ppxscal/embedding_network huggingface dataset:
Towards common sense planning
Authors: Wah-Bih Liaw, Frank M. Brown, Srung S. Park
Venue: Proceedings of the 1990 ACM annual conference on Cooperation (1990)

Classical planners are deficient in dealing with incomplete knowledge, resulting in incorrect interpretation of situations. This paper introduces a new planner ACP that tackles the problem by combining an action model based on Brown's quantified modal logic Z and a bi-directional reasoning scheme. The commonsense reasoning is handled by doing case analysis on default formulas that characterize each action's logical meaning. ACP suggests a simple and efficient approach for maintaining and updating consistent beliefs at major action steps. The frame problem and the qualification problem are dealt by introducing appropriate default rules and consistency criterion to the action model. Incremental constraints are used to ensure that the next state will be consistent with achieving the goals. The whole planning process can be modified when an unexpected action outcome occurs. The research also shows that if a plan is logically possible, ACP will find it. Therefore, ACP is complete.
Context: what does it mean to application design
Authors: Helen Maskery, Gord Hopkins, Tim Dudley
Venue: ACM SIGCHI Bulletin (1992)

This is the report of a workshop held at CHI'90. It describes the discussions and findings of the two days. The report starts with definition of terms. It moves on to look at the goals and benefits of including context in applications. Next the report presents some cautions to developers and finally, the report covers the discussions about real applications which might include context-sensitivity.
Towards task models for embedded information retrieval
Authors: H. Ulrich Hoppe, Franz Schiele
Venue: Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems (1992)

This paper investigates to what extent task-oriented user support based on plan recognition is feasible in a highly situation-driven domain like information retrieval (IR) and discusses requirements for appropriate task models. It argues that information seeking tasks which are embedded in some higher-level external task context (e.g. travel planning) often exhibit procedural dependences; that these dependences are mainly due to external task; and that they can be exploited for inferring the users' goals and plans. While there is a clear need for task models in IR to account for situational determinants of user behaviour, what is required are hybrid models that take account of both is &ldquo;planned&rdquo; and &ldquo;situated&rdquo; aspects. Empirical evidence for the points made is reported from a probabilistic analysis of retrieval sessions with a fact database and from experience with plan-based and state-based methods for user support in an experimental travel planning system
Animation of dynamic legged locomotion
Authors: Marc H. Raibert, Jessica K. Hodgins
Venue: ACM SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics (1991)

This paper is about the use of control algorithms to animate dynamic legged locomotion. Control could free the animator from specifying the details of joint and limb motion while producing both physically realistic and natural looking results. We implemented computer animations of a biped robot, a quadruped robot, and a kangaroo. Each creature was modeled as a linked set of rigid bodies with compliant actuators at its joints. Control algorithms regulated the running speed, organized use of the legs, and maintained balance. All motions were generated by numerically integrating equations of motion derived from the physical models. The resulting behavior included running at various speeds, traveling with several gaits (run, trot, bound, gallop, and hop), jumping, and traversing simple paths. Whereas the use of control permitted a variety of physically realistic animated behavior to be generated with limited human intervention, the process of designing the control algorithms was not automated: the algorithms were "tweaked" and adjusted for each new creature.
The *M-ary tree and *Ternary hillsort
Authors: Fred L. Heller, Alan L. Tharp
Venue: Proceedings of the 1992 ACM annual conference on Communications (1992)

Sorting is a significant activity for which better methods are always sought. In many computing scenarios, sorting must be done with the majority of data items remaining on an auxiliary storage device. This paper introduces a new data structure, the *M-ary tree, which improves external sorting. The recent adaptation of the heapsort to an external sorting strategy, called the Hillsort, combined with the *M-ary tree structure allow the development of the *Ternary Hillsort. The *Ternary Hillsort is an external heapsort, which has superior performance over the external heapsort, Hillsort. The *Ternary Hillsort executes faster than Hillsort. The *ternary tree, a variant of a ternary tree, allows the *Ternary Hillsort to exist since parent/child and sibling relationships are easily calculated, as opposed to an ordinary ternary tree.
Self-Improving Reactive Agents Based on Reinforcement Learning, Planning and Teaching
Authors: Long-Ji Lin
Venue: Machine Learning (1992)

