Information Sciences - Applications最新文献

This paper will present results of applying two autonomous fuzzy controllers to a dynamically coupled system. The system consists of a space platform and a gimballed payload. The controllers are developed with the systems decoupled. Parametric studies are performed on the support limits for the error, change-in-error, and control. These parametric variations provide insight into satisfactorily tuning the controllers. The controllers were compared to controllers developed using Linear Quadratic Regulator (LQR) control design. The controllers are used to perform slew maneuvers and disturbance rejection. A design procedure using constraints due to hardware or software specification is also examined. When error and control support limits are specified, tuning the fuzzy controller is made relatively easy. The systems were coupled and the response of the payload and platform were examined for commanded payload trajectories and impulses applied to the platform. The fuzzy controllers performed very well in all cases.

This paper introduces the subject of logic programming, describes the execution model of Prolog, and surveys Prolog development tools. In addition, the paper explains how Prolong integrates with artificial intelligence applications and software engineering principles. Finally, it shows how the execution model of Prolog can be optimized and parallelized efficiently.

Sequential algorithms and conventional architectures for grading tubules in digitized images of microscopic slide information of breast cancer malignancies are time-consuming and labor-intensive because of high computational complexity. This paper presents a parallel algorithm and its corresponding VLSI architecture for grading tubules in breast cancer lesions in real time. The algorithm relies on a combination of criteria used by physicians including brightness contrast, dark edge, and uniform density of tubule areas. The algorithm exploits concurrencies in both the space domain and the time domain. It only requires each processing element (PE) to perform three simple operations such as addition, subtraction, and comparison, which makes every PE simple. The essential parallelism in the proposed algorithm facilitates its implementation using VLSI architecture, so that the time complexity is only O(N²/k) if using k × k processing elements, where N is the dimension of the image plane. If k = N, the time complexity will be O(N), compared with O(N²) using a uniprocessor. A series of experiments and simulations have verified the high performance of the proposed algorithm and the parallel VLSI architecture.

Software professionals face the difficult challenge of keeping up with today's fast-paced technological environment. There has been much discussion about technical obsolescence in a field where the half-life of an undergraduate education is only a few years. Moreover, assessments provide measurable proof of behavioral changes, legitimizing the human resource department's role in improving productivity by rendering it quantifiable. In this paper, we describe an empirical study of the skills assessment of software practitioners. This study is based on a survey performed collaboratively by the Software Engineering Research Center (SERC), Purdue University, and IBM Training and Education, with direct participation from the IEEE. The goal of this research was the determination of the critical skills necessary for software professionals. This paper describes the survey, the structure of the questionnaire, and the skills assessment process. Skills assessment stages such as data collection, data analysis, data representation, and follow-up reassessment are also described. Detailed results of the survey and selected critical skills relating to both object-oriented and client-server technologies are presented in this paper. These assessments provide a systematic approach through which human resources departments can improve productivity during downturns by increasing the working effectiveness of software developers. We believe that university software engineering students must understand the differences between academic programming and industry software development and engineering. They must also be able to perform the activities involved with plan development, project management, and software product evaluation. We also conclude that these assessments will foster genuine commitment and motivate software practitioners to grow in a field of technology that changes daily.

Rather than using a length-based or translation-based criterion to align bilingual texts, this paper proposes a part-of-speech-based (POS-based) criterion. The postulation is that bilingual texts should share the same concepts, ideas, entities, and events. In addition, these are usually represented by some critical POSes. Thus, the numbers of critical POSes in a language pair of a bead are close. This criterion has two advantages: one is its uniform behavior across the different language families; the other is its simplicity comparing to translation-based criterion. Divide-and-conquer, dynamic programming, and simulated annealing techniques are used to implement the POS-based alignment algorithm. Under the order constraint of alignment, this paper introduces a performance evaluation method to calculate precision and recall. A concept of incremental beads measures the degree of matching between real bead sequence and computed bead sequence. Two important issues are considered in the experiments. On the one hand, the test texts are in languages from different families, i.e., Chinese (an oriental language) and English (an occidental language). On the other hand, they are selected from diversified registers, such as Sinorama Magazine and an IBM User Manual. The experimental results show that the simulated annealing approach has very good performance. In aligning texts from Sinorama Magazine, the recall is 94.4% and the precision is 94.9% by using paragraph markers. Without paragraph markers, the recall is 96.7% and the precision is 97.2% for aligning the IBM User Manual.