ppxscal/embedding_network huggingface dataset:
Software engineering education in the associate-degree-level vocational/technical computer science program
Authors: E. R. Richmond
Venue: ACM SIGCSE Bulletin (1989)

The need for software engineers has grown with the increased use of software and computers in our society. Presently, formal education of software engineers is being conducted at the graduate degree level. There are pressure to extend this education to other academic levels; in fact, many baccalaureate degree programs today include one or more software engineering courses. Difficulties confronting software engineering education at the associate-degree level include: limited educational and experience backgrounds of the students; faculty whose own education did not include software engineering; and severe time and content constraints imposed on such two-year programs. The author concludes that the two-year associate-degree-level vocational/technical computer science program should continue to focus on producing graduates with sound programming and problem-solving skills with which to gain entry level employment, and upon which those graduates can build, with further experience and education, toward a software engineering career, Software engineering education in the two-year vocational/technical program, then, should be restricted to that which directly enhances the development of these basic skills; specific recommendations are offered for consideration.
Rules for implementing very large knowledge base systems
Authors: J. B. Bocca, J. C. Freytag
Venue: ACM SIGMOD Record (1989)

With the current research effort in knowledge base management systems (KBMSs) the interest in storing, retrieving, and processing rules efficiently, and using them for describing and implementing such systems has increased significantly. In this paper we contribute to this subject in two ways. First, we introduce Educe*, an integrated programming system for building large knowledge base systems. In particular, we describe the treatment of rules and complex logic terms, examine at the physical level the compilation of logic programs and its subsequent storage, retrieval and execution in the specified context, and discuss performance related aspects of our system. Second, we provide an overview on how to use rules for organizing the processing of user requests in a database/knowledge base environment. Specifically, we discuss aspects of rule-based query optimization and compilation. Finally, we outline additional query processing problems that could benefit from a rule-based specification and a rule-driven implementation.
Pascal's emulation of a Prolog program
Authors: Howard Lambert
Venue: ACM SIGCSE Bulletin (1988)

This paper describes a Turbo Pascal program that explicitly emulates a Turbo Prolog program. The intended purpose of the Pascal program is to relate important implementation details of Prolog to concepts in a conventional programming language.
The status of the time warp operating system
Authors: D. Jefferson, B. Beckman, L. Blume, M. Diloreto, P. Hontalas, P. Reiher, K. Sturdevant, J. Tupman, J. Wedel, F. Wieland, H. Younger
Venue: Proceedings of the third conference on Hypercube concurrent computers and applications: Architecture, software, computer systems, and general issues - Volume 1 (1988)

The Time Warp Operating System (TWOS) is a special-purpose operating system designed to support parallel discrete event simulation. It has been under experimental development at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory for four years, and runs primarily on the JPL/Caltech Mark III Hypercube, although it has been ported to several other systems. Its main distinction is that it incorporates a full implementation of the Time Warp mechanism, which is based on the unusual synchronization primitives of process rollback and message-antimessage annihilation. In this paper we discuss the status of the TWOS project at JPL, and present preliminary data from some of the performance experiments we have conducted on a Pool Balls benchmark, along with our analysis of them.
Using critics to empower users
Authors: Gerhard Fischer, Andreas C. Lemke, Thomas Mastaglio, Anders I. Morch
Venue: Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems: Empowering people (1990)

We describe the critiquing approach to building knowledge-based interactive systems. Critiquing supports computer users in their problem solving and learning activities. The challenges for the next generation of knowledge-based systems provide a context for the development of this paradigm. We discuss critics from the perspective of overcoming the problems of high-functionality computer systems, of providing a new class of systems to support learning, of extending applications-oriented construction kits to design environments, and of providing an alternative to traditional autonomous expert systems. One of the critiquing systems we have built &mdash; JANUS, a critic for architectural design &mdash; is used as an example of the key aspects of the critiquing process. We also survey additional critiquing systems developed in our and other research groups.
Linking the colleges and the computer science center or puzzle pieces fit together
Authors: S. Clabaugh, B. Rush, J. Fajman
Venue: Proceedings of the 17th annual ACM SIGUCCS conference on User Services (1989)

The Computer Science Center at the University of Maryland at College Park provides user services functions to colleges by hiring discipline oriented consultants to place within the colleges. These consultants are known as Campus Computing Associates. The major purpose of the program is to provide a formal link between the colleges and the central computing organization. This link furnishes a structure to improve communications, provide advice and help to the colleges in their own environment, and provide insights to the central computing center concerning the everyday needs of the faculty. This paper will describe the Campus Computing Associates program from two perspectives: the computing associate and the dual management structure which oversees the program.
Inducing programs in a direct-manipulation environment
Authors: D. L. Maulsby, I. H. Witten
Venue: Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems: Wings for the mind (1989)

