An Integrated Graphics Programming Environment

The facilities of the PS-algol programming language are described in this paper to show how they may be used to provide an integrated graphics programming environment. The persistent store mechanism and the secure transaction facilities of the language provide the basic environment in which an integrated system may be implemented. This is augmented by data types and operations to support line drawings and raster graphics. The combination of these mechanisms may be used to provide the integrated graphics programming environment.     

Development of an advanced satellite system

A basic satellite system consists of a minicomputer, with card reader and line printer, emulating the Remote Job Entry (RJE) workstation of a mainframe manufacturer. The addition of a disk stroe increases the range of facilities which can be offered by such a system. Apart from a number of subsidiary advantages, this leads to a system which can interface a community of computer users to its mainframe computing facilities, and hence to a user image which is stable over some long period of time. The paper outlines how an advanced satellite system was simply assembled from four basic components. These components were written in different languages by different institutions, but the use of a standard message passing programming interface provided a sound framework for the detection and elimination of errors.     

If Prolog is the Answer, What is the Question? or What it Takes to Support AI Programming Paradigms

Knowledge programming, which makes use of the explicit representation and interpretation of knowledge to create intelligent programs, requires specialized languages and tools to help programmers. Prolog, an implementation of a logic programing language, provides some of these tools; it and other languages have been argued to be the "best" way to do such knowledge programming. This paper raises questions which suggest that any single paradigm of programming (e.g., logic programming or object-oriented programming) benefits by being integrated in a single environment with other paradigms of programming. Integration of these paradigms with each other, and within a flexible, user-friendly computing environment is also necessary. Such an environment must provide source level debugging and monitoring facilities, analysis and performance tuning tools, and an extended set of user communication programs.     

Multimodal image fusion for noninvasive epilepsy surgery planning

A neurodiagnostic workstation integrated into a hospital picture archiving and communication system supports low cost, low risk epilepsy surgery planning by combining biomedical information from four neuroimaging modalities. This medical workstation aims to provide an environment for optimal interpretation of multiple noninvasive image modalities by combining functional PET, MRS, and MEG information with structural MRI anatomy both qualitatively and quantitatively. Since there is currently little knowledge relating to the positive and negative findings of various imaging and intracranial EEG studies on patient populations, the data extracted will also help in outcome analyses to identify inefficient or duplicative evaluation procedures     

Limitations of Cycle Stealing for Parallel Processing on a Network of Homogeneous Workstations

The low cost and availability of clusters of workstations have lead researchers to re-explore distributed computing using independent workstations. This approach may provide better cost/performance than tightly coupled multiprocessors. In practice, this approach often utilizes wasted cycles to run parallel jobs. In this paper we address the feasibility and limitation of such a nondedicated parallel processing environment assuming workstation processes have priority over parallel tasks. We develop a simple analytical model to predict parallel job response times. Our model provides insight into how significantly workstation owner interference degrades parallel program performance. It forms a foundation for task partitioning and scheduling in a nondedicated network environment. A new term, task ratio, which relates the parallel task demand to the mean service demand of nonparallel workstation processes, is introduced. We propose that task ratio is a useful metric for determining how a parallel applications should be partitioned and scheduled in order to make efficient use of a nondedicated distributed system.     

Transportation interface facilities design using interactive high-level computer graphics

A prototype pedestrian facilities design system is described. The design system exploits the capabilities of an intelligent high-resolution vector graphics workstation which features a highly interactive computer graphics environment. A summary of historical developments in pedestrian facility design and graphics workstation architecture is presented, followed by a discussion of the stochastic model and interactive computer graphics features utilized by a prototype facilities design system. Potential applications of such a design system are discussed, and promising areas of future development are outlined.     

The design,development and evaluation of hypermedia courseware for the World Wide Web

The World Wide Web provides hypertext and multimedia based information across the Internet. Many applications have been developed on http servers.One important and novel use of the servers has been the provision of courseware facilities. This includes on-line lecture notes, exercises and their solutions as well as interactive packages suited primarily for teaching and demonstration packages. A variety of disciplines have benefitted notably C programming, X Windows, Computer Vision, Image Processing, Computer Graphics, Artificial Intelligence and Parallel Computing.This paper will address the issues of (i) implementing a variety of computer science courses and (ii) using the packages in a class environment.It also considers how best to provide information in such a hypertext based system and how interactive image processing packages can be developed. A suite of multimedia based tools have been developed to facilitate such systems and these will be described in the paper. In particular we have developed a number of methods for running applications live over the WWW.     

User interfaces for structural engineering relational data base

The needs of engineers in their interaction with engineering data bases are very different from those of their counter-parts in the business world. Business data base management system interfaces typically provide only a single mode of textual communication, usually a structured query language. However, in an idealengineering data base interface, an engineer would be able to define constraints, give examples, point at parts of pictures, and (sometimes) use several modes of communication simultaneously. The paper presents an example from an engineering design application to show how a traditional query language can be enhanced to accommodate the engineering needs. The paper further describes a conceptual approach for multimodal engineering data base interface combining multipurpose graphics, an engineering query language, and other interface methodologies in an engineering workstation environment.     

