Library: Computer Science

Upper body power (UBP) is one of the most important factors affecting the performance of cross-country skiers during races. Although some initial studies have already attempted to predict UBP, until now, no study has attempted to apply machine learning methods combined with various feature selection algorithms to identify the discriminative features for prediction of UBP. The purpose of this study is to develop new prediction models for predicting the 10-second UBP (UBP10) and 60-second UBP (UBP60) of cross-country skiers by using General Regression Neural Networks (GRNN), Radial-Basis Functio...

The operational aspects of Lambda Calculus are studied as a fundamental basis for high-order functional computation. We consider systems having full reduction semantics, i.e., equivalence-preserving transformations of functions. The historic lineage from Eval-Apply to SECD to RTNF/RTLF culminates in the techniques of normal-order graph Head Order Reduction (HOR). By using a scalar mechanism to artificially bind relatively free variables, HOR makes it relatively effortless to reduce expressions beyond weak normal form and to allow expression-level results while exhibiting a well-behaved linear ...

This book presents a comprehensive process for visualization of interface metaphor for software. It is helpful in designing interactive user interfaces with magical super-affordances and definitive user experiences. As per the ancient Indian Vedic literature, metaphors are always conceived out of Vastu (entities having existence in our world). The visualization process given in the book shows how metaphorization could help in innovating highly experiential user interfaces, as one can create Avastu (non entities) by combining different objects and imaginative properties together. The main highl...

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...

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 ...

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...

As distributed applications become more sophisticated, their implementation becomes more and more difficult. It is therefore important to study how to facilitate the implementation of efficient distributed applications. This thesis reviews the different classes of distributed languages and presents a new approach to develop efficient distributed programs using the Ada language. This approach is compared in detail with existing distributed programming languages, existing approaches to distributed Ada programs, and the Distributed Annex of the new revision of Ada language.

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...

In an effort to extend traditional human-computer interfaces research has introduced embodied agents to utilize the modalities of everyday human-human communication, like facial expression, gestures and body postures. However, giving computer agents a human-like body introduces new challenges. Since human users are very sensitive and critical concerning bodily behavior the agents must act naturally and individually in order to be believable. This dissertation focuses on conversational gestures. It shows how to generate conversational gestures for an animated embodied ag...

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...