To date, reinforcement learning has mostly been studied solving simple learning tasks. Reinforcement learning methods that have been studied so far typically converge slowly. The purpose of this work is thus two-fold: 1) to investigate the utility of reinforcement learning in solving much more complicated learning tasks than previously studied, and 2) to investigate methods that will speed up reinforcement learning.This paper compares eight reinforcement learning frameworks: adaptive heuristic critic (AHC) learning due to Sutton, Q-learning due to Watkins, and three extensions to both basic methods for speeding up learning. The three extensions are experience replay, learning action models for planning, and teaching. The frameworks were investigated using connectionism as an approach to generalization. To evaluate the performance of different frameworks, a dynamic environment was used as a testbed. The environment is moderately complex and nondeterministic. This paper describes these frameworks and algorithms in detail and presents empirical evaluation of the frameworks.
A storage and access manager for ill-structured data
Authors: Jeffrey Kottemann, Michael Gordon, Jack Stott
Venue: Communications of the ACM (1991)

Database management systems are powerful tools for processing large volumes of structured, or normalized, data. Much of the data to be stored in computer systems, however, differs from normalized data in both its logical uses and the storage structure required for its effective management. For instance, Van Rijsbergen (1979) distinguishes database retrieval from information retrieval (IR)&mdash;the retrieval of references to text&mdash;by comparing the following logical characteristics of IR systems to database management systems: IR Systems employ partial (vs. exact) matching; they are built on an underlying probabilistic (vs. deterministic) model; they classify information on a polythetic (vs. monothetic) basis, and queries are incompletely (vs. completely) specified. Similarly, other forms of relatively ill-structured data such as semantic networks [15]&mdash;which require property inheritance, and production rules&mdash;which must be joined in logical chains also differ in their logical use from normalized record structures.
Practical trade-offs for open interconnection
Authors: Michael Fry
Venue: Proceedings of the 1992 ACM annual conference on Communications (1992)

There is increasing market pressure to provide support for the open interconnection of systems via general purpose protocol suites such as OSI and TCP/IP. The complexity of these protocols means that the achievement of acceptable performance is not easy. Indeed, some would claim it is impossible, and advocate lean, closed protocols. A further aspect of communications architectures in the world outside the research laboratory is that they must be well structured and modular, in order to meet the needs of orderly systems development and the provision of configurable products. This paper examines the trade-offs between these three aspects of protocol stack development: conformance to standards, reasonable performance and modularity. It finds that while a considerable amount of work has been carried out in recent times, it is apparent that we do not know yet how to achieve all three.
A generic framework for distributed, cooperating blackboard systems
Authors: Brandon L. Buteau
Venue: Proceedings of the 1990 ACM annual conference on Cooperation (1990)

The Cooperative Architecture of Independent Blackboards (CAIBL) package is an evolving product of an independent research and development program in distributed problem solving at Planning Research Corporation (PRC). It was originally adapted from Stanford's BB1, a general-purpose shell for the development of blackboard-based expert systems. CAIBL provides support for communicating, cooperating expert systems that are distributed across heterogeneous platforms. Its primary focus is to serve as a flexible framework for distributed expert systems working concurrently upon multiple problems that require dynamic control of communication decisions. This paper identifies the prior research upon which CAIBL is based and describes key components of CAIBL's architecture.
Instance-Based Learning Algorithms
Authors: David W. Aha, Dennis Kibler, Marc K. Albert
Venue: Machine Learning (1991)

Storing and using specific instances improves the performance of several supervised learning algorithms. These include algorithms that learn decision trees, classification rules, and distributed networks. However, no investigation has analyzed algorithms that use only specific instances to solve incremental learning tasks. In this paper, we describe a framework and methodology, called instance-based learning, that generates classification predictions using only specific instances. Instance-based learning algorithms do not maintain a set of abstractions derived from specific instances. This approach extends the nearest neighbor algorithm, which has large storage requirements. We describe how storage requirements can be significantly reduced with, at most, minor sacrifices in learning rate and classification accuracy. While the storage-reducing algorithm performs well on several real-world databases, its performance degrades rapidly with the level of attribute noise in training instances. Therefore, we extended it with a significance test to distinguish noisy instances. This extended algorithm's performance degrades gracefully with increasing noise levels and compares favorably with a noise-tolerant decision tree algorithm.
Synthesis of Statistical Knowledge from Time-Dependent Data
Authors: David K. Y. Chiu, Andrew K. C. Wong, Keith C. C. Chan
Venue: IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (1991)

A general approach to analyzing multivariate time-dependent system processes with discrete-valued (both nominal and ordinal) and/or continuous-valued outcomes is presented. The approach is based on an event-covering method which selects (or covers) a subspace from the outcome space of an n-tuple of variables for estimation purposes. From the covered subspace, statistically interdependent events are selected as statistical knowledge for forecasting unknown events. The event-covering method presented is based on the use of restricted variables with only a subset of the outcomes considered. An extension to the event-covering method based on the selection of joint outcomes is discussed. The testing of this method using climatic data and simulated data which model situations in real life is described. The experiments show that the method is able to detect statistically relevant information, describe it in a meaningful and comprehensible way, and use this information for a reliable estimation (or forecast) of the missing values that will occur at some future time.
Efficient parallel logic simulation techniques for the connection machine
Authors: Moon Jung Chung
Venue: Proceedings of the 1990 ACM/IEEE conference on Supercomputing (1990)

