Using an expert system to interface mainframe computing resources with an interactive video system

The interactive video (IV) market has been expected to capture a significant share of the huge potential revenues to be generated by the business and residential markets. The level of revenues generated depends on the completion rate of calls the service provider can support, no matter what the IV system or network condition. Thus, a cost-effective, scalable fault-tolerant IV system is needed to maximize the video call completion rate at an affordable cost. This article describes design methodologies for a scalable, fault-tolerant IV system and an IV system design and analysis research prototype called IVSDNA (IV System Designer and Analyzer). The IVSDNA prototype is designed to help network planners and engineers to evaluate quantitative trade-offs (in terms of network communications costs, video storage costs, and degree of system fault tolerance) between two major IV system architectures (centralized and distributed) with a variety of video distribution methods, replication strategies, and fault-tolerant access protocols.

There are few tasks that managers dread as much as employee discipline. Except for cases in which the offense is severe enough to warrant termination, a manager must continue to interact daily with the employee after a punishment has been imposed. When the employee must be fired, the manager often fears that a lawsuit may not be far behind. Thus, when faced with the need to discipline an employee, supervisors might welcome help in figuring out what to do. That is the purpose of the computer expert system called the Supervisor Assistance System, created by the Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles (hereafter referred to as the Florida Department of Motor Vehicles). With the Supervisor Assistance System, a supervisor can first consult with the computer to determine if the employee's offense is actionable under departmental rules. If it is, the supervisor responds to a series of questions about the employee and the details of the offense. The computer then generates one or more recommendations for suggested actions to discipline the employee, along with supportive information from personnel rules. An expert system--one application of artificial intelligence--is a computerized decision-making software that structures expertise in a specific area and emulates human decision-making. The software helps users make a logical decision given its knowledge base drawn from laws, regulations, and human expertise.(1) Public agencies have used expert systems for over a decade, and they are becoming more common for a wide variety of purposes (Leonard-Barton and Sviokla, 1988; Martin, 1991). Social service departments use expert systems to determine eligibility for food stamps or refugee assistance, law enforcement units access solved and unsolved burglary cases through a computerized network to get a profile of possible perpetrators of an unsolved crime, and water testing laboratories apply for state license through an expert system. Although expert systems began as stand-alone computer programs, large public agencies are integrating their expert systems into their information data bases, and thus users may not even recognize their expert system as such (Hedberg, 1995). Most studies of public sector expert systems conclude that their promise is great, as they offer users significant potential benefits: increased productivity, improved service delivery effectiveness, and better problem anticipation (Hadden, 1989; McGowan and Lombardo, 1986; Shangraw, 1987). However, such systems have proven difficult to implement and institutionalize (Hadden, 1989, 204; Hauser and Hebert, 1992; Rubin, 1986). Few empirical studies of expert system implementation have been undertaken to assess what determines the extent to which public-sector decision makers will use an expert system initiated within their organization.(2) This article develops a model of the determinants of the degree to which managers utilize an expert system, and tests the model by examining how managers in the Florida Department of Motor Vehicles react to their expert system. The results offer lessons on how to implement an expert system in an agency so that the organization can achieve the benefits of computer technology. The Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles Supervisor Assistance System The Florida Department of Motor Vehicles developed the Supervisor Assistance System to provide consultations for its Supervisors on handling some 45 different employee offenses that can result in disciplinary actions.(3) (See Appendix 1 for a list of all offenses.) For any type of offense, the Supervisor Assistance System asks questions about the incident under investigation as well as other related information, such as the employee's prior disciplinary record and work history. (As an illustration, Appendix 2 presents the specific questions that the system asks a supervisor for the offense absent without authorized leave. …

This paper presents an interactive video system that enables users to change the flow of video playback by interacting with hotspots that were predefined throughout the video streams. These hotspots are synchronized with the underlying video streams and the interactions result in smooth transitions between the preloaded targets. This approach allows the dynamic visualization of content by interacting with the hotspots and producing the consequent changes in the flow of the story. The system includes web-based and mobile video players specifically developed to deal with the interactive features, as well as a configuration tool that allows content managers to choose which pre-produced interaction possibilities will be used for a specific target audience. The interactive video solution presented herein has potential to be used as a powerful communication tool, in commercial, e-learning, accessibility and entertainment contexts.

This paper introduces an interactive video system and its architecture where several systems cooperate to manage the services of interactive video. Each system is specialized according to the data it handles and the functionality it performs. A system can be a database (for billing purposes) or just a video store system (to store the video data) lacking the typical features of a database or an information retrieval system to support indexing and querying of video data. Because quality of service is an important requirement for whole management system, a specific system is introduced in the architecture. Such system monitors the bandwidth of the network, the buffer size and the frame size and rate. The resulting architecture of interactive video system consists of several systems cooperating through an active rules based workflow system to integrate their functionalities while preserving autonomy, extensibility and data integrity where necessary.

