All Computer Science and Engineering Research

This paper describes the design of the ACE object-oriented thread encapsulation class library. The architecture of this class library is presented from an end-user and internal design perspective and several key design issues are discussed. Readers should gain an understanding of the overall design approach as well as the tradeoffs between various software quality factors such as performance, portability, and extensibility.

The algorithmic analysis, data collection, and statistical analysis required to isolate the cause of time variability observed while an Elman style recurrent neural network is trained in parallel on a twenty processor SPARCcenter 2000 is described in detail. Correlations of system metrics indicate the operating system scheduler or an interaction of kernel processes is the most probable explanation for the variability.

The Programmers' Playground is a programming environment that supports end-user construction of distributed multimedia applications. The system implements a new programming model that is based, in part, upon ideas from the formal I/O automaton model of Lynch and Tuttle. Important features of The Programmers' Playground are a separation of communication and computation and graphical support for dynamic reconfiguration. This paper provides a formal specification of the Playground programming model and runtime system in terms of the I/O automaton model on which it is based. Exploiting the compositionality properties of the... Read More

Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) network technology is expected to become a central part of the emerging global information infrastructure. ATM networks introduce a number of features that distinguish them from earlier technologies and introduce new issues in network control. This paper offers a framework for precisely defining and analyzing alternative approaches to the distributed control of ATM networks and explores some of the key design issues through a series of examples. It is hoped that it will provide a useful foundation for researchers in networking and distributed computing interested in... Read More

This report analyzes two popular heuristics for ensuring packet integrity in ATM switching systems. In particular, we analyze the behavior of packet tail discarding, in order to understand how the packet level link efficiency is dependent on the rates of individual virtual circuits and the degre of the imposed overload. In addition, we study early packet discard and show that the queue capacity needed to achieve high efficiency under worst-case conditions grows with the number of virtual circuits and we determine the efficiency obtainable with more limited queue capacities. Using... Read More

As ATM becomes widely accepted as the communication standard for high speed networks, the signaling system structure and protocols that support ATM become more and more important. To support existing, future and unknown applications, the signalign system has to be very flexible and efficient. In this paper we define the signaling problem, present several possible signaling system structures, compare the advantages and disadvantages of these systems, and then we propose a new signaling system structure. The fundamental idea of the new signaling system is the logical separation of the signaling... Read More

Abstract Network signaling is the process of transferring control information among components of a communication network to establish, maintain, and release connections, and to pass the network management information. The rapid evolution in the field of telecommunications has led to the rapid evolution of network signaling. In this paper, we review the evolution of network signaling. We emphasize the concepts and protocols used in modern fast packet switching networks especially in emerging ATM networks.

We have developed and tested an automated method for simultaneous 3D tracking of numerous, flourescently-tagged cells. The procedure uses multiple thresholding to segment individual cells at a starting timepoint, and then iteratively applies a template-matching algorithm to locate a particular cell's position at subsequent time points. To speed up the method, we have developed a distributed implementation in which template matching is carried out in parallel on several different server machines. The distributed implementation showed a monotonic decrease in response time with increasing number of servers (up to 15 tested),... Read More

We first present an algorithm that uses membership and equivalence queries to exactly identify a discretized geometric concept defined by the unioin of m axis-parallel boxes in d-dimensional discretized Euclidean space where each coordinate can have n discrete values. This algorithm receives at most md counterexamples and uses time and membership queries polynomial in m and log(n) for any constant d. Furthermore, all equivalence queries can be formulated as the union of O(mdlog(m)) axis-parallel boxes. Next, we show how to extend our algorithm to efficiently learn, from only equivalence queries,... Read More

Large scale multimedia storage servers will be an integral part of the emerging distributed multimedia computing infrastructure. However, given the modest rate of improvements in storage transfer rates, designing servers that meet the demands of multimedia applications is a challenging task that needs significant architectural innovation. Our research project, called Massively-parallel And Real-time Storage (MARS) architecture, is aimed at the design and prototype implementation of a large scale multimedia storage server. It uses some of the well-known techniques in parallel I/O, such as data striping and Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive... Read More

This document specifies a Connection Management Access Protocol (CMAP) for call management in high-speed packet switched networks. We target CMAP to networks employing the Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) communication standard. CMAP specifies the access procedues exercised by network clients to manipulate multipoint calls; it is thus a User-Network Interface (UNI) signalling protocol. We define a multipoint call as a group of multipoint connections. A multipoint connection is a communication channel between two or more clients or endpoints of the network, where all data sent by one client is received by... Read More

The Pavane program visualization system is an implementation of the declarative paradigm of visualization. After a brief report on the status of the Pavane implementation, we present the results of an evaluation of the usability of Pavane. This evaluation is based on the use of Pavane by its developers to construct program visualizations, on its use in a classroom setting as a tool for examining executing programs, and on its application to some simple scientific visualizations.