Three efficient parallel logic simulation techniques for the Connection Machine are developed. The first technique, which uses a global clock, is a synchronous version of a traditional simulation technique. The second technique is a hybrid of both the synchronous simulation technique with a global clock and the Chandy-Misra algorithm for asynchronous event processing. The third technique, called a simulation time lookahead technique, is proposed to make the second technique more optimistic than the Chandy-Misra algorithm by predicting in advance the timestamp of the next event. Experimental results show that the three techniques achieve better performance than the Time Warp protocol on the Connection Machine. The proposed techniques are several hundred times faster than the VHDL simulator on a SUN3, especially for circuits with very large number of gates.
Ada as a preprocessor language
Authors: P. L. Baker
Venue: ACM SIGAda Ada Letters (1990)

Preprocessors are components of a software development environment that can increase productivity by providing semantic capabilities for expressing certain source language statement s concisely and directly which would otherwise be expressed indirectly and verbosely. Moreover, it is frequently necessary to reflect a single programming decision in several places in the source text; a preprocessor can propagate a single specification of such a decision to the points it affects thereby reducing effort and removing the possibility a consistency error. In traditional environments, the language of preprocessor statements differs from the underlying programming language, e.g., CPP differs from C itself. If such deviations were allowed in an Ada environment, they would impair portability and detract from the effort to provide widespread, uniform language training in pure Ada. This paper demonstrates, however, that Ada is, by itself, a viable preprocessor language provided two conventions are adopted. First, the compilation sequence of preprocessing must be used; fortunately, an Ada compiler can serve in a preprocessor step without affecting its validation under the ACVC. Second, normal and preprocessor statements are not intermixed; Ada package structure must be employed to separate contexts that would be differentiated by syntax in traditional preprocessing. The distinctive compilation sequence of Ada preprocessing is a multiple pass compilation where compilation steps are connected via Ada text, not Ada library units. The results of one compilation pass are converted to text via an execution step and then provided as text input to the next step. As an example, the paper describes a preprocessor that constructs subsystem interfaces.
Approximate MVA solutions with fixed throughput classes
Authors: Arnold O. Allen, Gary Hynes
Venue: ACM SIGMETRICS Performance Evaluation Review (1990)

Transaction (open) type workloads are often used in approximating computer system workloads which are actually closed because open workloads provide reasonable estimates in many cases and their solutions are straight-forward. We have found that their use can distort the results for many workloads in a multiclass queueing network model of a computer system. We have replaced transaction workloads with what we call fixed class workloads. We present an approximate algorithm based on MVA that represents a class with a given throughput by a corresponding terminal or batch class, which we call a fixed class workload. We solve for the closed population required to deliver the requested throughput. We also present techniques for overcoming problems encountered in the solution of some fixed class models.
A rapid hierarchical radiosity algorithm
Authors: Pat Hanrahan, David Salzman, Larry Aupperle
Venue: Proceedings of the 18th annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques (1991)

This paper presents a rapid hierarchical radiosity algorithm for illuminating scenes containing large polygonal patches. The algorithm constructs a hierarchical representation of the form factor matrix by adaptively subdividing patches into subpatches according to a user-supplied error bound. The algorithm guarantees that all form factors are calculated to the same precision, removing many common image artifacts due to inaccurate form factors. More importantly, the algorithm decomposes the form factor matrix into at most O(n) blocks (where n is the number of elements). Previous radiosity algorithms represented the element-to-element transport interactions with n2 form factors. Visibility algorithms are given that work well with this approach. Standard techniques for shooting and gathering can be used with the hierarchical representation to solve for equilibrium radiosities, but we also discuss using a brightness-weighted error criteria, in conjunction with multigridding, to even more rapidly progressively refine the image.
On Job Assignment for a Parallel System of Processor Sharing Queues
Authors: Flavio Bonomi
Venue: IEEE Transactions on Computers (1990)

