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Computer chess provides a good testbed for understanding dynamic MIMD-style computations. To investigate the programming issues, we engineered a parallel chess program called *Socrates, which running on the NCSA's 512 processor CM-5, tied for third in the 1994 ACM International Computer Chess Championship. *Socrates uses the Jamboree algorithm to search game trees in parallel and uses the Cilk 1.0 language and run-time system to express and to schedule the computation. In order to obtain good performance for chess, we use several mechanisms not directly provided by Cilk, such as aborting computations and directly accessing the active message layer to implement a global transposition table distributed across the processors. We found that we can use the critical path C and the total work W to predict the performance of our chess programs. Empirically *Socrates runs in time T ß 0:95C+1:09W=P on P processors. For best-ordered uniform trees of height h and degree d the average available pa...

Inertial measurement components, which sense either acceleration or angular rate, are being embedded into common user interface devices more frequently as their cost continues to drop dramatically. These devices hold a number of advantages over other sensing technologies: they measure relevant parameters for human interfaces and can easily be embedded into wireless, mobile platforms. The work in this dissertation demonstrates that inertial measurement can be used to acquire rich data about human gestures, that we can derive efficient algorithms for using this data in gesture recognition, and that the concept of a parameterized atomic gesture recognition has merit. Further we show that a framework combining these three levels of description can be easily used by designers to create robust applications.

This paper presents a formulation of the facilities block layout problem which explicitly considers uncertainty in material handling costs by use of expected values and standard deviations of product forecasts. This formulation is solved using a genetic algorithm meta-heuristic with a flexible bay construct of the departments and total facility area. It is shown that depending on the attitude of the decision-maker towards uncertainty, the optimal layout can change significantly. Furthermore, designs can be optimized directly for robustness over a range of uncertainty that is pre-specified by the user. Keywords - facilities, heuristics, optimisation, genetic algorithms, block layout, production uncertainty 1. Introduction Facility design problems generally involve the partition of a planar region into departments (work centers or cells) along with an aisle structure and a material handling system to link the departments. The primary objective of the design problem is to minimi...

This paper presents an extended formulation of the unequal area facilities block layout problem which explicitly considers uncertainty in material handling costs by use of expected value and standard deviations of product forecasts. This formulation is solved using a random keys genetic algorithm (RKGA) heuristic with a flexible bay construct of the departments and total facility area. It is shown that depending on the attitude towards uncertainty of the decision maker, the optimal layout can change significantly. The seminal 20 department problem of Armour and Buffa is studied with varying numbers of products and amount of forecast uncertainty. The RKGA is shown to be a robust optimizor that allows a user to make an explicit characterization of the cost and uncertainty trade-offs involved in a particular block layout problem. Keywords - facilities layout, block layout, genetic algorithm, production uncertainty 1. INTRODUCTION TO THE FACILITY LAYOUT PROBLEM Facility Layout...

The rise of small modern handhelds mandates innovation in user input techniques. Researchers have turned to tilt-based interfaces as a possible alternative for the stylus and keyboard. We have implemented Unigesture, a tilt-to-write system that enables one-handed text entry.

This research report was funded by the

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when the Department of Statistics was created at Iowa in 1965 and he served in that capacity for 19 years. At Iowa he also served as Chair of the Quality

This dissertation was presented by