Linda is a new parallel programming language that is built around an interprocess communication model called generative communication that differs from previous models in specifying that shared data be added in tuple form to an environment called tuple space, where a tuple exists independently until some process chooses to use it. Interesting properties arise from the model, including space and time uncoupling as well as structured naming. We delineate the essential Linda operations, then discuss the properties of generative communication. We are particularly concerned with implementing Linda on top of two traditional parallel programming paradigms - process communication through globally shared memory via monitors, and process communication in local memory architectures through the use of message passing constructs. We discuss monitors and message passing, then follow with a description of the two Linda implementations.

As the field of computer science continues to grow, the number of students enrolled in related programs will grow as well. Though one-on-one tutoring is one of the more effective means of teaching, computer science instructors will have less and less time to devote to individual students. To address this growing concern, many tools that automate parts of an instructor’s job have been proposed. These tools can assist instructors in presenting concepts and grading student work, and they can help students learn to program more effectively. A growing group of intelligent tutoring systems attempts to tie all of this functionality into a single tool that is meant to be used throughout an entire CS course or series of courses. To contribute to this emerging area, the Factoring Problem Generator (FPG) is presented in this work. The FPG creates and grades problems in C in which students search for and extract blocks of repeated code into individual functions, learning to utilize parameters and return values as they do so. The problems created by the FPG are highly configurable by instructors such that the difficulty can be finely tuned to suit students’ individual needs. Instructors can choose whether or not to include arrays, pointers, certain elemental data types, certain operators, or certain kinds of statements, among other things. The FPG is additionally capable of generating a set of test cases for each generated problem. These test cases fully exercise students’ solutions by covering all branches of execution, and they ensure that program functionality does not change as students factor code into functions. Initial experimentation with the system has suggested that the FPG can be integrated into a beginning CS curriculum and with further refinement could become a standard tool in the CS classroom.

Massively parallel programming is an increasingly growing field with the recent introduction of general purpose GPU computing. Modern graphics processors from NVIDIA and AMD have massively parallel architectures that can be used for such applications as 3D rendering, financial analysis, physics simulations, and biomedical analysis. These massively parallel systems are exposed to programmers through in- terfaces such as NVIDIAs CUDA, OpenCL, and Microsofts C++ AMP. These frame- works expose functionality using primarily either C or C++. In order to use these massively parallel frameworks, programs being implemented must be run on machines equipped with massively parallel hardware. These requirements limit the flexibility of new massively parallel systems. This paper explores the possibility that massively parallel systems can be exposed through web services in order to facilitate using these architectures from remote systems written in other languages. To explore this possi- bility, an architecture is put forth with requirements and high level design for building a web service that can overcome limitations of existing tools and frameworks. The CUDA Web API is built using Python, PyCUDA, NumPy, JSON, and Django to meet the requirements set forth. Additionaly, a client application, CUDA Cloud, is built and serves as an example web service client. The CUDA Web API’s performance and its functionality is validated using a common matrix multiplication algorithm implemented using different languages and tools. Performance tests show runtime improvements for larger datasets using the CUDA Web API for remote CUDA kernel execution over serial implementations. This paper concludes that existing limitations associated with GPGPU usage can be overcome with the specified architecture.

The use of Conversational Agents (CAs) utilizing Artificial Intelligence Markup Language (AIML) has been studied in a number of disciplines. Previous research has shown a great deal of promise. It has also documented significant limitations in the abilities of these CAs. Many of these limitations are related specifically to the method employed by AIML to resolve ambiguities in the meaning and context of words. While methods exist to detect and correct common errors in spelling and grammar of sentences and queries submitted by a user, one class of input error that is particularly difficult to detect and correct is the malapropism. In this research a malapropism is defined a "verbal blunder in which one word is replaced by another similar in sound but different in meaning" ("malapropism," 2013). This research explored the use of alternative methods of correcting malapropisms in sentences input to AIML CAs using measures of Semantic Distance and tri-gram probabilities. Results of these alternate methods were compared against AIML CAs using only the Symbolic Reductions built into AIML. This research found that the use of the two methodologies studied here did indeed lead to a small, but measurable improvement in the performance of the CA in terms of the appropriateness of its responses as classified by human judges. However, it was also noted that in a large number of cases, the CA simply ignored the existence of a malapropism altogether in formulating its responses. In most of these cases, the interpretation and response to the user's input was of such a general nature that one might question the overall efficacy of the AIML engine. The answer to this question is a matter for further study.