End users who need to program within highly interactive direct-manipulation interfaces should be able to communicate their intentions through concrete demonstration rather than in terms of symbolic abstraction. This paper describes a system that learns procedures in interactive graphics taught to it &ldquo;by example&rdquo; by minimally trained users. It shows how techniques of machine learning and reactive interfaces can support one another&mdash;the former providing generalization heuristics to identify constraints implicit in user actions, the latter offering immediate feedback to help the user clarify hidden constraints and correct errors before they are planted into the procedure. The teacher's attention is focused on the learning system's perceptual and inferential shortcomings through a metaphorical apprentice called Metamouse, which generalizes action sequences on the fly and eagerly carries out any actions it can predict. The success of the induction process is assessed quantitatively by counting erroneous predictions made during example tasks.
A Bayesian probability approach to predicting student performance in introductory computer science courses
Authors: D. M. Wiig
Venue: ACM SIGSMALL/PC Notes (1989)

This writer is currently conducting research on the academic performance of students in the introductory computing classes at Grand View College. The major premise of the study is that although these introductory courses have been taught for the past nine years, there has been no systematic attempt to evaluate causal factors pertaining to student performance in these classes, and to then incorporate that information into curriculum planning and development.
Concurrent multiple target tracking
Authors: T. D. Gottschalk
Venue: Proceedings of the third conference on Hypercube concurrent computers and applications - Volume 2 (1989)

A concurrent algorithm for multiple target tracking is presented. The underlying tracking formalism is first described by way of a sequential program, and the issues in generalizing the tracker for efficient concurrent implementations are discussed in detail. Typical tracking results on the Mark III hypercube are presented.
Design, implementation and evaluation of the FNC-2 attribute grammar system
Authors: Martin Jourdan, Didier Parigot, Catherine Julié, Olivier Durin, Carole Le Bellec
Venue: Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN 1990 conference on Programming language design and implementation (1990)

FNC-2 is a new attribute grammar processing system aiming at expressive power, efficiency, ease of use and versatility. Its development at INRIA started in 1986, and a first running prototype is available since early 1989. Its most important features are: efficient exhaustive and incremental visit-sequence-based evaluation of strongly (absolutely) non-circular AGs; extensive space optimizations; a specially-designed AG-description language, with provisions for true modularity; portability and versatility of the generated evaluators; complete environment for application development. This paper briefly describes the design and implementation of FNC-2 and its peripherals. Then preliminary experience with the system is reported.
A representational language for qualitative process control
Authors: Richard M. Matejka, Thomas J. Lagnese
Venue: Proceedings of the 1st international conference on Industrial and engineering applications of artificial intelligence and expert systems - Volume 1 (1988)

This paper describes the Qualitative Process Control Environment (QPCE) which is used to prototype qualitative control systems. The language provided within this environment allows process engineers to place their knowledge about the process in an executable closed loop control system. We focus on one application, autoclave curing of composites, and use the QPCE to create a process control model. This work will demonstrate that the process control model based upon event driven schedules will accomodate wide process variations yet maintain maximum product yield.
Expanding the domain of a prototype expert system with an eye on future maintenance&mdash;the FIESTA case study
Authors: Nadine Happell, Steven G. Miksell
Venue: Proceedings of the 2nd international conference on Industrial and engineering applications of artificial intelligence and expert systems - Volume 1 (1989)

As Expert Systems (ES) migrate from prototype to operational use, the tightly coupled issues of system maintenance and domain expansion become more significant. The manner in which an ES architecture and organization can support such key elements of domain expansion (and maintenance) as knowledge acquisition, representation, addition and modification are highlighted and illustrated using the Fault Isolation Expert System for TDRSS Applications (FIESTA). The paper focuses on domain expansion as applied to a diagnostic expert system, and considers implications for ongoing system maintenance, which encompasses automated end-user support.
Shape Reconstruction on a Varying Mesh
Authors: I. Weiss
Venue: IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (1990)

