student with a suitable background. These types of complexities are typical of computing, where early subject curricula are not standardised nationally or internationally, and create significant hurdles for realising the Bologna objectives.
A cognitive approach to identifying measurable milestones for programming skill acquisition
Authors: Mead Jerry , Gray Simon , Hamer John , James Richard , Sorva Juha , Clair Caroline St. , Thomas Lynda
Published: January 2007

Traditional approaches to programming education, as exemplified by the typical CS1/CS2 course sequence, have not taken advantage of the long record of psychological and experimental studies on the development of programming skills. These studies indicate a need for a new curricular strategy for developing programming skills and indicate that a cognitive approach would be a promising starting point. This paper first reviews the literature on studies of programming skills, cognition and learning, then within that context reports on a new formal structure, called ananchor graph, that supports curricular design and facilitates the setting of measurable milestones.
A reference collection for web spam
Authors: Castillo Carlos , Donato Debora , Becchetti Luca , Boldi Paolo , Leonardi Stefano , Santini Massimo , Vigna Sebastiano
Published: January 2007

We describe the WEBSPAM-UK2006 collection, a large set of Web pages that have been manually annotated with labels indicating if the hosts are include Web spam aspects or not. This is the first publicly available Web spam collection that includes page contents and links, and that has been labelled by a large and diverse set of judges.
The SIGIR 2006 workshop program
Authors: Anick Peter , Lalmas Mounia
Published: January 2007

The SIGIR workshop program aims to facilitate the development of subcommunities within the greater SIGIR population, encourage the exploration of new areas and foster interaction with participants from related fields. The 2006 program achieved all these goals with a broad range of workshops that both reunited researchers from previous workshops (such as multilingual information access and exploratory search) and introduced new topics (such as personal information management and faceted search).
Workshop on geographic information retrieval held at SIGIR'06
Authors: Purves Ross , Jones Chris
Published: January 2007

August 2006 saw the third in a series of workshops held to discuss the state of the art in Geographic Information Retrieval held in conjunction with SIGIR'06. The original call for papers for the workshop suggested the workshop should discuss further progress within the field and potential future research strands. Topics considered relevant for the workshop included the following:• architectures for geographic search engines;• spatial indexing of documents and other media resources;• extraction of geographical context from documents and geo-datasets;• geographical annotation techniques for geo-referenced media;• design, construction, maintenance and access methods for geographical ontologies, gazetteers and geographical thesauri;• geographical query interfaces for the web and geo-spatial libraries;• visualising the results of geographic searches; and• relevance ranking for geographical search.
Stylistics for text retrieval in practice
Authors: Uzuner Ozlem , Argamon Shlomo , Karlgren Jussi
Published: January 2007

Stylistics for Text Retrieval in Practice has met during SIGIR 2006. With participants from both academia and industry, the workshop spurred interesting discussions on the future of stylistics, its practical uses, and "killer app". The papers presented varied from customer feedback evaluation systems to automatic speech generation.
Object oriented goodness
Authors: Mather Karen
Published: January 2007

In her article 'What is Information Ethics?', Mathiesen seeks to establish a new framework for Information Ethics, contesting the 'rival theories' of Van Den Hoven and of Floridi. However, when the arguments are examined in terms of Object Oriented Modelling conventions, the concepts in question appear in a different light.
Information ethics, its nature and scope
Authors: Floridi Luciano
Published: January 2007

"The world of the future will be an ever more demanding struggle against the limitations of our intelligence, not a comfortable hammock in which we can lie down to be waited upon by our robot slaves"---Wiener (1964), p. 69.
Informational privacy and its ontological interpretation
Authors: Floridi Luciano
Published: January 2007

The article provides an outline of the ontological interpretation of informational privacy based on information ethics (Floridi, forthcoming-b). It is part of a larger project of research, in which I have developed the foundations of ideas presented here (Floridi, forthcoming-c) and their consequences (Floridi, forthcoming-a).As an outline, it is meant to be self-sufficient and to provide enough information to enable the reader to assess how the approach fares with respect to other alternatives. However, those interested in a more detailed analysis, and especially in the reasons offered in its favour, may wish to consult the other articles as well.
AS relationships
Authors: Dimitropoulos Xenofontas , Krioukov Dmitri , Fomenkov Marina , Huffaker Bradley , Hyun Young , claffy kc , Riley George
Published: January 2007