The problem this paper addresses is how to modify an existing operating system's I/O subsystem to support new high-speed networks and high-bandwidth multimedia applications that will play an important role in future computing environments. The proposed I/O subsystem is called universal continuous media I/O (UCM I/O). This paper will cover the preliminary design of UCM I/O, some of the trade-offs and issues that need to be addressed in order to implement UCM I/O, and a summary of work in progress.

The last few years have seen network data rates skyrocket from a few Mbps to a Gbps or more. However, a lack of integration of the host-netowrk interface, the operating system, and network protocols has resulted in end-applications seeing only a small fraction of this total bandwidth being available for data transfer. The emergence of demanding applications in the realms of multimedia and virtual reality provides further impetus in the drive to overcome this problem. In this paper, we present the design of a high performance ATM host-network interface for... Read More

In asynchronous systems, average function delays principally govern overall throughput. This paper compares the performance of six adder designs with respect to their average delays. Our results show that asynchronous addres (32 or 64-bits) with a hybrid structure (e.g., carry-select addres) run 20-40% faster than simple ripple-carry addres. Hybrid adders also outperform high-cost, strictly synchronous conditional-sum adders.

In this paper, a set of simple, general, yet practical performance models for RISC architectures are developed. These models apply to a wide range of systems that include both pipelined and superscalar systems operating in either clocked or asynchronous environments. The models permit quantitative evaluation of various design choices (e.g., the number of pipelines in the system, the pipeline depth, and the choice between clocked and asynchronous methodologies) as functions of technology parameters, environmental operating parameters, and pipeline function characteristics. Design curves are presented indicating optimal pipeline depth and number... Read More

One view of computational learning theory is that of a learner acquiring the knowledge of a teacher. We introduce a formal model of learning capturing the idea that teachers may have gaps in their knowledge. The goal of the learner is still to acquire the knowledge of the teacher, but now the learner must also identify the gaps. This is the notion of learning from a consistently ignorant teacher. We consider the impact of knowledge gaps on learning, for example, monoton DNF and d-dimensional boxes, and show that leraning is... Read More

Developing the ability to recognize a landmark from a visual image of a robot's current location is a fundamental problem in robotics. We consider the problem of PAC-learning the concept class of geometric patterns where the target geometric pattern is a configuration of k points on the real line. Each instance is a configuration of n points on the real line, where it is labeled according to whether or not it visually resembles the target pattern. To capture the notion of visual resemblance we use the Hausdorff metric. Informally, two... Read More

Many new network applications demand interprocess communication (IPC) services that are not supported by existing transport protocol mechanisms. Large bandwidth-delay products of high-speed networks also render the existing control mechanisms such as flow and error control less efficient. In particular, new error control schemes that can provide variable degrees of error recovery according to the applications requirements are needed. This paper presents the design, evaluation, and implementation of an application-oriented error control scheme that is aimed at supporting efficient IPC in high-speed networking environments. Our results show that the proposed... Read More

This report describes our approach towards providing quality of service (QoS) guarantees for network communication within the endsystems to support multimedia applications. We first address the problem of QoS specification by identifying a set of application classes and their QoS parameters that cover the communication requirements of most applications. We then describe the QoS mapping problem, and show how requirements for resources (such as the CPU, the network interface adaptor and network connections) can be automatically derived from the application QoS parameters. We then deal with the QoS enforcement issue... Read More

Communication latencies and delays are a major source of performance degradation in parallel computing systems. It is importnat to "mask" these communication delays by overlapping them with useful computation in order to obtain good parallel performance. This paper proposes speculative computation as a technique to mask communication latencies. Speculative computation is discussed in the context of synchronous iterative algorithms. Processors speculate the contents of messages that are not hyet received and perform computation based on the speculated values. When the messages are received, they are compared with the speculated values... Read More

We investigate the problem of transforming one binary tree into another by rotatoins, subject to certain weight ocnstraints on the nodes of the trees. These constraints arise in the problem of "morphing" one simple polygon to another simple polygon by continuous deformatinos (translations and scalings) that preserve the turn angles and the simplicity of the polygon; the two polygons must have the same sequence of turn angles. Our main theorem is that two arbitrary n-leaf binary trees satisfying our weight constraint can be morphed into each other with O(n log... Read More

We propose a n extremely simple approximation scheme for computing shortest paths on the surface of a convex polytope in three dimensions. Given a convex polytope P with n vertices and two points p,q on its surface, let dp (p,q) denote the shortest path distance between p and q on the surface of P. Our algorithm produces a path of length at most 2 × dp(p,q) in time O(n). Extending this results, we can also compute ana pproximation of the shortest path tree rooted at an arbitrary point χ Є... Read More

TRAINREC is a system for training feedforward and recurrent neural networks that incorporates several ideas. It uses the conjugate-gradient method which is demonstrably more efficient than traditional backward error propagation. We assume epoch-based training and derive a new error function having several desirable properties absent from the traditional sum-of-squared-error function. We argue for skip (shortcut) connections where appropriate and the preference for a sigmoidal yielding values over the [-1,1] interval. The input feature space is often over-analyzed, but by using singular value decomposition, input patterns can be conditioned for better... Read More