A central class of image understanding problems is concerned with reconstructing a shape from an incomplete data set, such as fitting a surface to (partially) given contours. A new theory for solving such problems is presented. Unlike the current heuristic methods, the method used starts from fundamental principles that should be followed by any reconstruction method, regardless of its mathematical or physical implementation. A mathematical procedure which conforms to these principles is presented. One major advantage of the method is the ability to handle shapes containing both smooth and sharp parts without using thresholds. A sharp variation, such as a corner, requires a high-resolution mesh for adequate representation, while slowly varying sections can be represented with sparser mesh points. Unlike current methods, this procedure fits the surface on a varying mesh. The mesh is constructed automatically to be more dense at parts of the image that have more rapid variation. Analytical examples are given in simple cases, followed by numerical experiments.
Performance modeling of distributed object-oriented database systems
Authors: J. A. Brumfield, J. L. Miller, H. T. Chou
Venue: Proceedings of the first international symposium on Databases in parallel and distributed systems (2000)

A simulation model has been designed to evaluate the performance of distributed object-oriented database systems. By adjusting parameters, a variety of different hardware configurations and workloads can be represented. The model has been used to study a number of performance issues relating to ORION-2, a distributed object-oriented database system being developed by the Advanced Computer Architecture Program at MCC. Experiments show that the central server or the local area network can be a performance bottleneck.
High performance SQL through low-level system integration
Authors: A. Borr
Venue: ACM SIGMOD Record (1988)

NonStop SQL [TM] achieves high performance through an implementation which integrates SQL record access with the pre-existing disk I/O and transaction management subsystems, and moves SQL function downward from the client to the server level of these subsystems. System integration and movement of function to the server reduce message traffic and CPU consumption by putting SQL optimizations at the lower levels of the system. Examples of such optimizations are message traffic savings by filtering data and applying updates at the data source, I/O savings by SQL-optimized buffer pool management, and locking and transaction journaling techniques which take advantage of SQL semantics. Achieving message traffic reduction is particularly important in a distributed, non shared-memory architecture such as the Tandem NonStop System. The result of this implementation is an SQL system which matches the performance of the pre-existing DBMS, while inheriting such pre-existing architecturally-derived features as high availability, transaction-based data integrity, and distribution of both data and execution.
The problem of identification
Authors: Ulrich Schiel
Venue: ACM SIGMOD Record (1988)

The existing models for database applications use a few fundamental concepts for the description of the world to be modeled. The most common of these concepts is the entity, also called object, element, concept, information, token, data or value. Entities are identifiable and distinguishable existing things of the real world. In general the concept of entity, is used only for static things whose existence does not depend directly from other entities, in contrast to the dynamic happenings called events and the existence of some dependency between two or more entities called relationship (or attribute or property) which can exist only in conjunction with the related entities. More complex combinations of entities, relationships and events we call facts. Therefore &ldquo;John has broken his leg yesterday and is in Santa Clara Hospital&rdquo; is a fact which combines the event of &ldquo;breaking a leg&rdquo; occurred with the entity &ldquo;leg of John&rdquo; at time-event &ldquo;yesterday&rdquo; and the relationship &ldquo;is in&rdquo; valid between &ldquo;John&rdquo; and &ldquo;Santa Clara Hospital&rdquo; now. We use the term object to refer to entities, relationships, events or facts, undistinguishably.
A framework for scheduling multi-rate circuit simulation
Authors: A. P.-C. Ng, V. Visvanathan
Venue: Proceedings of the 26th ACM/IEEE Design Automation Conference (1989)

This paper presents a theoretical framework for scheduling of subcircuit simulation in a multirate simulation environment. We show that event-driven simulation, selective-trace, and latency are subsumed by this framework. We assume that the circuit to be simulated is partitioned into subcircuits and that the dependency relations can be expressed as a directed acyclic graph. Each subcircuit predicts its own stepsize, and we assume that a subcircuit can be simulated over some step only when all its inputs are known over that step. It is possible to show that the problem of scheduling the subcircuits subject to these constraints to minimize the amount of memory used to store intermediate voltages is NP-Complete [NV88]. We therefore propose a greedy algorithm that at each step in the schedule, simulates the subcircuit that requires the minimal amount of memory. The algorithm has been implemented in the circuit simulator XPSim, and the performance improvement due to the scheduling technique is demonstrated on a number of circuits. Extensions of the approach to cyclic dependency graphs using the method of waveform relaxation are discussed in a section on future work.
Opportunistic garbage collection
Authors: P. R. Wilson
Venue: ACM SIGPLAN Notices (1988)

Opportunistic garbage collection is a non-incremental generation-based garbage collection system. It attempts to minimize the probability of disruptive pauses by careful scheduling of scavenges. Scavenge pauses are hidden in pauses created by the running program or by the user; they are also shortened by scheduling them at low points in the stack height, where live data tend to be at a minimum. These heuristics can be surprisingly simple and cheap to implement --- user input primitives provide an effective hook from which to invoke the scheduling routine, since they tend to correspond both to local stack minima and to computational pause boundaries.An additional mechanism is proposed to detect times when it is safe to scavenge an intermediate generation, based on the amount of data surviving from a new-generation scavenge. This mechanism can be used reliably in certain cases, or heuristically in a larger class of cases.
An approximation to the response time for shortest queue routing
Authors: R. D. Nelson, T. K. Philips
Venue: ACM SIGMETRICS Performance Evaluation Review (1989)

