LawBot: a multiagent assistant for legal research

LawBot is a system of Internet based agents that help to collect and organize the statutes and case histories relevant to a legal search. The system includes an ontology that maps colloquial terms to corresponding legal terminology, thus simplifying the system's use by people outside the legal profession     

The ultimate design tool

The author design tools from a tool user's point of view. The author considers the creative process and where design tools fit into that process. He considers pencil and paper as a tool and argues that they are better than computers as an ideation tool     

PELAS-program error-locating assistant system

Error localization in program debugging is the process of identifying program statements which cause incorrect behavior. A prototype of the error localization assistant system which guides a programmer during debugging of Pascal programs is described. The system is interactive: it queries the programmer for the correctness of the program behavior and uses answers to focus the programmer's attention on an erroneous part of the program (in particular, it can localize a faulty statement). The system differs from previous approaches in that it makes use of the knowledge of program structure, which is derived automatically. The knowledge of program structure is represented by the dependence network which is used by the error-locating reasoning mechanism to guide the construction, evaluation, and modification of hypothesis of possible causes of the error. Backtracking reasoning has been implemented in the reasoning mechanism     

A distributed programming assistant

This paper describes an interactive programming environment within which proposed changes to a program are monitored to ensure that they do not introduce various common types of logical inconsistency. The environment, which is provided by a network of concurrent ‘experts’ dealing with various aspects of the program being developed, is designed to be convenient to work in and to impose few constraints on the programmer.     

Shape ultimate attribute opening

The ultimate opening (UO) is a powerful segmentation operator recently introduced by Beucher [1]. It automatically selects the most contrasted regions of an image. However, in the presence of nested structures (e.g. text in a signboard or windows in a contrasted facade), interesting structures may be masked by the containing region. In this paper we focus on ultimate attribute openings and we propose a method that improves the results by favoring regions with a predefined shape via a similarity function. An efficient implementation using a max-tree representation of the image is proposed. The method is validated in the framework of three applications: facade analysis, scene-text detection and cell segmentation. Experimental results show that the proposed method yields better segmentation results than UO.     

Creating the Computer Industry

The major underlying factors that shaped the computer industry as it emerged, beginning in the mid-1940s, are the focus of this paper. Unlike many accounts that primarily discuss technological developments, this paper examines the interaction of three equally important elements: technology, customers and suppliers. The evolution of the computer industry is shown to have been driven initially by national-security customers, and later by cost-sensitive commercial customers. Technological advances made in response to these two customer types are identified, and the successes and failures of suppliers are analyzed in terms of changing customer requirements     

Creating the paperless office

A year ago, Oregon's Construction Contractors Board was still largely dependent on paper files. Every day, its 50 employees handled an ever-increasing number of documents submitted by contractors and the general public. In fact, in each of the past seven years, the number of documents handled by the CCB has increased by 19 percent. The office now maintains more than 100,000 paper files, each one an important public document. Agency management knew it was not realistic to ask the state of Oregon for more resources. CCB management knew past solutions would no longer work; it needed to better apply technology to its business processes. Two years ago, the agency began to migrate from a proprietary Wang 5100 environment to an open, client/server system. The Wang databases and their corresponding applications would be converted to RDBMs. The office would be networked with other state agencies. And the IS staff would get new RAD tools to enhance and maintain the reengineered applications. Of all the technologies that CCB and its contractor studied, it was imaging/workflow products promise to improve the efficiency of the CCB. Last fall, the CCB began a one-year project to use imaging/workflow products to remove its dependence on paper files     

Odyssey: A knowledge-based assistant

We describe an investigation into the representation and use of task domain knowledge to assist with the acquisition of data in an office information system. In particular, a demonstration system called Odyssey is described which assists with the filling out of a collection of electronic forms in the preparation for a business trip. The system uses knowledge about trip planning to maintain consistency of the acquired data, infer additional values and data base records, reformat field entries on the forms, correct spelling errors, etc. We discuss the ‘frame oriented’ style of programming used to design and implement Odyssey that combines ‘frame-structured’ knowledge representation and ‘object oriented’ programming. We focus on the problems involved with allowing the user at any time to enter or change information in any of the forms. A dependency maintenance facility is described that deals with those problems by allowing the application of domain knowledge to data whenever it enters the data base, and the removal of derived results whenever the data used in the derivation is removed or changed.     

On the ultimate convex hull algorithm in practice

Kirkpatrick and Seidel [13,14] recently proposed an algorithm for computing the convex hull of n points in the plane that runs in O(n log h) worst case time, where h denotes the number of points on the convex hull of the set. Here a modification of their algorithm is proposed that is believed to run in O(n) expected time for many reasonable distributions of points. The above O(n log h) algorithmsare experimentally compared to the O(n log n) ‘throw-away’ algorithms of Akl, Devroye and Toussaint [2, 8, 20]. The results suggest that although the O(n Log h) algorithms may be the ‘ultimate’ ones in theory, they are of little practical value from the point of view of running time.     