Research on performance, robustness, and evolution of the global Internet is fundamentally handicapped without accurate and thorough knowledge of the nature and structure of the contractual relationships between Autonomous Systems (ASs). In this work we introduce novel heuristics for inferring AS relationships. Our heuristics improve upon previous works in several technical aspects, which we outline in detail and demonstrate with several examples. Seeking to increase the value and reliability of our inference results, we then focus on validation of inferred AS relationships. We perform a survey with ASs' network administrators to collect information on the actual connectivity and policies of the surveyed ASs. Based on the survey results, we find that our new AS relationship inference techniques achieve high levels of accuracy: we correctly infer 96.5% customer to provider (c2p), 82.8% peer to peer (p2p), and 90.3% sibling to sibling (s2s) relationships. We then cross-compare the reported AS connectivity with the AS connectivity data contained in BGP tables. We find that BGP tables miss up to 86.2% of the true adjacencies of the surveyed ASs. The majority of the missing links are of the p2p type, which highlights the limitations of present measuring techniques to capture links of this type. Finally, to make our results easily accessible and practically useful for the community, we open an AS relationship repository where we archive, on a weekly basis, and make publicly available the complete Internet AS-level topology annotated with AS relationship information for every pair of AS neighbors.
Some remarks on ld plots for heavy-tailed traffic
Authors: Malone David , Duffy Ken , King Christopher
Published: January 2007

Ricciato [6] poses several questions, including why a particular LD (log-diagram) plot does not give the Hurst parameter predicted by theory? We offer an explanation of his observation and highlight other unusual aspects of LD plots.
Challenges in peer-to-peer gaming
Authors: Neumann Christoph , Prigent Nicolas , Varvello Matteo , Suh Kyoungwon
Published: January 2007

While multi-player online games are very successful, their fast deployment suffers from their server-based architecture. Indeed, servers both limit the scalability of the games and increase deployment costs. However, they make it easier to control the game (e.g. by preventing cheating and providing support for billing). Peer-to-peer, i.e. transfer of the game functions on each each player's machine, is an attractive communication model for online gaming. We investigate here the challenges of peer-to-peer gaming, hoping that this discussion will generate a broader interest in the research community.
VAX-11 Fortran
Authors: Khalil M. R.
Published: January 2007

This report describes the following flaws in VAX-11 Fortran version 3.5-62 compiler that may cause erroneous results without any warning. (1) It fails to detect an overflow condition in integer addition and subtraction; (2) it violates the semantic requirement of Fortran language with equal precedence operations of addition and subtraction.
The internet society announcing a new organization
Authors: Lyons Leila , Amsler Ann
Published: January 2007

The purpose of this document is to provide a brief description of the Internet Society and its goals and objectives. It will function as a professional society to facilitate, support, and promote the evolution and growth of the Internet as a global research communications infrastructure. The suggestions and recommendations of all parties interested in the Internet are solicited to assist in making the Internet Society robust, productive, and structured to meet the needs of its members.
The AT&T teaching theater at the University of Maryland at College Park
Authors: Gilbert Walter
Published: January 2007

The University of Maryland at College Park, with the support of AT&T, has designed and constructed a classroom where technology is used to promote teaching and learning. That is, the focus is on teaching and learning, not on the technology; the computers, networking, and audio/visual equipment are simply a means to help accomplish effective learning. The result is called the AT&T Teaching Theater: "Using technology to transform lectures and learning."
Machine Characterization Based on an Abstract High-level Language Machine
Authors: Saavedra-Barrera Rafael , Smith Alan J. , Miya Eugene
Published: January 2007

A
linear performance model
decomposes program execution into
n
distinct operations, such as adds, multiplies, loads, and stores. A program is characterized as an
n
-vector of operation counts, and a machine is characterized as an
n
-vector of operation times. The dot-product of the two is the time required for the machine to execute the program. A linear performance model has several uses:1. Once every machine and program is characterized, the performance of each program on each machine can be predicted without having to run them.2. Two machines (or programs) can be compared by comparing corresponding elements of their parameter vectors. The influence of individual parameters on overall performance can be used to predict the effect of design changes.3. Machines (and programs) can be classified by the similarity of their parameter vectors.
On the Fractal Dimension of Computer Programs and its Application to the Prediction of the Cache Miss Ratio
Authors: Thiebaut Dominique
Published: January 2007