Traditional computation models such as Turing machines, lambda-calculus, Markov's normal algorithms, are not suitable models for visual programming languages because they are all based on one-dimensional text strings and visual programming uses two-dimensional graphic diagrams. We propose a two-dimensional computation model, called Boxgraph, that requires no text. The syntax of the model consists of nested boxes connected by arrows, and the semantics consists of dataflow and the concept of consistency. The expressive power of the model is demonstrated by constructing representations of a binary full adder, the Fibonacci function, and... Read More

We consider the concept classes of DNF formulas and unions of discretized, axis-parallel d-dimensional boxes in discretized d-dimensional space with respect to several different learning models. In the model of learning with queries we present an algorithm to learn unions of boxes. We introduce a model of teaching that prevents illicit communication between the teacher and the leaner but that captures the intuitive aspect of teaching: a learner should perform at least as well with a cooperative teacher as with an adversarial teacher. We propose the study of teaching of... Read More

Two concurrent implementations of the method of conjugate gradients for training Elman networks are discussed. The parallelism is obtained in the computation of the error gradient and the method is therefore applicable to any gradient descent training technique for this form of network. The experimental results were obtained on a Sun Sparc Center 2000 multiprocessor. The Sparc 2000 is a shared memory machine well suited to coarse-grained distributed computations, but the concurrency could be extended to other architectures as well.

We present a visual specification language for constructing distributed applications and their direct manipulation graphical user interfaces. Each distributed application consists of a collection of independent modules and a configuration of logical connections that define communication among the data interfaces of the modules. Our specification language uses a single visual mechanism that allows end-users to define interprocess communication among distributed modules and to define intraprocess communication among objects within a module. This seamless specification provides a general encapsulation/abstraction mechanism and is designed to support dynamic change to the communication structure.... Read More

The Washington University MultiMedia eXplorer (MMX) is a complete, host-independent multimedia system capable of transmitting and receiving JPEG-compressed video, CD-quality audio, and high-resolution radiographic images over the Washington University broadband ATM network. If the host is equipped with an ATM interface card, normal network traffic can be supported via an ATM extension port on the MMX. The major components of the MMX are an ATMizer and three multimedia channels. The ATMizer implements the host interface, the interface to the ATM network, and hte interface to the three multimdeia channels. This... Read More

Formal methods hold the promise for high dependability in the design of critical software. However, software engineers who employ formal methods need to communicate their design decisions to users, customers, managers, and collegues who may not be in a position to acquire a full understanding of the formal notation being used. Visualizations derived from formal specifications and designs must be able to convey the required information precisely and reliably without the use of formal notation. This paper discusses a design methodology which attempts to integrate a design methodology based upon... Read More

The Programmer's Playground takes a new approach to simplifying and supporting the construction of distributed applications. The approach, called I/O abstraction, separates the description of a system's communication structure from the descriptions of its computational components so that software modules written in existing programming languages cna be integrated flexibly and dynamically by both programmers and end-users. This separation is achieved by estabishing logical connectinos among the data interfaces of independent software modules. The logical connections provide a uniform high-level view of communication for both discrete and continuous data. The I/O... Read More

This paper describes a distributed algorithm for computing the biconnected components of a dynamically changing graph. Our algorithm has a worst case communication complexity of O(b + c) messages for an edge insertion and O(b' + c) messages for an edge removal, and a worst case time complexity of O(c) for both operations, where c is the maximum number of biconnected components in any of the connected components during the operation, b is the number of nodes in the biconnected component containing the new edge, and bprime is the number... Read More

Distributed multimedia computing and communiation systems combine computer systems, networks and distributed software to facilitate applications that enable and enhance collaborative work, direct interpersonal communication, remote access to information and real-time presentation of information from a variety of sources. Over the next decade, we expect such systems to become central to the infrastructure of our increasingly information-driven society. This prospectus describes a program of research being pursued within the Computer and Communications Research Center of Washington University and the Departments of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering. This program seeks to... Read More

In 1993, APRA funded a major program at Washingotn University to create gigabit networking technology and create a gigabit testbed based on this technology. This program is now nearing the end of its first year and is making excellent proress towards its research and technical objectives. This note a proposes a program that would lead to the export of this technology to research groups in networking and gigabit applications with an interest in using it to further their own research activities.

A useful way to design simple and robust protocols is to make them self-stabilitizing. We describe a simple technique for self-stabilization called counter flushign which is applicable to a number of distributed algorithms. A randomized version of counter flushing is shown to have extremely small expected stabilization time. We show how our technique helps to crisply understand and improve some previous distributed algorithms. Then we apply it to a variety of total algorithms for deadlock detection, propagation of information with feedback, resets and snapshots. Our stabilizing snapshot protocol has much... Read More

In high speed networks, packet processing is relatively expensive while bandwidth is cheap. This begs the question: what fields can be added to packets to make packet processing easier? By exploring this question, we device a number of novel mechanisms to speed up packet processing. With the advent of new standards for hte Data Link, Network, and Transport lyaers, we believe there is an opportunity to apply these techniques to improve the performance of real protocols. First, we suggest adding a data manipulation header to an easily accessible portion of... Read More