Our objective was to assess the acceptability of using an interactive video system in a general practice setting to inform patients about treatment choices. A descriptive cohort study was carried out in eight general practices in Oxfordshire. Fifty-four patients with mild hypertension and 29 with benign prostatic hypertrophy were studied. Patients' views of the video, treatment preference, level of involvement in treatment decision and satisfaction with decision-making process and GPs' views of the effect of the video on subsequent consultations were measured. Both patients and GPs reported favourable impressions of the interactive video system: 71% of patients said it definitely helped with their treatment decision; GPs said they found the video helpful in 82% of cases. The results of this pilot study were sufficiently encouraging to indicate the need for a randomized controlled trial to evaluate the impact of the video on the doctor-patient relationship, on subsequent treatment decisions and on health outcomes and patients' well-being.

A ten-man-year computer system development and deployment effort to improve equipment utilization at Intel Corp.'s manufacturing facilities is discussed. The features of the equipment management system and the joint effort by Sematech and Intel to develop an equipment performance analysis system that will lay the foundation for an industry-wide standard are described. The equipment management system was layered on top of the computer-aided manufacturing (CAM) system used in the company. A key by-product of the equipment performance management system introduction is a vastly improved user interface. Application migration in a rapidly changing distributed architecture and integration with expert systems and station controllers are also considered.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>

Layer geometry control for the fabrication of lattice structures by wire and arc additive manufacturing

In recent years, there has been a strong interest in transmitting compressed video over packet switched networks, such as asynchronous transfer mode (ATM). Previous work has dealt with transmitting MPEG over constant bit rate (CBR) and variable bit rate (VBR) services of ATM. The available bit rate (ABR) service of ATM is expected to be much more cost effective than CBR or VBR. However, there hasn't been much work done on running interactive client/server applications (for example, video on demand) over ABR. We have developed a framework to design interactive video systems transmitting MPEG video over the ATM ABR service. We have developed models to determine the network connection parameters required to run interactive client/server multimedia applications over an ATM network using the ABR service. We solve our model using real-time dynamic equilation (RTDE) analysis. We conclude that by proper dimensioning of the buffers at the client and the server, it is possible to run interactive video over the ATM ABR service.

To evaluate the design and manufacture accuracy of a domestic computer aided design (CAD) and computer aided manufacture (CAM) system, and to compare it with similar foreign products. Thirty models of posterior-teeth-single-crown preparations were collected, and STL data of these preparations was collected by Denmark 3Shape scanner. Three copings were made for each preparation, the one designed and manufactured using commercial CAD/CAM system (3Shape CAD software and Wieland T1 CAM equipment) was assigned into control group T0, the one designed and manufactured using domestic CAD software (developed by Peking University School and Hospital of Stomatology and Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics) and Wieland T1 CAM equipment was assigned into experimental group TCAD for design accuracy evaluation, and the one designed and manufactured using 3Shape CAD software and domestic CAM equipment (developed by Peking University School and Hospital of Stomatology, Tsinghua University and ShanDong XinHua Incorporated Company of medical apparatus and instruments) was assigned into experimental group TCAM for manufacture accuracy evaluation. Finally, the marginal fitness were compared and evaluated by using 3D & Profile measurement microscope laser. The marginal fitness of TCAD was 27.98 (19.10, 46.57) µm in buccal, 32.67 (20.65, 50.82) µm in lingual, 27.38 (22.53, 52.61) µm in mesial, 29.50 (22.68, 53.65) µm in distal; of TCAM was 21.69 (15.87, 30.21) µm in buccal, 18.51 (13.50, 22.51) µm in lingual, 19.15 (15.42, 26.89) µm in mesial, 22.77 (18.58, 32.15) µm in distal; and there were no statistical differences compared with T0 [20.16 (17.16, 48.00) µm in buccal, 21.51 (17.05, 28.31) µm in lingual, 23.54 (17.89, 30.04) µm in mesial and 23.94 (17.93, 28.19) µm in distal] except lingual data of TCAD. The design and machining precision of this domestic CAD/CAM system is at the same level of those comparable foreign products.