Fractals are complex, nonsmooth functions with simple recursive characterizations. Many complex phenomena resemble fractals, and may therefore be analyzable. Intuitively the repetition structures of a computer program should produce patterns of fractal behavior. This paper shows fractal characteristics of cache-miss and memory-reference patterns across four program traces. It should be interesting to those wanting a simple classification of program behavior; cache designers should use more exact methods, such as trace-driven simulation.
Using the campus network to link faculty, staff, and graduate students with their children
Authors: Stager Sue
Published: January 2007

This past fall, University Computing Services provided a computer hook-up at the Indiana University - Bloomington campus day care center, enabling four-, five-, and six-year-old children to communicate with their parents during the day. The parents are faculty, staff, and students at Indiana University, and have access to computers in their office or at public computing sites throughout campus.
Book review: Performance Measurement of Computer Systems by Phillip McKerrow (Addison-Wesley 1988)
Authors: Finkel David
Published: January 2007

As its title indicates, this book has the very specific purpose of applying performance evaluation tools to the study of on-line transaction processing systems. The book provides both an overview of the relevant mathematical methods from performance evaluation, and an application of those methods to transaction processing systems.
Inside the LOOM description classifier
Authors: MacGregor Robert M.
Published: January 2007

This paper presents a symbol level account of some of the representation and reasoning structures within the LOOM knowledge representation system. Reasoning in LOOM centers around a classifier whose primary function is to construct a taxonomy of all descriptions that have been entered into the system. The LOOM classifier is unique in that it constructs a separate taxonomy for each of seven kinds of non-composite descriptions, and uses a marker passing algorithm to replace the quadratic time subsumption test found in most classifiers with a linear time test. We briefly illustrate how the selection of data structures within LOOM impacts the completeness of the classification algorithm, and we describe the LOOM option that allows concepts to be reasoned with in either a forward-chaining or a backward-chaining mode.
K-Rep system overview
Authors: Mays Eric , Dionne Robert , Weida Robert
Published: January 2007

The K-Rep system was built to explore the utility of a KL-One style knowledge representation in the development of expert systems. Beginning in about 1985, our activity in expert systems has been centered on the FAME (FinAncial Marketing Expertise) system[4]. FAME attempts to provide support to an IBM marketing representative in the financing decisions involved in the acquisition of large mainframe computer systems. Based on our experience in building a feasibility demonstration of FAME using a rule based approach, we concluded that the rule based technology would not easily scale up. Thus we abandoned the rule based approach in favor of organizing the system as a set of problem solvers around a common conceptual core. Since diverse problem solvers would be utilized in FAME, it was thought desireable that the conceptual core have a well-defined, enforceable semantics. These considerations led us to the KL-One[3] style knowledge representation.
CAKE
Authors: Rich Charles
Published: January 2007

The particular combination of facilities implemented in CAKE is motivated by the need to support research in automatic programing, rather than any specific set of research questions in knowledge representation and reasoning. Nevertheless, we believe CAKE epitomizes two central challenges in the current state of the art in knowledge representation and reasoning: How do we develop a principled approach to hybrid systems, and how do we learn to live with limited reasoning capabilities?
Case studies of SNePS
Authors: Shapiro Stuart C.
Published: January 2007

SNePS, the Semantic Network Processing System, has been designed to be a system for representing the beliefs of a natural-language-using intelligent system (a "cognitive agent"). This paper expands on this motivation, discusses some of the system features that derived from this motivation, and presents four case studies of interactions with SNePS demonstrating some of these features. The features demonstrated in the case studies are: non-standard connectives; the use of recursive rules; the Unique Variable Binding Rule, that says that two variables in a rule cannot be instantiated to the same term; and discussing sentences and propositions in natural language.
Topics in teaching and using APL2
Authors: Thomson Norman
Published: January 2007