Connecting tools using message passing in the Field environment

An overview is given of the Field environment, which was developed to show that highly integrated, interactive environments like those on PCs can be implemented on workstations and can be used for classical-language and large-scale programming. Field connects tools with selective broadcasting, which follows the Unix philosophy of letting independent tools cooperate through simple conventions, demonstrating that this simple approach is feasible and desirable. Field achieves its goals by providing a consistent graphical front end and a simple integration framework that lets existing and new Unix tools cooperate. The front end is based on a tool set called the Brown workstation environment. The framework combines selective broadcasting with an annotation editor that provides consistent access to the source code in multiple contexts and with a set of specialized interactive analysis tools. Field's integration framework and message facility are described     

Creating sophisticated development tools with OmniBrowser

Smalltalk is not only an object-oriented programming language; it is also known for its extensive integrated development environment supporting interactive and dynamic programming. While the default tools are adequate for browsing the code and developing applications, it is often cumbersome to extend the environment to support new language constructs or to build additional tools supporting new ways of navigating and presenting source code. In this paper, we present the OmniBrowser, a browser framework that supports the definition of browsers based on an explicit metamodel. With OmniBrowser a domain model is described in a graph and the navigation in this graph is specified in its associated metagraph. We present how new browsers are built from predefined parts and how new tools are easily described. The browser framework is implemented in the Squeak Smalltalk environment. This paper shows several concrete instantiations of the framework: a remake of the ubiquitous Smalltalk system browser, a coverage browser, the Duo Browser and the dynamic protocols browser.     

Privacy and security in information systems using programming language features

This paper describes a specification and implementation scheme for providing an integrated approach to security and privacy rules and shows how they may be achieved with a formal specification language that permits the association of operations with logical conditions. The implementation of these rules is shown in the programming language PLAIN. In this way, the access and notification control that has typically been performed by operating systems, database management systems, and programming languages is brought together in an integrated programming environment.     

Tools: An environment for time-shared computing and programming

The Yale Tools environment provides integrated modern computing facilities to a mixed group of programmers and users on time-shared machines. Hundreds of people use the environment every day for systems and applications programming, word-processing and university business. The success of the environment is in its integration and engineering detail. Building such a system without a high-level language and a run-time library would have been impossible.     

Developing technologies for broad-network concurrent computing

Recent developments in networking infrastructures, computer workstation capabilities, software tools, and programming languages have motivated new approaches to broad-network concurrent computing. This paper describes extensions to concurrent computing which blend new and evolving technologies to extend users' access to resources beyond their local network. The result is a concurrent programming environment which can dynamically extend over network and file system boundaries to envelope additional resources, to enable multiple-user collaborative programming, and to achieve a more optimal process mapping. Additional aspects of the derivative environment feature extended portability and support for the accessing of legacy codes and packages. This paper describes the advantages of such a design and how they have been implemented in the environment termed “IceT”.     

VERTAF/Multi-Core: A SysML-Based Application Framework for Multi-Core Embedded Software Development

Multi-core processors are becoming prevalent rapidly in personal computing and embedded systems.Nevertheless,the programming environment for multi-core processor-based systems is still quite immature and lacks efficient tools.In this work,we present a new VERTAF/Multi-Core framework and show how software code can be automatically generated from SysML models of multi-core embedded systems.We illustrate how model-driven design based on SysML can be seamlessly integrated with Intel’s threading building blocks (TBB) and the quantum framework (QF) middleware.We use a digital video recording system to illustrate the benefits of the framework.Our experiments show how SysML/QF/TBB help in making multi-core embedded system programming model-driven,easy,and efficient.     

GAnet: genetic algorithm platform for pipe network optimisation

The marriage of object-oriented programming techniques and genetic algorithms (GAs) provides a uniquely flexible environment for the development of evolution programs with technical applications. Computerised representations of hydraulic network models are used in various guises throughout the water industry. As well as being commonly linked to relational databases to form asset management systems and to geographic information systems (GIS) to provide visualisation and mapping facilities, common applications include modelling the hydraulic performance of the network and use in network optimisation applications. This paper describes an architecture for an integrated optimisation application, GAnet, which comprises a GA application, a GIS and a hydraulic network solver.     

Knowledge resource tools for information access

This paper provides an overview of a research program just being defined at Bellcore. The objective is to develop facilities for working with large document collections that provide more refined access to the information contained in these “source” materials than is possible through current information retrieval procedures. The tools being used for this purpose are machine-readable dictionaries, encyclopedias, and related “resources” that provide geographical, biographical, and other kinds of specialized knowledge. A major feature of the research program is the exploitation of the reciprocal relationship between sources and resources. These interactions between texts and tools are intended to support experts who organize and use information in a workstation environment. Two systems under development will be described to illustrate the approach: one providing capabilities for full-text subject assessment; the other for concept elaboration while reading text. Progress in the research depends critically on developments in artificial intelligence, computational linguistics, and information science to provide a scientific base, and on software engineering, database management, and distributed systems to provide the technology.     

System software for computer-aided design in electronics on a small machine

A minicomputer installation dedicated to c.a.d. is described. The economy and flexibility of such systems when incorporating comprehensive graphics facilities is stressed. Suitable operating systems are discussed, including an executive program to provide software simulation of three virtual computers (each virtual machine may then run under an independent operating system). Features of the graphical system software are outlined, including device and machine independence, flexibility, ease of use and economy. The applications programming philosophy required is described together with several interactive programs developed for use in electronics design. These programs, used by electronic engineers and research scientists over the past four years, illustrate the flexibility inherent in the system.     

A hardware-independent virtual reality development system

Simulating virtual reality (VR) hardware allows programs to be written in a desktop environment without constant use of limited VR resources. Rather than shifting constantly between VR and workstation environments, developers at the Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) wanted to be able to test VR applications on the normal workstation console. We therefore created a software simulator for VR development. It simulates various VR system features with an interface that runs on an ordinary workstation. The simulator is implemented as part of the CAVE library, the programming library originally written to support the CAVE hardware. It can, however, be used to develop applications for several VR systems, including ImmersaDesks and head-coupled displays. The library itself has been designed so that use of the simulator or any supported hardware is entirely transparent to application code