The design and implementation of two expert systems for semiconductor manufacturing are described and compared. The first expert system is used for parametric test analysis in a CMOS wafer facility. It is designed as a user-interactive system, with all the expert's knowledge included in one knowledge base. This expert system tightly controls the flow of information between the knowledge base and the wafer data stored in a relational database. This expert system was implemented using the knowledge engineering environment shell with interface programs to INGRES. The second expert system is used for parametric test analysis in an analog wafer facility. This system is partitioned into several independent C programs running online and continuously communicating their results through the relational database. The interactive system is more flexible in representing expert knowledge and in explaining results, while the online system is faster, more open to new module integration, and better able to classify and diagnose large volumes of wafer data. >

This paper presents a questionnaire-based approach to evaluate the user experience (UX) while interacting with interactive Television (iTV) systems. Current contributions in the field of UX propose generic methods applicable to various application domains, whereas our contribution is dedicated to the specific domain of interactive TV systems. Based on a classification of UX dimensions from a literature review, the first version of the questionnaire is focusing on the dimension’s aesthetics, emotion, stimulation and identification. A validation study with 106 participants was performed to assess the relations between the evaluated UX dimensions, as well as their fit to the underlying theoretical assumptions. Results showed that the UX dimensions aesthetics, emotion and stimulation are important for the domain of iTV, while identification was not confirmed. The study revealed significant correlations between the type of IPTV system used and the emotional and stimulation dimension. Additionally, a significant effect of the TV reception mode and the type of IPTV box owned on the emotion towards the system was observed. Beyond the contribution of the questionnaire that is directly applicable for any iTV system, the findings described in the paper demonstrate the need for user experience evaluation methods targeted at specific domains: the validation of the questionnaire shows that identification is not a central dimension of user experience when interacting with interactive TV.

The development of computer-aided manufacturing systems is evolving towards that of intelligent manufacturing systems (IMS). In an intelligent manufacturing system, unprecedented and unforeseen situations are expected to be solved within certain limits, even on the basis of incomplete and imprecise information. Therefore, a tremendous amount of manufacturing knowledge is needed. Artificial intelligence (AI) based techniques are designed for capturing, representing, organizing, and utilizing knowledge by computers, and hence will play an important role in intelligent manufacturing. As an AI technique, knowledge-based expert systems have been used in manufacturing for nearly two decades. Recently, another AI technique, namely, neural networks, is gaining more and more visibility and has been successfully applied in manufacturing practice. Expert systems and neural networks are individually useful but not sufficient on their own in dealing with manufacturing problems. In fact, expert systems and neural networks are complementary. The weaknesses of expert systems are offset by the strengths of neural networks, and vice versa. Quite a few researchers are interested in merging the structures and functions of expert systems with those of neural networks. Some evidence has shown that the neural-expert hybrid technique is a promising tool for intelligent manufacturing. This paper reviews the current research on the neural-expert hybrid approach and its applications in manufacturing, which will provide some guidelines and references for the research and implementation.

This paper discusses the current developments in interactive video and its implications for online learning, and particularly to the new educational concept of MOOC - Massive Open Online Courses. The authors present an interactive video platform that can be easily used for generation of interactive videos. Interactivity is added to videos by temporal and spatial interactive multimedia annotations using media fragments, as well as decisions at the end of a video, via a special interface. The same interactive video platform allows the dynamic generation of a graph-type multiple path linear story, with information dependent on previous decisions and choices, similar to an educational experience where later courses depend on prerequisite information. Information depth is ensured via various types of annotations. The authors consider two main types of content annotations - basic annotations explaining fundamental concepts, and advanced annotations providing in-depth specialized information about a given topic. The dynamic of user interaction with these two types of annotations is used to determine the users level of knowledge about the course topic. All these aspects are then put in perspective against a MOOC environment, showing how interactive video can be used to enhance the learning process and to enhance the user experience. We also discuss the cost-effective means of adding value and interactivity to the video content, whether generated purposely to be interactive, or simply adding interaction to existing video content to enhance it. As a conclusion, the article proposes a theoretical and practical approach supported by existing examples, and draws future directions and guidelines for developing educational projects and applications using interactive video in a MOOC context.

This paper proposes a tool posture optimization method in five-axis machining using configuration space (C-Space) transformation according to the inverse feedback message. In conventional computer numerical control (CNC) manufacture process, the machining status information transmission is in single direction, and the CNC system interpolates the toolpaths without feedback. However, considering the drives’ acceleration and deceleration, the interpolation situation would greatly affect the machining efficiency and the trajectory should be adjusted in CNC. In this case, the toolpath efficiency is deteriorated and unable to be evaluated exactly by traditional computer-aided manufacturing (CAM) system, where the efficiency is approximately estimated by the length of toolpath. In this paper, an inverse feedback mechanism is proposed; the simulated information on CNC system interpolation can be feedback to CAM system to help evaluate the toolpath efficiency. An axis-based dynamic confined feedrate schedule model is used to find the feed sensitive zones of the toolpaths. A C-Space method is adopted to adjust the tool postures in the sensitive zones. Several examples are given to verify the method, and the machining efficiency is raised by 10% on the whole after feedback optimization.

Object oriented paradigms for integrated structural engineering