Abstract Libraries have long been widely recognized as import information-offering institutes. Thousands of new books are acquired per month by our university¡Xa mid-sized university in Taiwan), and patrons may have difficulties identifying the small set of books that really interest them. This gives rise to the problem of finding an effective way to recommend patrons the newly arrived books in a library. In this work, we address this problem in finding generalized association rules between patrons and books. We first discuss how to identify relevant but independent patron attributes in regard of the books they checked out. Then, we propose a set of algorithms for generating large itemsets and evaluate their performance experimentally. In addition, we define interestingness of rules and propose an algorithm for pruning uninteresting rules. Finally, we apply our approach to the circulation data of National SUN Yat-Sen University library and report our experiences.

½×¤åºK­n (­^) In the IC packaging and testing industry, short lead-time, high yield performance and excellence in quality are the major factors for competition. To achieve these goals, experienced and knowledgeable employees as well as a culture appreciating collaborative problem solving and knowledge sharing are essential. The case company realized and promoted the importance of collaborative problem solving and knowledge sharing. Currently, several collaborative problem solving and knowledge sharing activities can be observed in the case company. Although the case company appreciates and creates the culture of collaborative problem solving and knowledge sharing, several challenges remain to be addressed. ¡P Reuse of lessons learned knowledge (or tacit knowledge for short) seldom takes place. ¡P Retention of Lessons Learned knowledge is lacking. ¡P The availability of lessons learned knowledge is a concern. To address the above-mentioned challenges faced by the case company, the purpose of this research is to develop and implement a knowledge management system. Specifically, an lessons learned knowledge repository will be constructed for capturing, retaining and reusing lessons learned knowledge. The goals of the target knowledge management system include facilitating efficient inter- and intra-departmental knowledge sharing and improving the knowledge availability that, in turn, leading to a productivity improvement. Empirical evaluations on the usability of the proposed system will be conducted and analyzed.

TCP is the most popular transport layer protocol. When there is congestion in the network, either sender¡¦s TCP or router¡¦s buffer management has its way to resist the penalties of congestion. But each of them achieves this goal in an independent way. In TCP, Tahoe, Reno, New Reno, SACK, Vegas, FACK, and some modifications to TCP to improve performance were proposed. Although they have better performance than previous TCP, the cooperation between different types of TCP is not well. And TCP-unfriendly connections will be adverse to TCP connections. In buffer management, the fairness between different connections can be maintained. But some phenomena will be adverse to TCP connection because of buffer management is TCP-unawareness. In this paper, we show a problem that buffer management scheme may be unfriendly to new connection which is going to join the network with congestion. This problem will incur (1) TCP-unfriendly behavior, (2) alleviating congestion inefficiently, (3) unfairness between two connections. We propose a scheme to alleviate this problem and this scheme is easy to implement with existing buffer management scheme.

Traditional relational database model does not have enough capability to cope with a great deal of data in finite time. To address these requirements, data warehouses and online analytical processing (OLAP) have emerged. Data warehouses improve the productivity of corporate decision makers through consolidation, conversion, transformation, and integration of operational data, and supports online analytical processing (OLAP). The data warehouse design is a complex and knowledge intensive process. It needs to consider not only the structure of the underlying operational databases (source-driven), but also the information requirements of decision makers (user-driven). Past research focused predominately on supporting the source-driven data warehouse design process, but paid less attention to supporting the user-driven data warehouse design process. Thus, the goal of this research is to propose a user-driven data warehouse design support system based on the knowledge discovery approach. Specifically, a Data Warehouse Design Support System was proposed and the generalization hierarchy and generalized star schemas were used as the data warehouse design knowledge. The technique for learning these design knowledge and reasoning upon them were developed. An empirical evaluation study was conducted to validate the effectiveness on the proposed techniques in supporting data warehouse design process. The result of empirical evaluation showed that this technique was useful to support data warehouse design especially on reducing the missing design and enhancing the potentially useful design.

