Library: Computer Science

Almost from the very beginning of the digital age, people have sought better ways to communicate with computers. This research investigates how computers might be enabled to understand natural language in a more humanlike way. Based, in part, on cognitive development in infants, we introduce an open computational framework for visual perception and grounded language acquisition called Experience-Based Language Acquisition (EBLA). EBLA can watch a series of short videos and acquire a simple language of nouns and verbs corresponding to the objects and object-object relations in those videos. U...

Shape classification is a challenging image processing problem because shapes can occur in any position, at any orientation, and at any scale in an image. Shapes can also be obscured by gaps in their boundaries, occlusions, and noise. General shape classifiers often suffer from low precision, and specialized shape classifiers rely on specific features, like vertices or connected boundaries, making them difficult to generalize. The objective of this research is to design, implement, and test a general, high-precision two-dimensional shape classifier that is invariant to translation, scale, and ...

"Liberal order and software-agents" - long-established ideas and modern technology are bridged. The impulse for undertaking this effort comes from the observation that it becomes difficult for computer science alone to create order for and within machines. The growing complexity of computer systems, open networks like the Internet, and the increasingly social role of software entities push the traditional quest for total global control out of reach. Economic theory of social order offers extensive experience with such conditions, so that it can complement and guide research in computer science...

A synopsis of eminent computer chess programs reveal that they are designed around a 'brute force' approach. An argument is made that by continuing the 'brute force' search approach, computer chess development is moving away from human evaluation methods. Research is done into studies of evaluation methods, and a discovery is made that humans use a form of intuition, called their 'sense of beauty', to choose the best chess move. A paper by Margulies is cited which formulates principles of beauty which apply to chess. Three versions of a chess program are developed, using no heuristics, standar...

Cross Language Text Retrieval (CLTR) has been defined as the retrieval of documents in a language different from that of the original query. To make this possible some kind of mechanism has to be applied in order to translate the information contained in the source sentence. Many different approaches have been carried out with the purpose of transferring the information from the source language query to the target language one. Though all these methods deal with a way of translating as much information as possible from the source query, little research has been conducted in relation to the fie...

This research is dedicated to two main problems in finding shortest paths in the graphs. The first problem is to find shortest paths from an origin to all other vertices in non-negatively weighted graph. The second problem is the same, except it is allowed that some edges are negative. This is a more difficult problem that can be solved by relatively complicated algorithms. We attack the first problem by introducing a new data structure - Relaxed Heaps that implements efficiently two main operations critical for the improvement of Dijkstra's shortest path algorithm. R²heaps with suspended re...

Context Mediation is a field of research that is concerned with the interchange of information across different environments, which provides a vehicle to bridge semantic gaps among disparate entities. Knowledge Discovery is concerned with the extraction of actionable information from large databases. A challenge that has received relatively little attention is knowledge discovery in a highly disparate environment, that is multiple heterogeneous data sources, multiple domain knowledge sources and multiple knowledge patterns. This thesis tackles the problem of semantic interoperability among ...

This dissertation introduces new hardware architectures for more realistic surface rendering of three dimensional objects and the rendering of volumetric datasets. Surface rendering is dealt with in the first part of the dissertation where the architectures for displacement map rendering in hardware are proposed. This work represents the first to appear in scientific literature on displacement map hardware rendering. Where possible these architectures propose components that integrate into currently available pipelines and make use of existing units in those pipelines. Displacement map renderi...

In this thesis we advance the state-of the practice in the Space Mission Operations domain by leveraging single spacecraft technologies along with classical scheduling frameworks and notation to create a scheduler for a constellation of spacecraft. We define a scheduling product that is focused on the problem of scheduling networked groups of spacecraft, called constellations. Within this thesis we show that the constellation schedule problem is a very complex problem, and the application of heuristics is one approach that allow us to schedule successfully. Our first objective, comprising chap...

Information theory methods are of wide use in contemporary logic design, but their proper application to Computer Aided Design (CAD) is rather impossible without strong theoretical and practical justification. Our research is focused on logic function minimization which is an essential component of any system for digital circuit design. The well-known information theory methods to minimize logic functions should be improved and developed towards new problems appeared while increasing the number of CAD applications. We report new results on logic functions minimization by information theory sta...