This thesis describes user interface and visualization components in the problem solving environment "Site-Specific System Simulator for Wireless System Design" (S4W) developed by CS and ECE faculty and students at Virginia Tech. S4W integrates visualization and computational tools with a high level user interface. The objective of this PSE is to improve the ability of wireless design engineers to design an indoor wireless system through the aid of various simulation and visualization components. S4W provides engineers with the facility of thinking in terms of the overall task of designing the system for optimal performance. They need not to worry about computation, data-management and connectivity issues. The choice of method for interaction between service logic within a PSE and its user is always a challenging issue. The selection of user interaction channel is mostly dictated by the characteristics of the problem domain. For S4W, we chose to build a graphical user interface as human interaction interface, which was connected to other components via a high speed Local Area Network (LAN). The other key form of user interaction in a PSE is the visual representations of the abstract data results of simulations, perceived as user interface for data. The Complex nature of data sets in the domain of wireless simulations calls for a customized set of visualization tools. To address the specific needs of visualizations for S4W, ad hoc visualization tools were developed and integrated into the graphical user interface. A comparison of the integrated PSE and an earlier collection of unintegrated tools and scripts is presented. / Master of Science

This thesis investigates several issues in data and computation modeling for scientific problem solving environments (PSEs). A PSE is viewed as a software system that provides (i) a library of simulation components, (ii) experiment management, (iii) reasoning about simulations and data, and (iv) problem solving abstractions. Three specific ideas, in functionalities (ii)-(iv), form the contributions of this thesis. These include the EMDAG system for experiment management, the BSML markup language for data interchange, and the use of data mining for conducting non-trivial parameter studies. This work emphasizes data modeling and management, two important aspects that have been largely neglected in modern PSE research. All studies are performed in the context of S4W, a sophisticated PSE for wireless system design. / Master of Science