Due to the ever-increasing volume of textual documents, text mining is a rapidly growing application of knowledge discovery in databases. Past text mining techniques predominately concentrated on discovering intra-document patterns from textual documents, such as text categorization, document clustering, query expansion, and event tracking. Mining inter-document patterns from textual documents has been largely ignored in the literature. This research focuses on discovering inter-document patterns, called evolution patterns, from document-sequences and proposed the evolution pattern discovery (EPD) technique for mining evolution patterns from a set of ordered sequences of documents. The discovery of evolution patterns can be applied in such domains as environmental scanning and knowledge management, and can be used to facilitate existing document management and retrieval techniques (e.g., event tracking).

The bluetooth technology encompasses a simple low-cost, low-power, global radio system for integration into mobile devices to solve a simple problem: replace the cables used on mobile devices with radio frequency waves. Such devices can form a quick ad-hoc secure "piconet" and communicate among the connected devices. While WLANs had good ad-hoc networking capabilities, there was no clear market standard among them. Moreover, there were no global standards that can be integrated and implemented into small handheld devices. Some market analysts predict that there will be some 1.4 billion Bluetooth devices in operation by the year 2005 [1]. That is the reason we replace the cable from the "Network Adapter" with a low-cost RF link that we now call Bluetooth. However, the current specification1.1 [2][3] does not describe the algorithms or mechanisms to create a scatternet due to a variety of unsolved issues. Since the upper layers are not defined in Bluetooth, it is not possible to implement scatternet in current specification. Hence in this research, we need make some modifications to Bluetooth protocol in order to support the transmissions of packets in scatternet. In this paper we describe a novel scatternet architecture, and present link performance results of the proposed architecture.

Abstract Wideband-CDMA (WCDMA) is a kind of third-generation wireless communication system. It can provide multi-rate services and fast transmission with wideband technology. To improve the solution of no enough wireless bandwidth currently, the 3G communication systems have been researched and developed in several leading countries recently. WCDMA adopts a kind of new spreading codes named Orthogonal Variable Spreading Factor codes (OVSF codes) that have advantages of dynamically variable rates and keeping orthogonality. OVSF codes can provide different data transmission rates by assigning codes with different lengths. By building a code tree, we can discuss some better schemes to assign available data rate. In this paper, we propose an efficient channel assignment scheme that can decrease the call blocking rate and complexity of channel reassignment procedure. Based on the properties of the binary code tree, we use code merge scheme to decrease channel reassignment rate and call blocking rate. This will efficiently improve the performance of channel assignment and spectral efficiency. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme has expected results.

In this thesis, we shall propose heuristic algorithms to construct evolutionary trees under the distance base model. For a distance matrix of any type, the problem of constructing a minimum ultrametric tree (MUT), whose scoring function is the minimum tree size, is NP-hard. Furthermore, the problem of constructing an approximate ultrametric tree with approximation error ratio within $n^{epsilon}, epsilon > 0$, is also NP-hard. When the distance matrix is metric, the problem is called the triangle minimum ultrametric tree problem ($ riangle$MUT). For the $ riangle$MUT, there is a previous approximation algorithm, with error ratio $leq 1.5 ( lceil log n ceil + 1 )$. And we shall propose an improvement, with error ratio $leq lceil log_{alpha} n ceil + 1 cong 1.44 lceil log n ceil + 1$, where $alpha = frac{sqrt{5}+1}{2}$ for solving the $ riangle$MUT problem. We shall also propose a heuristic algorithm to obtain a good leaf node circular order. The heuristic algorithm is based on the clustering scheme. And then we shall design a dynamic programming algorithm to construct the optimal ultrametric tree with some fixed leaf node circular order. The time complexity of the dynamic programming is $O(n^3)$, if the scoring function is the minimum tree size or $L^1$-min increment.