Fair queuing is a technique that allows each flow passing through a network device to have fair share of network resources. previous schemes for fair queuing that achieved nearly perfect fairness were expensive to implement: specifically, the work required to process a packet in these schemes was O(log(n)), where n is the number of active flows. This is expensive at high speeds. On the other hand, cheaper approximations of fair queuing that have been reported in the literature exhibit unfair behavior. In this paper, we describe a new approximation of... Read More

The current trend toward portable computing systems (e.g., cellular phones, laptop computers) brings with it the need for a new paradigm for thinking about designing distributed applications. We introduce the term mobile to refer to distributed systems that include moving, autonomous agents which loosely cooperate to accomplish a tastk. The fluid nature of hte interconnections between components in a mobile system provides new challenges and new opportunities for the research community. While we do not propsoe to have fully grasped the consequences of these systems, we believe that the notions... Read More

We report the results of an experiment comparing the merits of the pen and the mouse as drawing devices. For this study a pen-based graphic diagram editor equipped with a shape recognition algorithm was developed on GO's PenPoint operating system. A commercially available drawing program on NeXT was used for mouse-based editing. Twelve CS students were chosen as subjects and asked to draw four different diagrams of similar complexity: two with a pen and the other two with a mouse. The diagrams are chosen from the categories of dataflow visual... Read More

The analysis of human conversations has revealed that the design of interfaces using spoken dialogue must differ radically from those using written communication. Such characteristics as prosody, confirmations, echoes, and other speech phenomena must be considered. This work is a step in that direction. Prosodic, syntactic and semantic information from actual human dialogues has been used to build a turn-taking model empirically for dydadic telephone dialogues. The ability to predict completion of turns has been the biggest motivating factor in the development of this model. The design and evaluation of... Read More

This paper explores the architectural requirements for computers to be able to process multimedia data streams such as video and audio. The I/O subsystem is shown to be a bottleneck, and a network backplane approach is suggested to alleviate this. The need to provide end-to-end performance guarantees requires predictable performance of intra-machine communication, and a schedulable bus with reservation is proposed to achieve this. In addition this requires operating system (OS) mechanisms to negotiate and enforce QoS requirements of applications. A real-time microkernel executive is proposed for each autonomous unit.... Read More

Visual programming is the specification of computational processes using diagrams and icons. Traditional computation models such as Turing machines and lambda-calculus, which are based on one-dimensional text strings, are not suitable for visual programming languages. We propose a two-dimensional computation model that requires no text. We also prove that the model is computationallhy complete, i.e., that the model has the same computational power as Turing machines.

A number of efficient learning algorithms achieve exact identification of an unknown function from some clas using membership and equivalence queries. Using a standard transformation such algorithms can easily be converted to on-line learning algorithms that use membership queries. Under such a transformation the number of equivalence queries made by the query algorithm directly corresponds to the number of mistakes made by the on-line algorithm. In this paper we consider several of the natural classes known to be learnable in this setting, and investigate the minimum number of equivalence queries... Read More

Declarative visualization is a paradigm in which the process of visualization is treated as a mapping from some domain (typically a program) to an image. One means of declaring such mappings is through the use of rules which specify the relationship between the domain and the image. This paper examines the computational power of such rule-based mappings. Computational power is measure using three separate criteria. The first of these uses the Chomsky hierarchy, in which computational power is treated as string-acceptance; with this criterion we are able to show that... Read More

Recently, Static Single Assignment Form and Sparse Evaluation Graphs have been advanced for the efficient solution of program optimization problems. Each method is provided with an initial set of flow graph nodes that inherently affect a problem's solution. Other relevant nodes are those where potentially disparate solutions must combine. Previously, these so-called {phi}-nodes were found by computing the iterated dominance frontiers of the initial set of nodes, a process that could take worst case quadratic time with respect to the input flow graph. In this paper we present an almost-linear... Read More

This document describes the motivation, language description, and experience using FrIL, an intermediate language for a compiler's "middle-end." FrIL has subbessfully supported a two-semester compiler construction sequence, where the first semester included code generation from a C-like language and the second semester included advanced data flow analysis and program transformation.

A multimedia ATM network is shared by media streams with different performance requirements. For media streams such as file transfers, the preservation of bursts and the provision of guarantees for loss probability at the burst level is of primary importance, while, for media streams such as voice, loss guarantees at the cell level are sufficient. Continuous media have stringent delay jitter requirements. Finally, some applications require loss-free transmission. In this paper, the first complete traffic management scheme for multimedia ATM networks is introduced. The traffic management scheme supports four different... Read More

When using random clone overlap based methods to make DNA maps, fragment matching mistakes, the incorrect matching of similar length restriction fragments, are a common problem that produces incorrect maps. Previous work presented the Restricted Splitting Algorithm (or RSA), which is useful for repairing a map containing a fragment mistake when the location of the mistake is known. This work presents an algorithm, called FIX, which attempts to identify the location of the fragment matching mistake and then uses the RSA to repair the map containing the mistake. In essense,... Read More