Traditional archival media such as paper, film, photographs, etc. contain a vast storage of knowledge. Much of this knowledge is applicable to current business and scientific problems, and offers solutions; consequently, there is value in extracting this information. While it is possible to manually extract the content, this technique is not feasible for large knowledge repositories due to cost and time. In this thesis, we develop a system that can extract such knowledge automatically from large repositories. A Graphical User Interface that permits users to indicate the location of the knowledge components (indexes) is developed, and software features that permit automatic extraction of indexes from similar documents is presented. The indexes and the documents are stored in a persistentdata store.The system is tested on a University Registrar’s legacy paper-based transcript repository. The study shows that the system provides a good solution for large-scale extraction of knowledge from archived paper and other media.

This thesis discusses PRIMM which stands for Parallel Remote Interactive Management Model. PRIMM is a framework for object oriented applications that relies on grid computing. It works as an interface between the remote applications and the parallel computing system. The thesis shows the capabilities that could be achieved from PRIMM architecture.

In this modern rather interconnected era, an organization’s top priority is to protect itself from major security breaches occurring frequently within a communicational environment. But, it seems, as if they quite fail in doing so. Every week there are new headlines relating to information being forged, funds being stolen and corrupt usage of credit card and so on. Personal computers are turned into “zombie machines” by hackers to steal confidential and financial information from sources without disclosing hacker’s true identity. These identity thieves rob private data and ruin the very purpose of privacy. The purpose of this project is to identify suspicious user activity by analyzing a log file which then later can help an investigation agency like FBI to track and monitor anonymous user(s) who seek for weaknesses to attack vulnerable parts of a system to have access of it. The project also emphasizes the potential damage that a malicious activity could have on the system. This project uses Hadoop framework to search and store log files for logging activities and then performs a ‘Map Reduce’ programming code to finally compute and analyze the results.

Computers have been assisting in recording, sound synthesis and other fields of music production for quite some time. The actual performance of music continues to be an area in which human players are chosen over computer performers. Musical performance is an area in which personalization is more important than consistency. Human players play with each other, reacting to phrases and ideas created by the players that they are playing with. Computer performers lack the ability to react to the changes in the performance that humans perceive naturally, giving the human players an advantage over the computer performers. This thesis creates a framework for describing unique musical performers that can play along in realtime with human players. FrTime, a reactive programming language, is used to constantly create new musical phrases. Musical phrases are constructed by unique user programmed performers and by chord changes that the framework provides. The reactive language creates multiple musical phrases for each point in time. A simple module which chooses musical phrases to be performed at the time of performance is created.

Middleware technologies change so rapidly that designers must adapt existing software architectures to incorporate new emerging ones. This project proposes an architectural pattern and guidelines to abstract the communication barrier whereby allowing the developer to concentrate on the application logic. We demonstrate our approach and the feasibility of easily upgrading the middleware infrastructure by implementing a sample project and three case studies using three different middlewares on the .NET framework.

Functional logic languages provide a powerful programming paradigm combining the features of functional languages and logic languages. However, current implementations of functional logic languages are complex, slow, or both. This thesis presents a scheme, called the Basic Scheme, for compiling and executing functional logic languages based on non-deterministic graph rewriting. This thesis also describes the implementation and optimization of a prototype of the Basic Scheme. The prototype is simple and performs well compared to other current implementations.