This dissertation is intended to explore the design of a dual connection skeleton (DCS), which facilitates effective and efficient exploitation of Internet-centric collaborative workgroup and high performance metacomputing applications. The predominant difference between DCS and conventional frameworks is that DCS administers a network of brokers that are grouped into a logical ring. New mechanisms for group collaboration, load distribution, and fault tolerance, which are three crucial issues in Internet-based computing, are proposed and integrated into the dual connection skeleton. Collaborative workgroup becomes a significant common issue when we attempt to develop wide area applications supporting computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW). For group collaboration, DCS therefore offers a strategy for concurrency control that ensures the consistency of shared resources. By using the strategy, multiple users in a collaborative group are able to simultaneously access shared data without violating its consistency. With respect to load distribution, additionally, DCS applies an adaptive highest response ratio next (AHRRN) algorithm to job scheduling. Performance evaluations on competing algorithms, such as shortest job first (SJF), highest response ratio next (HRRN), and first come, first served (FCFS) are conducted. Simulation results demonstrate that AHRRN is not only an efficient algorithm, but also is able to prevent the well-known job starvation problem. In a parallel computational application, one can further decompose a composite job into constituent tasks such that these tasks can be assigned to different PEs for concurrent execution. The dual connection skeleton thus makes use of a proposed dynamic grouping scheduling (DGS), to undertake task scheduling for performance improvement. The DGS algorithm employs a task grouping strategy to determine computational costs of tasks. It re-prioritizes unscheduled tasks at each scheduling step to explore an appropriate task allocation decision. In terms of the schedule length, the performance of DGS has been evaluated by comparing with some existing algorithms, such as Heavy Node First (HNF), Critical Path Method (CPM), Weight Length (WL), Dynamic Level Scheduling (DLS), and Dynamic Priority Scheduling (DPS). Simulation results show that DGS outperforms these competing algorithms. Moreover, as for fault tolerance, DCS utilizes a dual connection mechanism for computational reliability enhancement. For the sake of constructing dual connection, we examine five approaches: RANDOM, NEXT, ROTARY, MINNUM, and WEIGHT. Each one of these approaches can be incorporated into DCS-based wide-area metacomputing systems. Performance simulation shows that WEIGHT benefits the dual connection the most. A DCS-based scientific computational application named the motion correction is used to demonstrate the fault tolerant ability of DCS. Putting the group collaboration, load distribution, and fault tolerance issues together, the dual connection skeleton forms a seamless and integrated framework for Internet-centric computing.

Abstract Machiavelli creates his model of an ideal prince in his famous book The Prince. He abandons the Christian criteria set for a prince, such as generosity, morality, and piety. Instead, he claims that it is harmful for a prince to follow all the moral principles, and it is necessary for a prince to be well versed in the use of evil and treachery. Machiavelli¡¦s contemporaries, including the Tudors, are shocked by his vision of a prince unfettered by the constraints of traditional morality. Most of the Tudors regard his doctrines as atheism and immorality. Only some accept certain parts of his doctrines. This thesis intends to explore how Shakespeare deals with Machiavellianism in his two tetralogies. Does Shakespeare agree with Machiavelli in the definition of an ideal prince? How does Shakespeare think of the pragmatism Machiavelli advocates? Among the kings Shakespeare portrays in his two tetralogies, I choose King Richard III and Henry IV for my discussion, for these two kings correspond to the kinds of princes whom Machiavelli wants to offer advice to in his treaty, i.e., the new princes, or the princes who gain power recently. It is interesting that although both Richard III and Henry IV are usurpers and they both adopt Machiavellian statecraft, the way Shakespeare presents them proves very different. When portraying Richard III, Shakespeare follows the convention of the hero villain and makes him a stage Machiavelli. When portraying Bolingbroke, later Henry IV, he presents him as a man who revolts against the tyranny of his king, and a man who wins the crown with calmness, intelligence, and justice. Whenever Richard makes use of evil, he arouses detest and horror. When Henry adopts evil, it turns out to be necessary evil. However, the accounts and evidence recently found about Richard show us that the king, unlike what Shakespeare portrays, is not a hunchback, nor is he a murderous monster. On the contrary, he is a ruler of efficiency and responsibility. In my opinion, the reason why Shakespeare distorts Richard is that he intentionally portrays a king who fully demonstrates the dangerous teachings of Machiavelli in order to warn his contemporaries against the danger of accepting Machiavellianism. Obviously, he still cannot appreciate pragmatism and realism advocated by Machiavelli. Years after, when he composes the second tetralogy and writes about Henry IV, Shakespeare alters his attitude and comes to realize that it is not enough for a king to be good and virtuous; he has to be wise, active, resolute, and treacherous, if necessary¡Xto put it in another way: he has to be a Machiavellian prince. To sum up, as he grows older, a powerful and efficient monarch rather than a virtuous and pious prince becomes what Shakespeare longs for. We can say that Shakespeare matures in public affairs. Therefore, we see a Shakespeare crossing the boundaries of idealism and realism.