A technique called Synchronized Double Digest Mapping (SDDM) is presented; it combines classical Double Digest Mapping (DDM) and Multiple-Restriction-Enzyme Mapping (MREM). Classical DDM is a technique for determining the order of restriction fragments in a clone given three digestions of the clone: a digestion by enzyme1, a digestion by enzyme2, and a digestion by enzyme1 and enzyme2 combined. All algorithms for applying this technique are exponential (in the number of fragments present in the clone) in nature. MREM is an extension of classical high-resolution restriction-fragment mapping of a YAC or... Read More

A framework is given for specifying nonblocking traffic limits in a connection-oriented communications network. In this framework, connections may be point-to-point or mutlipoint, and the data rates may vary from one connection to another. The traffic limits may be "flat", or they may also be hierarchical, representing communities of interest within the network that have higher traffic among themselves than with the rest of the network. The communication networks are constructed from switches (or nodes) and trunks, which connect pairs of switches. This framework is intended to model Asynchronous Transfer... Read More

Clocked (synchronous) and self-timed (asynchronous) represent the two prinicipal methodologies associated with timing control and synchronization of digital systems. In this paper, clocked and the asynchronous instruction pipelines are modeled and compared. The approach which yields the best performance is dependent on technology parameters, operating range and pipeline algorithm characteristics. Design curves are presented which permit selection of the best approach for a given application and technology environment.

Two experiments for evaluating psychophysical distortion metrics for JPEG-encoded images are described. The first is a threshold experiment, in which subjects determined the bit rate or level of distortion at which distortion was just noticeable. The second is a suprathreshold experiment in which subjects ranked image blocks according to perceived distortion. The results of these experiments were used to determine the predictive value of a number of computer image distortion metrics. It was found that mean-square-error is not a good predictor of distortion thresholds or suprathreshold perceived distortion. Some simple... Read More

Supervised Competitive Learning (SCL) assembles a set of learning modules into a supervised learning system to address the stability-plasticity dilemma. Each learning module acts as a similarity detector for a prototype, and includes prototype resetting (akin to that of the ART) to respond to new prototypes. SCL has usually employed backpropagation networks as the learning modules. It has been tested with two feature abstractors: about 30 energy-based features, and a combination of energy-based and graphical features (about 60). Anout 75 subjects have been involved. In recent testing (15 college students),... Read More

SCL assembles a set of learning modules into a supervised learning system to address the stability-plasticity dilemma. Each learning module acts as a similarity detector for a prototype, and includes prototype resetting (akin to that of ART) to respond to new prototypes. Here (Part I) we report SCL results using back-propagation networks as the learning modules. We used two feature extractors: about 30 energy-based features, and a combination of energy-based and graphical features (about 60). SCL recognized 98% (energy) and 99% (energy/graphical) of test digits, and 91% (energy) and 96%... Read More

This paper presents the analysis of an improved distributed checkpointing algorithm. It shows that the message volume of Koo and Toueg's distributed checkpointing algorithm approaches 3fN for large checkpoint intervals where N is the number of processes and processes randomly send messages to f other processes. Thus, the average mesage volume is O(n2). We show how Koo and Toueg's algorithm can be modified so as to avoid this O9n2) overhead and derive an accurate estimate of the message volume. The overhead is reduced by using dependency knowledge to substantially reduce... Read More

This paper shows how Koo and Toueg's distributed checkpointing algorithm can be modified so as to substantially reduce the average message volume. It attempts to avoid O(n{squared}) messages by using dependency knowledge to reduce the number of checkpoint request messages. Lemmas on consistency and termination are also included.

We present two algorithms that use membership and equivalence queries to exactly identify the concepts given by the union of s discretized axis-parallel boxes in d-dimensional discretized Euclidean space where each coordinate can have n discrete values. The first algorithm receives at most s*d counterexamples and uses time and membership queries polynomial in s and logn for d any constant. Further, all equivalence queries made can be formulated as the union of O(s*d*log(s)) axis-parallel boxes. Next, we introduce a new complexity measure that better captures the complexity of a union... Read More

I/O abstraction is offered as a new high-level approach to interprocess communication. Functional components of a concurrent system are written as encapsulated modules that act upon local data structures, some of which may be published for external use. Relationships among modules are specified by logical connections among their published data structures. Whenever a module updates published data, I/O takes place implicitly according to the configuration of logical connections. The Programmer's Playground, a software library and run-time system supporting I/O abstraction, is described. Design goals include high-level communication among programs written... Read More

A unified model of distributed systems that accomodates both shared-memory and message-passing communication is proposed. An extension of the I/O automaton model of Lynch and Tuttle, the model provides a full range of types of atomic accesses to shared memory, from basic reads and writes to read-modify-write. In addition to supporting the specification and verification of shared memory algorithms, the unified model is particularly helpful for proving correspondences between atomic shared objects and invocation-response systems and for proving the correctness of systems that contain both message passing and shared memory... Read More

