Volume rendering is a technique for visualizing 3D arrays of sampled data. It has applications in areas such as medical imaging and scientific visualization, but its use has been limited by its high computational expense. Early implementations of volume rendering used brute-force techniques

The classification rules induced by machine learning systems are judged by two criteria: their classification accuracy on an independent test set (henceforth "accuracy"), and their complexity. The relationship between these two criteria is, of course, of keen interest to the machine learning community. There are in the literature some indications that very simple rules may achieve surprisingly high accuracy on many datasets. For example, Rendell occasionally remarks that many real world datasets have "few peaks (often just one) " and so are "easy to learn" (Rendell & Seshu, 1990, p.256). Similarly, Shavlik et al. (1991) report that, with certain qualifications, "the accuracy of the perceptron is hardly distinguishable from the more complicated learning algorithms " (p.134). Further evidence is provided by studies of pruning methods (e.g. Buntine & Niblett, 1992; Clark & Niblett, 1989; Mingers, 1989), where accuracy is rarely seen to decrease as pruning becomes more severe (for example, see Table 1) 1. This is so even when rules are pruned to the extreme, as happened with the "Err-comp " pruning method in Mingers (1989). This method produced the most accurate decision trees, and in four of the five domains studied these trees had only 2 or 3 leaves

, will explain the discrepancy between the observed and correct system behaviour. We propose a general theory for this problem. The theory requires only that the system be described in a suitable logic. Moreover, there are many such suitable logics, e.g. first-order, temporal, dynamic, etc. As a result

and perspectives adopted in these areas often differ in substantial ways, many planning problems of interest to researchers in these fields can be modeled as Markov decision processes (MDPs) and analyzed using the techniques of decision theory. This paper presents an overview and synthesis of MDP

Performance modelling is concerned with the capture and analysis of the dynamic behaviour of computer and communication systems. The size and complexity of many modern systems result in large, complex models. A compositional approach decomposes the system into subsystems that are smaller and more

The Internet presents numerous sources of useful information---telephone directories, product catalogs, stock quotes, weather forecasts, etc. Recently, many systems have been built that automatically gather and manipulate such information on a user's behalf. However, these resources

While knowledge is viewed by many as an asset, it is often difficult to locate particular items within a large electronic corpus. This paper presents an agent based framework for the location of resources to resolve a specific query, and considers the associated design issue. Aspects of the work

Migrating operating system instances across distinct physical hosts is a useful tool for administrators of data centers and clusters: It allows a clean separation between hardware and software, and facilitates fault management, load balancing, and low-level system maintenance. By carrying out

, however, little consensus in the research community on what is an ADL, what aspects of an architecture should be modeled in an ADL, and which of several possible ADLs is best suited for a particular problem. Furthermore, the distinction is rarely made between ADLs on one hand and formal specification

Requirements analysis includes a preliminary acquisition step where a global model for the specification of the system and its environment is elaborated. This model, called requirements model, involves concepts that are currently not supported by existing formal specification languages