APL2 is like many subjects in programming and mathematics in that it can appear sprawling, complex, vast and difficult to grasp if a few underlying principles are not well understood. Selecting and emphasising these to the point where they become the basis of ingrained habits on the part of students is the first crucial step towards success in teaching APL2. The next is to use these principles to separate clearly the roles of a set of primitive functions, namely disclose, first, take, pick and index which have strong similarities both in their function and in the symbols used to represent them. Then comes the discipline of using these and other functions in ways that exploit the self-specification nature of APL2, which if applied properly bears the same relation to software engineering as alternative medicine does to the orthodox brand.
Correspondence: Response to "Are Complete K-Trees Something More than Decision Trees?"
Authors: Schwartz Edward N. , Kiernan Gerard , Koltun Arnold
Published: January 2007

This is a response to the Correspondence from Gabriel Valiente regarding the article "Using Complete K-Trees to Generate Code in Pascal for an Expert System" that appeared in Volume 1 Number 2 of the
SIGART Bulletin.
Contrary to his assertion that the idea of a complete K-Tree is the central result presented, as the title indicates, the central result is the use of K-Trees to generate high level code for expert systems. Generation of such code is becoming increasingly important as expert systems, or what many people refer to as expert systems, are being integrated into larger applications. We would, nevertheless, like to clarify some of the points made in the Correspondence.
Software Review: The Great Theorem Prover Newborn Software 4874 Westmount St. Westmount, Quebec, Canada H3Y 1Y1; $30.00
Authors: Cohen Don
Published: January 2007

This product --- I'll refer to it as TGTP --- is a resolution theorem prover that runs on a standard IBM PC (not requiring anything like a 286, lots of memory, graphics, etc.). It contains several programs, some sample files and a manual of a little over 100 pages. It not only describes how to use the programs but also attempts to teach the reader how they work, and in the process, something about logic and resolution theorem provers in general. The preface says that, in addition to actually proving theorems, TGTP can be used for teaching theorem proving techniques. It is claimed to be understandable by high school students with a good mathematical background. I am not in a position to agree or disagree with this claim, but I have my doubts. It is also supposed to be of interest to mathematicians curious about progress in mechanical theorem proving, college students studying the subject and specialists in the area. TGTP evidently started out as a teaching aid for an AI course. For specialists I don't expect that it will be of more than passing interest, although it also has some entertainment value.
Broad agents
Authors: Bates Joseph , Loyall Bryan , Reilly W. Scott
Published: January 2007

The Oz project at Carnegie Mellon is developing technology for dramatic virtual worlds. One requirement of such worlds is the presence of broad, though perhaps shallow, agents. To support our needs, we are developing an agent architecture that provides goals and goal directed reactive behavior, emotional state and its effects on behavior, some natural language abilities (especially pragmatics based language generation), and some memory and inference abilities. We are limiting each of these capacities whenever necessary to allow us to build a broadly capable, integrated agent.In attempting to construct a broad agent, constraints seem to arise between components of the architecture. In this brief note, we discuss some of these constraints.
An analysis of soar as an integrated architecture
Authors: Laird John , Hucka Mike , Huffman Scott , Rosenbloom Paul
Published: January 2007

In this article we provide a brief analysis of the Soar architecture [Lairdet al.,1987; Lairdet al.,1990; Rosenbloomet al.,1991a] with respect to the issues listed in the preface of this collection.
A time-ordered architecture for integrating reflexive and deliberative behavior
Authors: Lewis Lundy M.
Published: January 2007

The objective of our research is to establish a universal architecture for effecting an autonomous control logic for land, space, air, and underwater platforms. Although the operational constraints of each platform are diverse, we perceive the general task to be the execution of a mission in an unstructured environment. The task requires reflexive and deliberative mechanisms that sometime trade off problems and sometime combine to solve a single problem. We propose a hierarchical time-ordered architecture for integrating these mechanisms.
On modularity in integrated architectures
Authors: Minton Steven
Published: January 2007