We introduce a formal model of teaching in which the teacher is tailored to a particular learner, yet the teaching protocol is designed so that no collusion is possible. Not surprisingly, such a model remedies the non-intuitive aspects of otehr models in which the teacher must successfully teach any consistent learner. We prove that any class that can be exactly identified by a deterministic polynomial-time algorithm with access to a very rich set of example-based queries is teachable by a computationally unbounded teacher and a polynomial-time learner. In addition, we... Read More

Multimedia workstation architectures differ from current architecture in these respects – they have multiple specialized processing units, a high speed I/O interconnect mechanism, a high speed broadband network interface and a real-tie multitasking operating systems (OS) that provides QoS guarantees. These systems will primarily be used to run distributed applications that require high network throughput and predictable delay and delay jitter for real-time traffic. We argue the need for a different protocol organization and processing architecture in order to achieve this. We show how the emerging hardware architecture and OS... Read More

In this paper, the N-body simulation problem is considered, its parallel implementation described, its execution time performance is modeled and compared with measured results, and two alternative load balancing algorithms for enhancing performance investigated. Parallel N-body techniques are widely applied in various fields and possess characteristics that challenge the computation and communication capabilities of parallel computing systems and are therefore good candidates for use as parallel benchmarks. Performance models may be used to estimate the performance of an algorithm on a given system, identify performance bottlenecks and study the performance... Read More

The quality of performance of a decision-support system (or an expert system) is determined to a large extent by its underlying preference model (or knowledge base). The difficulties in preference and knowledge acquisition make them a major focus of current research in decision-support and expert systems. Researchers have used various concepts to develop promising acquisition techniques. One of the concepts used is knowledge maintenence where the knowledge base is changed in response to incorrect or inadequate performance by the expert system. This dissertation investigates a preference acquisition technique based on... Read More

Computers have been used in radiation therapy since the early 1960s to perform dose calculations. In the last decade, researchers have developed computer-based clinical decision-support systems for assisting in different decision-making tasks in radiation therapy. This paper reviews eleven prototype systems developed for target volume delineation, treatment planning, treatment plan evaluation, and treatment machine diagnosis. The advent of three-dimensional (3D) conformal radiation therapy (CRT) provides radiation oncologists with the opportunity to consider innovative beam arrangements which were not possible in two-dimensional class solutions. The difficulty of manually generating the thousands... Read More

The evaluation of radiation treatment plans involves making trade-offs among doses delivered to the tumor volumes and nearby normal tissues. Evaluating state-of-the-art three-dimensional (3D) plans is a difficult task because of the huge amount of planning data that needs to be deciphered. Multiattribute utility theory provides a methodology for specifying trade-offs and selecting the optimal plan from many competing lans. Using multiattribute utility theory, we are developing a clinically meaningful objective plan-evaluation model for 3D radiation treatment plans. Our model incorporates three of the factors involved in radiation treatment evaluation... Read More

We report an experiment designed to compare human-human spoken dialogues with human-computer spoken dialogue. Our primary purpose was to collect data on the kinds of protocols that were used to control the interaction. Three groups of 12 subjects each were asked to complete tasks over the phone. These tasks involved the use of custom-calling features such as call-forwarding and speed-dialing. The experimental procedure was a new variation on the Wizard of Oz (WOZ) technique that allowed much clearer comparisons to be made between human-human and human-computer interactions. Subjects in the... Read More

TRAINREC is a system for training feedforward and recurrent neural networks that incorporates several ideas. It uses the conjugate-gradient method which is demonstrably more efficient than traditional backward error propagation. We assume epoch-based training and derive a new error function having several desirable properties absent from the traditional sum-of-squared-error function. We argue for skip (shortcut) connections where appropriate and the preference for a sigmoidal yielding values over the [-1,1] interval. The input feature space is often over-analyzed, but by using singular value decomposition, input patterns can be conditioned for better... Read More

The integration of video and audio into computers requires the support of continuous streams at the hardware level. This paper proposes a bus bandwidth management and access arbitration scheme for a multimedia workstation. It is assumed that a multimedia workstation consists of several specialized processing modules which are linked by a packet-switched bus. Using the proposed scheme, the bus can support a mix of real-time continuous media streams and random transactions while fulfilling special requirements corresponding to each traffic type. Specifically, the bus provides very fast response to random transactions... Read More

SCL assembles a set of learning modules into a supervised learning system to address the stability-plasticity dilemma. Each learning module acts as a similarity detector for a prototype, and includes prototype resetting (akin to that of ART) to respond to new prototypes. Here (Part I) we report SCL results using back-propagation networks as the learning modules. We used two feature extractors: about 30 energy-based features, and a combination of energy-based and graphical features (about 60). ACL recognized 96% (energy) and 99% (energy/graphical) of test digits, and 91% (energy) and 96%... Read More

Representation poses important challenges to connectionism. The ability to structurally compose representaitons is critical in achieving the capability considered necessary for cognition. We are investigating distributed patterns that represent structure as part of a larger effort to develop a natural language processor. Recursive Auto-Associative Memory (RAAM) representations show unusual promise as a general vehicle for representing classical symbolic structures in a way that supports compositionality. However, RAAMs are limited to representations for fixed-valence structures and can often be difficult to train. We provide a technique for mapping any ordered collection... Read More

The development of computationally informed formalisms for reasoning with defeasible rules affords new accounts of familiar forms of reasoning. This paper points to recent accounts of defeasible reasoning and portrays analogy, decision, and theory-formation as essentially defeasible, in the same way that statistical reasoning has been portrayed. Each portrayal depends largely on the idea of partial computation, which is inherent in actual reasoning, largely ignored by past formalisers, and formalizable now.