Two of the optimality criteria most commonly considered to compare job assignment policies, namely, the stochastic order and the average total completion time criterion, are discussed. It is shown that the latter, while being weaker than the former, still provides a useful criterion when policies are to be evaluated in terms of average performance measures such as the system average response time. Some of the most relevant results available in the literature on job assignment to parallel first come, first served (FCFS) servers are summarized. The assignment problem is discussed for a parallel system of processor sharing (PS) queues with exponential interarrival times and exponential and identical service requirements. The optimality of the join-the-shortcut-queue (JSQ) assignment policy for this case is proven. Feasible policies for general service time distribution are discussed. An approach allowing a meaningful comparison of servers in the perspective of job assignment is proposed. A comparison of the assignment problem for FCFS and PS parallel systems is presented.
Creation machines: Stanley Kubrick's view of computers in 2001
Authors: Mark Midbon
Venue: ACM SIGCAS Computers and Society (1991)

A retrospective look at the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey shows that Stanley Kubrick paid a great deal of attention to computer developments of the late 1960s. In particular, the recurring image of the monolith turns out to represent a monolithic integrated circuit. The movie shows that computers and other tools have an important role in creating the human race. And the film teaches a set of ethics for using the computer.
Extending the behavioral capabilities of the object-oriented paradigm with an active model of propagation
Authors: Heidi J. C. Ellis, Steven A. Demurjian, Fred J. Maryanski, George McA. Beshers, Joan Peckham
Venue: Proceedings of the 1990 ACM annual conference on Cooperation (1990)

Object-oriented design techniques have begun to play a critical role in increasing productivity, assuring correctness, and modeling both the structure and behavior of applications. However, while most object-oriented models support intra-class behavior definition through encapsulation, inter-class relationships and behavior are supported in only a limited sense, i.e., within ISA or inheritance hierarchies. This is a serious draw-back when attempting to model advanced applications such as software-development environments (SDEs) and CAD/CAM. In order to model these critical inter-class relationships and behavior, our goal is to incorporate propagation actions into an object-oriented data model at the design-phase level. This results in increased accuracy in the modeling of information, more complete specification of system behavior, elimination of some side effects, and decreased application coding errors. To meet this goal, this paper presents the active model of propagation (AMP) which supports the specification of inter-class relationships during the design phase to permit system enforced propagation.
Authentication in distributed systems: theory and practice
Authors: Butler Lampson, Martín Abadi, Michael Burrows, Edward Wobber
Venue: ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review (1991)

We describe a theory of authentication and a system that implements it. Our theory is based on the notion of principal and a "speaks for" relation between principals. A simple principal either has a name or is a communication channel; a compound principal can express an adopted role or delegation of authority. The theory explains how to reason about a principal's authority by deducing the other principals that it can speak for; authenticating a channel is one important application. We use the theory to explain many existing and proposed mechanisms for security. In particular, we describe the system we have built. It passes principals efficiently as arguments or results of remote procedure calls, and it handles public and shared key encryption, name lookup in a large name space, groups of principals, loading programs, delegation, access control, and revocation.
Who teaches management information systems?
Authors: George P. Schell
Venue: ACM SIGCPR Computer Personnel (1991)

Does the AACSB common body of knowledge requirement for information systems (including applications) suggest that this discipline be included in course work in each business school discipline? Certainly information systems permeate all functional areas of business. Therefore, should information systems theory and practice be incorporated into the course work of all disciplines of the business school? If the answers to these questions are "yes" then it becomes very important to address how students learn information theory and applications.Most business schools have an information systems course as a core requirement. An introductory course to management information systems (MIS) provides the overview of the field. Many introductory MIS texts devote chapters and/or case studies to the application of information systems to different functional areas of businesses. Beyond this overview, course work in other disciplines utilizes computer software and applications.This article provides a discussion of the abilities of other disciplines to incorporate information system theory and practice into course work. It is supported by an example of an expert system that was introduced in a business policies course. The design and implementation of that expert system provided insights into the students' perceptions of expert systems and also into the abilities of non-MIS instructors to assimilate information systems concepts into their courses.
Using MAPLE for the analysis of bifurcation phenomena in condensed-phase surface combustion
Authors: Marc Garbey, Hans G. Kaper, Gary K. Leaf, Bernard J. Matkowsky
Venue: Journal of Symbolic Computation (1991)

This article describes the use of the symbolic manipulation language MAPLE for the analysis of bifurcation phenomena in condensed-phase combustion. The physical problem concerns the structure and stability properties of a combustion front that propagates in the axial direction along the surface of a cylindrical solid fuel element. Experimental observations suggest that the front may propagate in a number of different ways; the objective of the investigation is to describe these different modes of propagation. The analysis involves the study of a set of nonlinear partial differential equations which describe the structure and evolution of the combustion front. Because the location of the front is unknown and must be found as part of the solution, the problem is a free boundary value problem. The purpose of this article is to show how symbolic manipulation languages like MAPLE can be combined effectively with analysis and numerical computations for this type of investigation.