An automated software design assistant

An automated software design assistant was implemented as a part of a long-term project with the objectives of applying the computer-aided technique to the tools in a software engineering environment. A set of quantitative measures are derived based on the degree to which a particular design satisfied the attributes associated with a structured software design. The measure are then used as decision rules for a computer-aided methodology for structured design. The feasibility of the approach is also demonstrated by a case study using a small application system design problem     

Creating the first SCORM object

The creation of the first SCORM (Shareable Content Object Reference Model) object offers some challenges and difficulties which go beyond the facilities offered by content generation applications. In particular, the creation of really reusable, searchable learning objects requires a detailed consideration of metadata, where some institutional aspects may be unclear or not available. This work describes creation of a first learning object, from software tools installation to final packaging. It aims at a wider perspective than that offered by handbooks or user guides for content generation tools, generally poor or altogether deprived of suggestions on how to go about to achieve reusability, interoperability, durability and accessibility as conceived by the SCORM standard. Only free software and Internet publications are used as references. The creation of a simple SCORM package with the Reload Editor is described step by step, and the package created is then tested using Reload SCORM Player, allowing for the detection of some difficulties and alternatives of solution. Help available and some commented references are afterwards indicated. A list of suggestions finally emerges, to the purpose of solving beforehand most of the uncertainties, defining a consistent learning object creation scheme and reducing training time to master tools and metadata generation. As a conclusion, some limitations found along the work are pointed out, in particular the necessity of adopting or defining a LOM (Learning Object Metadata) application profile together with an institutional strategy to face metadata creation efficiently.     

Creating the first SCORM object

The creation of the first SCORM (Shareable Content Object Reference Model) object offers some challenges and difficulties which go beyond the facilities offered by content generation applications. In particular, the creation of really reusable, searchable learning objects requires a detailed consideration of metadata, where some institutional aspects may be unclear or not available. This work describes creation of a first learning object, from software tools installation to final packaging. It aims at a wider perspective than that offered by handbooks or user guides for content generation tools, generally poor or altogether deprived of suggestions on how to go about to achieve reusability, interoperability, durability and accessibility as conceived by the SCORM standard. Only free software and Internet publications are used as references. The creation of a simple SCORM package with the Reload Editor is described step by step, and the package created is then tested using Reload SCORM Player, allowing for the detection of some difficulties and alternatives of solution. Help available and some commented references are afterwards indicated. A list of suggestions finally emerges, to the purpose of solving beforehand most of the uncertainties, defining a consistent learning object creation scheme and reducing training time to master tools and metadata generation. As a conclusion, some limitations found along the work are pointed out, in particular the necessity of adopting or defining a LOM (Learning Object Metadata) application profile together with an institutional strategy to face metadata creation efficiently.     

A multi-level control architecture for the bionic handling assistant

The bionic handling assistant is one of the largest soft continuum robots and very special in being a pneumatically operated platform that is able to bend, stretch, and grasp in all directions. It nevertheless shares many challenges with smaller continuum and other soft robots such as parallel actuation, complex movement dynamics, slow pneumatic actuation, non-stationary behavior, and a lack of analytic models. To master the control of this challenging robot, we argue for a tight integration of standard analytic tools, simulation, control, and state-of-the-art machine learning into an overall architecture that can serve as blueprint for control design also beyond the BHA. To this aim, we show how to integrate specific modes of operation and different levels of control in a synergistic manner, which is enabled by using modern paradigms of software architecture and middleware. We thereby achieve an architecture with unique overall control abilities for a soft continuum robot that allow for flexible experimentation toward compliant user-interaction, grasping, and online learning of internal models.     

Multiple switching relays for the estimation of ultimate data

Sustained oscillations are obtained by putting relays in the feedback loop, which provide ultimate periods and gains of processes that can be used to tune PID controllers. The ultimate periods obtained by conventional relay autotuning have relative errors up to 5% for first order plus time delay processes. To improve the estimation of ultimate periods, modified relays such as a saturation relay and a relay with preload have been available. However, these modifications lose the binary (on-off) property of the conventional relay. Here relays with multiple switching which produce pulse-widthmodulation (PWM) signals are proposed. They retain the binary property and show improved identification accuracies of ultimate parameters.     

An intelligent assistant for requirements validation

The process of determining user requirements for software systems is often plagued with uncertainty, ambiguity, and inconsistency. Rapid prototyping offers an iterative approach to requirements engineering that can be used to alleviate some of the problems with communication and understanding. Since the systems development process is characterized by changing requirements and assumptions, involving multiple stakeholders with often differing viewpoints, it is beneficial to capture the justifications for the decisions in the development process in a structured manner. Thisdesign rationale captured during requirements engineering can be used in conjunction with the rapid prototyping process to support various stakeholders involved in systems development. CAPS (the Computer Aided Prototyping System) has been built to help software engineers rapidly construct prototypes of proposed software systems. REMAP (Representation and MAintenance of Process knowledge) provides a conceptual model and mechanisms to represent and reason with (design) rationale knowledge. In this paper, we describe how in the context of evolving requirements, the CAPS system augmented with REMAP helps firm up software requirements through iterative negotiations via examination of executable prototypes and reasoning with design rationale knowledge.     

A versatile and safe mobility assistant

The Bremen autonomous wheelchair implements obstacle avoidance plus driving and routing assistance in a shared-control system. This article shows how the tasks of reliably detecting obstacles in the environment and safely avoiding these obstructions are solved     

计算机实验室实验员工作规程初探

根据计算机实验室特点,为了高效、优质地开展实验实训,我们从上课和课后两方面总结出了一套切实可行的实验员管理工作规程,并收到了很好的效果。