As computer scientists, most of us tend naturally to write modular systems. It is ingrained in our upbringing. The PRODIGY system (Minton
et al.
1989, Carbonell
et al.
1990) is an example of a highly modular system. PRODIGY has separate modules for planning, explanation-based learning, abstraction creation, experimentation and analogy, to name just a few. The system is rather traditional, in that it reflects the organization of the field of AI itself. Of course, an intelligent system need not be based on such a highly modular design. A system might be highly uniform throughout, with no obvious breakdown according to function, like some neural net models might suggest. Or a system might be very modular, but the functional breakdown might not look anything like that in the PRODIGY system, where each module corresponds to a different method for analysis or learning. In this brief paper, I speculate about the role of modularity in general intelligent systems and review the reasons why modularity might be an appropriate organizing principle.
Coordinating planning, perception, and action for mobile robots
Authors: Simmons Reid
Published: January 2007

To operate effectively with complex tasks in complex environments, agents must intelligently manage their limited physical and computational resources. This can be accomplished by explicitly coordinating the agent's planning, perception, and action. The Task Control Architecture (TCA) provides a vocabulary of coordination constructs that combines both deliberative and reactive aspects. The paper briefly describes the control constructs of TCA, and characterizes their applicability along several important dimensions.
Book review: Change of Representation and Inductive Bias Edited by D. Paul Benjamin (Kluwer Academic Publishers Boston, 1990)
Authors: Murphy Dennis D.
Published: January 2007

This is a collection of 18 papers from 20 contributors to the First International Workshop on Change Representation and Inductive Bias held June 8--10, 1988, in Tarrytown, NY, hosted by Philips Laboratories. The workshop was attended by 32 invited participants with 24 presenting. Although identified as proceedings by the editor, two of the papers reference a collection of "proceedings" available from Philips. Most of the papers in this book were written after the conference.
Book review: Abduetive Inference Models for Diagnostic Problem Solving by Y. Peng and J. Reggia (Springer Verlag New York 1990)
Authors: Thagard Paul
Published: January 2007

In the spring of 1990, the American Association for Artificial Intelligence sponsored a symposium on abductive inference, bringing together several dozen researchers (O'Rorke 1990). The term "abduction" as a form of inference originated with C.S. Peirce in the 1890s, and was introduced in artificial intelligence by Pople (1973). In recent years, it has found increasing use by researchers working on a diverse set of topics, particularly medical diagnosis, scientific discovery, and natural language understanding. But what is abductive inference?
Book review: INTELLIGENT DATABASES: OBJECT-ORIENTED, DEDUCTIVE HYPERMEDIA TECHNOLOGIES by K. Parsaye, M. Chignell, S. Khoshafian & H. Wong (John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1989)
Authors: Cook Linda K.
Published: January 2007

Of all the fields within the high technology industry, database systems is one that has changed most dramatically over the last ten years. These changes, particularly along the lines of hypermedia, will profoundly affect how all of us, not just computer scientists, will interact with, manage, create, and learn new information. If you are feeling somewhat "low-tech" and uninformed in a fast-paced, high-tech world, this book may be a good investment. It conveys to the reader both a sense of excitement about and a mastery over this evolving discipline.
Book review: English-Japanese, Japanese-English Dictionary of Computer and Data-Processing Terms by Gene Ferber (MIT Press, 1989)
Authors: Tripp Steven D.
Published: January 2007

The design of a dictionary is a more complicated problem than it may appear. There are many basic decisions about the ordering of words and the kinds of information under each entry. Dictionaries need not be in alphabetical order, and, when different alphabets are used, the question of order arises naturally.
The standards factor
Authors: Billingsley Pat
Published: January 2007

This month's column focuses on the current status of various drafts of international standards, rather than on the progress of individual committees. There are two reasons for this shift in emphasis. First, in many cases, an International Organization for Standardization (ISO) committee and its parallel American National Standards Institute (ANSI) committee are jointly developing one or more parts of the same standard, so there is a lot of duplication in the reports of their activities. Second, several user-interface-related draft ISO standards have recently been released for balloting. Each country belonging to ISO, including the United States, has the opportunity to vote on these drafts. However, since there is only one vote per country, it is important that all interested parties in the U. S. follow the progress of these drafts and register any concerns they may have
before
the draft becomes an official international standard.
Protecting rights in user interface designs
Authors: Shneiderman Ben
Published: January 2007