We discuss the problem of representing utility in planning systems that are based on Allen's [83] popular ontology for planning, which represents actions and events as time intervals. We identify a small number of primitive functions on time intervals which may be helpful in representing preference and also in eliminating dominated actions. Assuming that utility can be decomposed to take advantage of these primitives, these functions provide one solution to the problem of specifying utility in such expressive planning languages. We identify a restricted class of utility expressions that generate... Read More

Cell loss is an inherent problem of ATM networks. The magnitude of the service degeneration caused by cell loss depends on the application and loss distribution. This paper introduces a new performance criterion, called effective loss, which can quantitatively measure this degradation. Effective loss is particularly suitable for block-oriented transmissions, such as file transfer applications, but can also be applied to a broad range of other applications. In this paper the effective loss measure is applied to the study of the effectiveness of bandwidth reservation mechanisms in an ATM multiplexer.... Read More

This chapter considers the problems of expressing logic and constructing proofs in fault tolerant connectionist networks that are based on energy minimalism. Given a first-order-logic knowledge base and a bound k, a symmetric network is constructed (like a Boltzman machine or a Hopfield network) that searches for a proof for a given query. If a resolution-based proof of length no longer than k exists, then the global minima of the energy function that is associated with the network represent such proofs. If no proof exist then the global minima indicate... Read More

This work delineates the relation between logic and symmetric neural networks. The motivation is two-fold: 1) to study the capabilities and limitations of connectionist networks with respect to knowledge representatoin; and 2) to develop a new kind of inference negine that is expressive, massively parallel, capable of coping with nonmonotonic or noisy knowledge and capable of learning. The thesis shows that propositional logic can be implemented efficiently in networks where hidden units allow the representation of arbitrary constraints. An inference engine is constructed which can obtain its knowledge either by... Read More

The chapter presents methods for efficiently representing logic formulas in connectionist networks that perform energy minimization. Algorithms are given for transforming any formula into a network in linear time and space and for learning representations of unknown formulas by observing examples of satisfying truth assignments. The relaxation process that underlies networks of energy minimization reveals an efficient hill climbing algorithm for satisfiability problems. Experimental results indicate that the parallel implementation of the algorithm with give extremely good average-case performance, even for large-scale, hard satisfiability problems (randomly generated).

The Washington University MultiMedia eXplorer (MMX) is a complete, host-independent multimedia system capable of transmitting and receiving JPEG-compressed video, CD-quality audio, and high-resolution radiographic images over the Washington University broadband ATM network. If the host is equipped with an ATM interface card, normal network traffic is supported via "T" and "Y" connections. The MMX consists of an ATMizer and three multimedia subsystems. The ATMizer implements the host interface, the interface to the ATM network, and the interface to the three multimdeia channels. This paper describes the architecture of the MMX,... Read More

The Washington University Multimedia System (MMS) is a complete multimedia system capable of transmitting and receiving video, audio, and radiological images, in addition to normal network traffic, over the Washingon University broadband ATM network. The MMS consists of an ATMizer and three multimedia subsystems. The ATMizer implements the host interface, the interface to the ATM network, and the interface to the three multimedia subsystems. The video sybsystem encodes and decodes JPEG compressed video using two hardware compression engines. The audio subsystem encodes and decodes CD-quality stereo audio. The high-speed radiological... Read More

Program visualization may be viewed as a mapping from programs to graphical representations. This simple idea provides a formal framework for a new taxonomy of program visualization systems. The taxonomy is compared briefly against previous attempts to organize the program visualization field. The taxonomic principles and their motivation are explained in detail with reference to a number of existing systems, especially Balsa, Tango, and Pavane.

This paper presents a model of concurrency (Dynamic Synchrony) whose distinctive feature is a novel formal treatment of synchronization. Synchrony is defined as the coordinated execution of two or more actions. The dynamic aspect comes from the fact that the definition of which actions must be executed synchronously can change freely during the execution of the program. This unique modeling capability comes with a UNITY-stype assertional logic that can be applied to program verification and derivation. This paper shows that the proposed proof logic can be used to verify programs... Read More

This thesis describes a number of techniques for segmenting non-cursive handwritten digits into individual characters. It strongly emphasizes on a recognition-segmentation algorithm, which uses the linear regression method to recognize those strokes which consist of one or more straight-lined parts. A new method of sampling the pen data according to the pen speed, hence giving a more uniform points concentratino distribution, is also introduced. It is shown how several of our segmenting techniques, such as relative stroke lengths, relative stroke positions, order of stroke entry, stroke direction, stroke intersection, etc.... Read More