In this paper we derive an approximation for the mean response time of a multiple queue system in which shortest queue routing is used. We assume there are &Kgr; identical queues with infinite capacity and service times that are exponentially distributed. Arrivals of jobs to this system are Poisson and are routed to a queue of minimal length. We develop an approximation which is based on both theoretical and experimental considerations and, for &Kgr; &le; 8, has an relative error of less than one half of one percent when compared to simulation. For &Kgr; = 16, the relative error is still acceptable, being less than 2 percent. An application to a model of parallel processing and a comparison of static and dynamic load balancing schemes are presented.
Computer aided prototyping
Authors: R. Krista, I. Rozman
Venue: ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes (1989)

In this article a methodology for rapid prototyping is described. Modified data flow diagrams are used as a graphical tool and Prototyping System Description Language is deveoped.The advantages of the methodology and of the prototyping tool, which is being built, are as follows: a possibility to describe a system in an understandable graphical way without global data, a posibility to describe the system by parallel activities and a possibility to verify the whole system or only a part of it. A simple and understandable specification of the new system is enabled by decomposition.
A Bayesian Approach to Reconstruction from Incomplete Projections of a Multiple Object 3D Domain
Authors: Y. Bresler, J. A. Fessler, A. Macovski
Venue: IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (1989)

An estimation approach is described for three-dimensional reconstruction from line integral projections using incomplete and very noisy data. Generalized cylinders parameterized by stochastic dynamic models are used to represent prior knowledge about the properties of objects of interest in the probed domain. The object models, a statistical measurement model, and the maximum a posteriori probability performance criterion are combined to reformulate the reconstruction problem as a computationally challenging nonlinear estimation problem. For computational feasibility, a suboptimal hierarchical algorithm is described whose individual steps are locally optimal and are combined to satisfy a global optimality criterion. The formulation and algorithm are restricted to objects whose center axis is a single-valued function of a fixed spatial coordinate. Simulation examples demonstrate accurate reconstructions with as few as four views in a 135 degrees sector, at an average signal-to-noise ratio of 3.3.
Making asynchronous parallelism safe for the world
Authors: Guy L. Steele,  Jr.
Venue: Proceedings of the 17th ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT symposium on Principles of programming languages (1989)

We need a programming model that combines the advantages of the synchronous and asynchronous parallel styles. Synchronous programs are determinate (thus easier to reason about) and avoid synchronization overheads. Asynchronous programs are more flexible and handle conditionals more efficiently. Here we propose a programming model with the benefits of both styles. We allow asynchronous threads of control but restrict shared-memory accesses and other side effects so as to prevent the behavior of the program from depending on any accidents of execution order that can arise from the indeterminacy of the asynchronous process model. These restrictions may be enforced either dynamically (at run time) or statically (at compile time). In this paper we concentrate on dynamic enforcement, and exhibit an implementation of a parallel dialect of Scheme based on these ideas. A single successful execution of a parallel program in this model constitutes a proof that the program is free of race conditions (for that particular set of input data). We also speculate on a design for a programming language using static enforcement. The notion of distinctness is important to proofs of noninterference. An appropriately designed programming language must support such concepts as &ldquo;all the elements of this array are distinct,&rdquo; perhaps through its type system. This parallel programming model does not support all styles of parallel programming, but we argue that it can support a large class of interesting algorithms with considerably greater efficiency (in some cases) than a strict SIMD approach and considerably greater safety (in all cases) than a full-blown MIMD approach.
Three-dimensional vortex tube reconnection: morphology for orthogonally-offset tubes
Authors: N. J. Zabusky, M. V. Melander
Venue: Proceedings of the eighth annual international conference of the Center for Nonlinear Studies on Advances in fluid turbulence (1989)

Load sharing has been the focus of a great deal of research as a means of enhancing the performance of distributed systems. In this paper we evaluate the potential benefits of load sharing in hierarchical distributed systems. A hierarchical system consists of sub-systems, each of which is a distributed system in its own right. Our goal is to determine the level(s) at which load sharing may be exercised to improve the system performance at minimum overhead. Our simulation results indicate that most of the potential benefits can be achieved by employing load sharing locally. The additional benefit gained from global load sharing is minimal and does not justify the cost associated with it.