Sacrificing individual rights in the hopes of benefitting the public good is a tempting but often misguided pursuit. I believe that protecting individual rights (civil, voting, privacy, intellectual property, etc.) is usually the best way to benefit and advance the public good.
STATUS REPORT ON THE USER INTERFACE MAGAZINE
Authors: Myers Brad A.
Published: January 2007

In May 1989, the SIGCHI Executive Committee voted to form a Publications Committee to investigate CHI-related publications. The SIGCHI Publications Committee had a meeting on October 15, 1989 [1]. The committee recommended the founding of a new magazine on computer-human interaction to address the area of interface design and implementation.
Errors in computerized office work
Authors: Prümper Jochen , Frese Michael , Zapf Dieter , Brodbeck Felix C.
Published: January 2007

This paper deals with errors by novices and experts when interacting with the computer in normal office work. Three criteria are discussed to determine the level of expertise: a) total length of time that the user has worked computers, b) number of programs known, and c) length of daily work-time with the computer. In contrast to widespread assumptions, experts did not make less errors than novices (except knowledge errors). On the other hand, experts spent less time handling the errors than novices. A cluster analysis produced groups of Occasional-, Frequent-, Beginning- and General Users in the work force.
Computers in teaching initiative
Authors: Gershuny J. I. , Slater J. B.
Published: January 2007

In 1982, the Nelson working party of the Computer Board for Universities and Research Councils identified serious shortages in the provision of workstations for use in teaching in UK universities, and in the support of those workstations with software and skilled manpower. Countries such as the USA, Japan and Germany were at that time apparently doing much better. As a result, the Board set aside three tranches of £500000 at half yearly intervals to fund 23 pilot projects in the use of computers in teaching. This was supplemented by a further project funded by the Department of Education for Northern Ireland. In 1985, the University Grants Committee injected significant funds and, by 1986/7, the central expenditure on a total of 139 projects was £9.5 million. Allowing for university contributions above the central provision, the initiative brought together funds of approximately £20 million.
The worst order in not always the lexicographic order
Authors: Reeves Alyson A.
Published: January 2007

Consider
I
an homogeneous ideal in
S
=
k
[
x
0
,...,
x

n

], where
k
is a field of characteristic zero. For any multiplicative order > on
S
with
x
0
>
x
1
> ... >
x

n

, denote by
M
>
(
I
) the maximum degree of a generator of the Gröbner basis for
I
with respect to the order >. It is known [BaSt87] that if
I
is in generic coordinates, then
M

rev. lex.

(
I
) is minimal among all orders.
Brief review: Queueing Networks-Exact Computational Algorithms: A Unified Theory Based on Decomposition and Aggregation by Adrian E. Conway and Nicholas D. Georganas (MIT Press 1989)
Authors: Finkel David
Published: January 2007

Unlike the other, more specialized, books given brief reviews in this issue, this book would be an appropriate text for an introductory graduate course in performance evaluation. The book presumes a knowledge of probability theory, which is reviewed in an appendix. There is a chapter on single queueing systems, which covers the M/M/1 queueing system in detail, and a number of related models. In particular, the author has a section on reversibility and one on the M/G/1 queue.
Comparative evaluation of approximate methods for modelling of network systems
Authors: Fateyev A. E. , Porotskiy S. M. , Drujinin V. I.
Published: January 2007

The paper discloses the results of a comparative evaluation of several approximate methods of queueing network analysis concerning their accuracy, fields of validity and computational consumptions; the comparison is being carried out with varying values of network parameters.
The standards factor
Authors: Billingsley Pat
Published: January 2007

New standards committees are springing up left and right, old standards committees are releasing documents with abandon, and global demand for standards is increasing; meanwhile, the SIGCHI community waits breathlessly for information. Perhaps I exaggerate, but it does seem to be time once again to bring you the latest news from user interface standards committees around the world.
The interface specialist
Authors: Normore Lorraine F.
Published: January 2007

Through involvement in on-going development projects, we investigated issues brought about by having interface specialists rather than generally trained system development staff designing and developing interfaces. This article reports on some of the issues raised, discusses the activities associated with this project and points out differences in the perceptions of the tasks seen as relevant to this role by a human factors professional and by systems development staff.
Four generic communication tasks which must be supported in electronic conferencing
Authors: McCarthy John C. , Miles Victoria C. , Monk Andrew F. , Harrison Michael D. , Dix Alan J. , Wright Peter C.
Published: January 2007