Dynamic reconfiguration is explored in the context of I/O abstraction, a new programming model that defines the communication structure of a system in terms of connections among well-defined data interfaces for the modules in the system. The properties of I/O abstraction, particularly the clear separation of computation from communication and the availability of a module's state information, help simplify the reconfiguration strategy. Both logical and physical reconfiguration are discussed, with an emphasis on a new module migration mechanism that (1) takes advantage of the underlying I/O abstraction model, (2) avoids... Read More

This paper describes an architecture for a multicast virtual circuit switch using cell recycling. This is the first nonblocking switch architecture that is optimal in both the switching network complexity and the amount of memory required for multicast address translation. Furthermore, it is optimal in the amount of effort required for multicast connection modification. This architecture makes it both technically and economically feasible to construct the large switching systems that will ultimately be needed for wide scale deployment of Broadband ISDN to residential users. In particular, we estimate that systems... Read More

Many multipoint virtual circuit switching systems have been proposed for use in ATM networks. The inherent flexibility of ATm networks and the desire to use them for a wide range of different applications makes it impractical to rely on statistical traffic models, motivating a renewed interest in nonblocking networks. While the various multipoint architectures can all be configured to be nonblocking, for most, the cost quickly becomes prohibitive. We examine the complexity of several multipoint switch architectures, taking into account the switching network, the memory needed for routing and the... Read More

In this paper we make an analogy between the time that storage must be maintained in an optimistic simulation and the blocking time in a conservative simulation. By exploring this analogy, we design two new Global Virtual Time (GVT) protocols for Time Warp systems. The first simple protocol is based on the null message scheme proposed for clock advancement in some conservative approaches; this yields what we call Local Guaranteed Time. Our main contribution is a second new protocol that is inspired by Misra's circulating marker scheme for deadlock recovery... Read More

Supervised Competitive Learning (SCL) is described in an accompanying paper [1]; SCL assembles a set of learning modules into a supervised learning system to address the stability-plasticity dilemma. That paper reported results using backpropagation networds as the learning modules (SCL/BP). Here (Part II) we report SCL results using learning modules based on fuzzy logic (SCL/FZ). Although its learning algorithm is very different from that of backpropagation networks, fuzzy logic also suffers the stability-plasticity dilemma. A simulator on handwritten digit and gesture recognition was constructed to demonstrate the utility of SCL/FZ;... Read More

This paper examines the performance of synchronous checkpointing in a distributed computing environment with and without load redistribution. Performance models are developed, and optimum checkpoint intervals are determined. The analysis extends earlier work by allowing for multiple nodes, state dependent checkpoint intervals, and a performance metric which is coupled with failure-free performance and the speedup functions associated with implementation of parallel algorithms. Expressions for the optimum checkpoint intervals for synchronous checkpointing with and without load redistribution are derived and the results are then used to determine when load redistribution is... Read More

Early work in the dield of natural language processing was based on the assumption that humans interact with computers in the same way they do with other humans. However, more recent work seems to indicate otherwise. We conducted an experiment to explore human-computer interactions for a limited domain. The results that we obtained are consistent with recent findings. In a limited domain, when communicating with computers, people keep utterances very brief, pronomial references to a minimum and the conversation very focused. From the data that we have gathered, it is... Read More

Current natural language processing systems have a wide coverage of English, but are unforgiving of errors and generate numerous alternative but irrelevant analyses. These problems are exacerbated when speech is the input medium rather than text, because speech recognizers generate their own errors and ambiguities. These errors, together with the user's informality of speech, can lead to extremely large search spaces of possible interpretations. To add to the complexity, only very small subsets of English can be analyzed semantically. For our domain, which is very limited, our approach is to... Read More

Although speech recognition has improved significantly in recent years, it use in commercial environments has been limited by the inability of systems to model conventional co-operative dialogue. Any natural language systems for co-operative dialogue should at least be able to account for the many types of sub-dialogues that occur in conversations. Plan-based techniques provide a computationally powerful method for handling such dialogues. We discuss in this report our first attempt at building a plan-recognizer for an overall speech-driven system which interacts via a naturally restricted subset of English in a... Read More

A feasible and cost-effective resource management scheme is urgently needed in the Broadband Integrated Services Digital Network adopting the Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) technique. In this paper we propose a simple and comprehensive strategy to manage bandwidth allocations, congestion control and quality of service (QOS) integrity in a multi-service ATM network. The proposed framework involves a core network that grants a limited number of grade of service (GOS) profiles and suggest the design of edge-adaptors able to match QOS user's requirements with associated connection acceptance algorithms are presented. Also, for... Read More

This paper describes several methods for analyzing the queueing behavior of switching networks with flow control and shared buffer switches. It compares the various methods on the basis of accuracy and computation speed, where the performance metric of the most concern is the maximum throughput. The best of the methods accurately predicts throughput for multi-stage networks constructed from large switches (greater than equal to 8 ports).