Raj Sunderraman

Implementation of a calendar application based on SyD coordination links

System on devices (SyD) is a specification for a middleware to enable heterogeneous collections of information, databases, or devices (such as hand-held devices) to collaborate with each other. This paper illustrates the advantages of SyD by describing a prototype calendar of meetings application. This application highlights some of the technical merits of SyD by exploiting the use of coordination links. Based on the underlying event-and-trigger mechanism, these links allow automatic updates as well as real-time enforcements of global constraints and interdependencies, not available with existing calendar applications. Additionally, the calendar application illustrates coordination among heterogeneous devices and databases, formation and maintenance of dynamic groups, mobility support through proxies, and performance group transactions across independent data stores.

SyD: a middleware testbed for collaborative applications over small heterogeneous devices and data stores

Developing a collaborative application running on a collection of heterogeneous, possibly mobile, devices, each potentially hosting data stores, using existing middleware technologies such as JXTA, BREW, compact .NET and J2ME requires too many ad-hoc techniques as well as cumbersome and time-consuming programming. Our System on Mobile Devices (SyD) middleware, on the other hand, has a modular architecture that makes such application development very systematic and streamlined. The architecture supports transactions over mobile data stores, with a range of remote group invocation options and embedded interdependencies among such data store objects. The architecture further provides a persistent uniform object view, group transaction with Quality of Service (QoS) specifications, and XML vocabulary for inter-device communication. This paper presents the basic SyD concepts and introduces the architecture and the design of the SyD middleware and its components. We also provide guidelines for SyD application development and deployment process. We include the basic performance figures of SyD components and a few SyD applications on Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) platforms. We believe that SyD is the first comprehensive working prototype of its kind, with a small code footprint of 112 KB with 76 KB being device-resident, and has a good potential for incorporating many ideas for performance extensions, scalability, QoS, workflows and security.

The development of a digital library to support the teaching of computer graphics and visualization

Abstract The ACM SIGGRAPH Education Committee web site is being evolved into a Digital Library that will be a worldwide resource for Graphics and Visualization Education. We discuss the history of the website, including a long-standing partnership with the National Science Foundation, and the current work to evolve it into a Digital Library. Finally, we discuss a proposed vision of the future of the Digital Library and how we are working to achieve that vision.

Toward an easy programming environment for implementing mobile applications: a fleet application case study using SyD middleware

This paper describes the advantages of SyD (System on Mobile Devices), a middleware technology for mobile devices and e-services, in terms of technology and programming. Features of SyD are illustrated here through our prototype application, a complex communication system for a trucking fleet that operates an automated package delivery system. The fleet system has been implemented in three ways, with SOAP, with JDBC, and with SyD. Our implementation experience shows that SyD greatly simplifies coding by allowing heterogeneous devices, peer-to-peer communications, group transactions based on triggering events, and mobility support through proxies and directory service.

Online biomedical publication classification using Multi-Instance Multi-Label algorithms with feature reduction

Text annotation, the assignment of metadata to documents, requires significant time and effort when performed by humans. A variety of text mining methods have been used to automate this process, many of them based on either keyword extraction or word counts. However, when using keywords as text classification features, it is common to find that (1) the number of training instances is much less than the number of features extracted. This complexity affects text classification performance. Another challenge is (2) the assignment of multiple, non-exclusive labels to the documents (multi-label classification). This problem makes text classification more complicated when compared with single label classification. We use, as an example, a set of expertly labeled documents from the human functional neuroimaging literature, and we apply a Multi-instance Multi-label (MIML) classification algorithm to the problem. To address (1), we apply a feature reduction approach to reduce the feature dimension. For (2) we use an MIML algorithm called MIMLfast to implement the multi-label classification.

Performance Impact of Computer Science Course Load and Transfer Status: (Abstract Only)

A recent 2017 study from HigherEd.com, shows that roughly 35% of students transfer colleges during their academic career. While much research has focused on the impact of undergraduate student success factors such as flipped classrooms, hybrid learning, and technology usage, we found no studies comparing transfer students versus non-transfer (native). In our research, we measure impact based on CS course load per semester related to pass/fail rates and contrast student status of transfer versus non-transfer (native). We show that transfer students tend to enroll in more CS courses per semester, beyond the departments recommended two. We also show that their performance is consistently different than that of native students, namely higher CS course fail rates and lower CS GPA scores. The detrimental effects and realization in this study is reason for further investigation. More features will be gathered to be used in our continued analysis and we see the need to examine the difficulty of CS courses taken to indicate why one cohort performs poorly and one does not. We conjecture that most transfer students tend to complete their core classes and are left with only CS courses to complete upon transfer. This results in the transfer students taking a heavier CS load and thus impacting their performance negatively, as compared to native students. Considering that many transfer students start their path way in 2-year institutions, it is imperative that better advising strategies are developed to enable the students to succeed upon their transition.

Hybrid feature selection methods for online biomedical publication classification

We review several feature selection methods: Recursive Feature Elimination, Select K Best, and Random Forests, as elements of a processing chain for feature selection in a text mining task. The text mining task is a multi-label classification problem of label assignment; metadata that is usually applied to published scientific papers by expert curators. In the formulation of this classification task, a feature space that is dramatically larger than the available training data occurs naturally and inevitably. We explore ways to reduce the dimension of the feature space, and show that sequential feature selection does substantially improve performance for this complex type of data.

Real Time Graphical Chinese Chess Game Agents Based on the Client and Server Architecture

The client and server architecture is currently widely used in industry; therefore, it is worthwhile to perform further investigations into its usefulness in different applications. To accomplish this, this paper will demonstrate its appropriateness by implementing an Internet based Chinese chess game using client and server architecture. This paper also has value for developers who would like to develop similar applications, such as Western chess, Internet Relay Chat, etc. In implementing the game application, the server program is developed with Java technology while the client program is implemented in C++ with the help of MFC to facilitate the development of a 2D graphical user interface. In the future, the client program can be modified to be a web application. Importantly, the Internet-based graphical Chinese chess agent system can be used to teach students to understand intelligent agents and game playing in an artificial intelligence class, networks, graphics and other relevant techniques in other computer science classes.