Paul J. Fortier

The design of real-time extensions to the Open Object Oriented Database system

The paper describes real time extensions to the Open Object Oriented Database system using the RTSORAC data model. This model combines an object oriented data model, real time requirements, flexible transactions, semantic relationships among objects, and active database features. Several extensions to the Open Object Oriented Database system, including development of interfaces for real time objects and real time transactions, use of a real time operating system, incorporation of real time object management, and incorporation of real time transaction management, are also described.

Mainstreaming an innovative 31-credit curriculum for first-year engineering majors

In September of 1998, the College of Engineering at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth piloted an innovative, integrated, first-year curriculum that dramatically changed 31 credits across two semesters. Preliminary assessment data was very encouraging after the first semester of operation and the team started an effort to adopt it. A storm of intense resistance and controversy erupted, however, catching nearly everyone by surprise. Argument, rational and seemingly irrational, threatened to eclipse the benefits of the new program and could have easily led to its termination. In retrospect the nature of the controversy and opposition was predictable. With earlier understanding of responses, adoption would still have been resisted and people would have disagreed but the team would have been better able to respond productively. This paper will present the story of the adoption of the IMPULSE program so that others can learn from our experiences. It will focus on the process that led to rapid adoption of the new curriculum and will point out important steps and pitfalls. The paper will include discussion of the important, and predictable, human reactions that were seen. We could not make progress until these were appreciated. Human reactions had to be understood and worked with. We hope that our experiences will encourage and help others to become more aware of the human factors that often dominate change processes.

Distributed Information and Computation in Scientific and Engineering Environments

The NSF Invitational Workshop on Distributed Information, Computation, and Process Management for Scientific and Engineering Environments (DICPM) brought together domain specialists from engineering and the ocean, atmospheric, and space sciences involved in the development and use of simulations of complex systems, and computer scientists working on distributed repositories, visualization, and resource management. The objective was to formulate directions for research efforts to facilitate effective collaboration and to help increase access to information and sharing of results and tools useful in large-scale, distributed, multidisciplinary scientific and engineering environments. Three broad problem areas inhibit such activities: (1) Computational, e.g, insufficient infrastructure for the sharing of very large amounts of information, results, and tools; (2) Structural institutional barriers, e.g., funding, publication, and promotion policies; and (3) Social, e.g., communication barriers stemming from narrow specialization. The participants supported specific steps to address these problems: explicit support and incentives for multidisciplinary activities; the development of digitial libraries to enhance interdisciplinary communication and understanding; and development of a “virtual scientific marketplace” to disseminate tools, results, and expertise;

Hierarchical Agglomerative Clustering Based T-outlier Detection

Diversification is a technique to reduce portfolio volatility. In traditional financial domains, the correlation coefficient has been used as a basis for diversification. However, it is problematic in reality since it only captures a single dimension. This research introduces a unique similarity based framework to identify outliers among high dimensional time series objects in financial markets. As the similarity between two assets decreases in the portfolio, the benefits of diversification increase. The paper proposes an efficient hierarchical agglomerative clustering (HAC) algorithm based on vertical and horizontal dimension reduction algorithms. Finally, this paper proposes a unique similarity measurement definition/calculation based on the time-value function. This paper discloses a series of experiment results illustrating the effectiveness of the framework. The detected outliers can be used to monitor portfolio diversification and therefore mitigate risk

Web based e-government data distribution

The US government and its agencies have a mandate to disseminate information on their operations for public use. Two such agencies are the National Marine Fisheries Service, and the Environmental Protection Agency. These agencies have an e-government directive, requiring them to provide historically collected electronic information to the general public and other agencies, organizations or businesses having legitimate uses for their databases. The three most important concepts for e-government data distribution are data preparation, presentation and data management. Unfortunately many of todays Web based information systems put presentation before content, and content before design. All three aspects are of equal importance and should receive equal attention. This paper discusses four Web based data distribution models, protocols, services and policies, with varying levels of complexity, being developed to allow the general information on water quality assessment, watershed health and fisheries assessment in the New England region.

Standardizing Real-Time Databases — RTSQL

This paper discusses extending the standard query language SQL’s definition, manipulation, and control to support real-time databases creating RTSQL (Real-Time SQL). A real-time database system has three distinguishing features: the requirement of temporally consistent data, the requirement of execution timing constraints, and the requirement that certain executions exhibit predictable timing behavior [17, 14, 20]. These features are useful to time critical applications that need to collect, modify, and retrieve shared data, and will add new requirements to the database query language.

Teaching Engineering through Design: A Novel Approach for a Department Level Reform Project

Engineering emphasizes human creation of products, processes and techniques aimed at making life better. The problem with traditional engineering education revolves around the use of stove-pipe curricula, using passive lectures and cookbook laboratories with apriori known results. Real-world engineering is open-ended and team-oriented requiring active participation. This paper describes our Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) department’s ongoing reform project to develop curricula striving to change this model by helping students become creative designers through: (1) encouraging students to broaden their perspectives, (2) requiring innovation, not copying, (3) promoting a product orientation, (4) providing students insight both socially and psychologically as to the nature of creativity, (5) providing tools (both physical and cognitive) to aid in creativity (6) requiring and encouraging original and creative work. The paper outlines the process for developing the new curricula, getting faculty involved, and how open-ended design will be integrated into courses and the processes used to initiate implementation of the new programs.

Implementation of a speculative concurrency controller

Many scheduling algorithms for databases have been developed in order to improve transaction responsiveness. Some developed algorithms meet special needs of real-time databases. These algorithms however, deal with temporal execution aspects, often disregarding semantics of data usage which could further improve performance. One such algorithm is speculative concurrency control, which uses execution redundancy by forking to improve performance. A simplified version of this algorithm has been implemented as a concurrency controller for an object oriented real-time database. The paper describes the experiences with the implementation, explains the reasons for only implementing a subset, and indicates required extensions to implement the complete algorithm. Also provided is a theoretical evaluation of the algorithm performance and scalability.

Derivation of Non-intrusive Cardiac Synthetic Sensor Using Native Instrumentation Metadata

Measuring an event of interest is not always as simple as placing a sensor with the desired properties in an appropriate measurement location to observe the event. Often, sensors cannot be placed at the desired site for numerous reasons (e.g. weight, space, and power issues). The desired measurement can often be derived through the use of other embedded native sensors, networked sensors and test specific sensors possessing appropriate metadata supporting extended use / reuse of measurement data. These measures are then used within a performance model to fuse data and derive a composite measure for the overall performance taking into account all of the discrete parameters and their performance variations both good and bad in determining overall system performance. This paper utilizes concepts for metadata and sensors allowing seamless selection and construction of non-physical (non-contact) synthetic sensors using embedded sensors and native metadata specifications.

Exception-handling extension for an object-oriented DBMS

The paper describes the implementation of an exception handling facility for the Open OODB, a research database system developed by Texas Instruments. The initial OODB database has been extended and modified to support exception handling. An extended exception handling model was designed and implemented which fits into the existing Open OODB architecture and computation model.