In this paper we describe and discuss the design implications of four Generic Communication Tasks which must be supported in electronic conferencing.
A methodology for taking account of user tasks, goals and behavior for design of computerized library catalogs
Authors: Belkin N. J.
Published: January 2007

Catalogs have long been the primary device by which people gain access to the contents of libraries. For most of the twentieth century, this device has been in the form of the familiar card catalog. The advent of library automation systems in the 1960s and 1970s, originally for such housekeeping tasks as acquisition and circulation control, provided the opportunity for a new form of library catalog, which is now known generically as the Online Public Access Catalog (OPAC).
KARMA
Authors: Czerwinski M. , Schumacher R. , Duba B.
Published: January 2007

KARMA is a quantitative model which can be used to predict a user's acquisition, retention, maintenance, and transfer of system knowledge. In KARMA, three stages over the course of an operator's model (see Schumacher & Czerwinski, in press) are characterized:
pretheoretic
- the understanding of system structure centers on the retrieval of superficially similar instances in memory; experiential - some understanding of causal system relationships emerges, as does some reliance upon structural system information. Also, abstraction begins to occur across different, but similar systems; and
expert
- at this stage, the user makes abstractions across various system representations stored in memory; full reliance upon structural system knowledge emerges. Currently, a programmed simulation is used to compare our theoretical predictions and assumptions with experimental data. The simulation is running in Scheme (a dialect of LISP).
Psychometric evaluation of an after-scenario questionnaire for computer usability studies
Authors: Lewis James R.
Published: January 2007

A three-item after-scenario questionnaire was used in three related usability tests in different areas of the United States. The studies had eight scenarios in common. After participants finished a scenario, they completed the After-Scenario Questionnaire (the ASQ). A factor analysis of the responses to the ASQ items revealed that an eight-factor solution explained 94 percent of the variability of the 24 (eight scenarios by three items per scenario) items. The varimax-rotated factor pattern showed that these eight factors were clearly associated with the eight scenarios. The benefit of this research to system designers is that this three-item questionnaire has acceptable psychometric properties of reliability, sensitivity, and concurrent validity, and may be used with confidence in other, similar usability studies.
The evaluation of cursor control devices for space station freedom
Authors: Holden Kritina L. , Muratore Debra , Rudisill Marianne
Published: January 2007

Human-Computer Interface researchers at the Johnson Space Center are faced with the challenge of designing a cursor control device for use in zero gravity so that crewmembers can take full advantage of direct manipulation interfaces. Over the past year, the Crew Interface Analysis Section (CIAS) and the Astronaut Space Station Support Office at the Johnson Space Center in Houston have been working together to generate a research-based recommendation for the design of a microgravity cursor control device for Space Station Freedom.
A MULTIMEDIA INTERACTIVE CULTURAL SIMULATION
Authors: Adelson Beth , Schlusselberg Evelyn
Published: January 2007

In this short paper we describe an application with an
interactive multimedia interface
designed to help students develop
analytic and argument construction skills
in the context of a college level French curriculum. Using the application helps students':• French language comprehension.• Abilities to generate extended pieces of French text.• Psychological and sociological analytical skills: Not only are these skills an important part of a general education, they are central to the kind of cultural adaptation that is part of learning, in a deep sense, a foreign language.• Abilities to identify and structure central points when generating arguments.
CHILDREN'S USE OF A DIRECT MANIPULATION LIBRARY CATALOG
Authors: Borgman Christine L. , Walter Virginia A.
Published: January 2007

The Science Library Catalog project is a component of Project SEED, a hands-on science project for elementary schools based at the California Institute of Technology. The Science Library Catalog has been implemented in the libraries of two elementary schools in Los Angeles and will soon be installed in the Los Angeles Public Library, each with location-specific databases of science and technology materials. Our primary interface is a graphical browsing structure, consisting of a hierarchy of bookshelves based on the Dewey Decimal Classification, implemented in HyperCard on the Macintosh.