Air Force Institute of Technology Research Report 1999

This report summarizes the research activities of the Air Force Institute of Technology’s Graduate School of Engineering and Management. It describes research interests and faculty expertise; lists student theses/dissertations; identifies research sponsors and contributions; and outlines the procedures for contacting the school. Included in the report are: faculty publications, conference presentations, consultations, and funded research projects. Research was conducted in the areas of Aeronautical and Astronautical Engineering, Electrical Engineering and Electro-Optics, Computer Engineering and Computer Science, Systems and Engineering Management, Operational Sciences, and Engineering Physics

Air Force Institute of Technology Research Report 1997

This report summarizes the research activities of the Air Force Institute of Technology\u27s Graduate School of Engineering and the Graduate School of Logistics and Acquisition Management. It describes research interests and faculty expertise; list student theses/dissertations; identifies research sponsors and contributions; and outlines the procedure for contacting either school

Air Force Institute of Technology Research Report 2000

This report summarizes the research activities of the Air Force Institute of Technology’s Graduate School of Engineering and Management. It describes research interests and faculty expertise; lists student theses/dissertations; identifies research sponsors and contributions; and outlines the procedures for contacting the school. Included in the report are: faculty publications, conference presentations, consultations, and funded research projects. Research was conducted in the areas of Aeronautical and Astronautical Engineering, Electrical Engineering and Electro-Optics, Computer Engineering and Computer Science, Systems and Engineering Management, Operational Sciences, and Engineering Physics

Building a Learning Space for Language Acquisition

International audienceLearning spaces offer a rigorous mathematical foundation for algorithms that can be employed in intelligent tutoring systems to organize the body of knowledge necessary to become proficient in a domain. These mathematical structures are particular types of partial ordered sets, and thus they can be built using formal concept analysis (FCA), which provides powerful formal tools, such as concept lattices, to order data of this nature. Learning spaces are helpful to bring to light implications between notions and uncover students’ different learning paths. These structures eventually help teachers create personalized learning plans and intelligently assess students. Learning spaces have been used to ease teaching and learning in a variety of subjects. However, applications in language acquisition remain challenging.This manuscript presents an adaptation of this framework to language acquisition, specifically Mandarin, by leveraging the shared properties between learning space theory and FCA. The functioning of the tool realized is based on a local and dynamic exploration of the space, without the need to compute the whole structure beforehand. This way, a scalable system architecture, which is not limited by the size of the input and the power of the machine on which it runs, is achieved.We report experiments conducted using several datasets and feedback provided by teachers who used the first prototype of the system. The results we obtain are encouraging and suggest that the approach can be adapted to other languages

Air Force Institute of Technology Research Report 2004

This report summarizes the research activities of the Air Force Institute of Technology’s Graduate School of Engineering and Management. It describes research interests and faculty expertise; lists student theses/dissertations; identifies research sponsors and contributions; and outlines the procedures for contacting the school. Included in the report are: faculty publications, conference presentations, consultations, and funded research projects. Research was conducted in the areas of Aeronautical and Astronautical Engineering, Electrical Engineering and Electro-Optics, Computer Engineering and Computer Science, Systems and Engineering Management, Operational Sciences, and Engineering Physics

Improving Computer Network Operations Through Automated Interpretation of State

Networked systems today are hyper-scaled entities that provide core functionality for distributed services and applications spanning personal, business, and government use. It is critical to maintain correct operation of these networks to avoid adverse business outcomes. The advent of programmable networks has provided much needed fine-grained network control, enabling providers and operators alike to build some innovative networking architectures and solutions. At the same time, they have given rise to new challenges in network management. These architectures, coupled with a multitude of devices, protocols, virtual overlays on top of physical data-plane etc. make network management a highly challenging task. Existing network management methodologies have not evolved at the same pace as the technologies and architectures. Current network management practices do not provide adequate solutions for highly dynamic, programmable environments. We have a long way to go in developing management methodologies that can meaningfully contribute to networks becoming self-healing entities. The goal of my research is to contribute to the design and development of networks towards transforming them into self-healing entities. Network management includes a multitude of tasks, not limited to diagnosis and troubleshooting, but also performance engineering and tuning, security analysis etc. This research explores novel methods of utilizing network state to enhance networking capabilities. It is constructed around hypotheses based on careful analysis of practical deficiencies in the field. I try to generate real-world impact with my research by tackling problems that are prevalent in deployed networks, and that bear practical relevance to the current state of networking. The overarching goal of this body of work is to examine various approaches that could help enhance network management paradigms, providing administrators with a better understanding of the underlying state of the network, thus leading to more informed decision-making. The research looks into two distinct areas of network management, troubleshooting and routing, presenting novel approaches to accomplishing certain goals in each of these areas, demonstrating that they can indeed enhance the network management experience

Air Force Institute of Technology Research Report 2003

This report summarizes the research activities of the Air Force Institute of Technology’s Graduate School of Engineering and Management. It describes research interests and faculty expertise; lists student theses/dissertations; identifies research sponsors and contributions; and outlines the procedures for contacting the school. Included in the report are: faculty publications, conference presentations, consultations, and funded research projects. Research was conducted in the areas of Aeronautical and Astronautical Engineering, Electrical Engineering and Electro-Optics, Computer Engineering and Computer Science, Systems and Engineering Management, Operational Sciences, and Engineering Physics

Graceful Language Extensions and Interfaces

Grace is a programming language under development aimed at education. Grace is object-oriented, imperative, and block-structured, and intended for use in first- and second-year object-oriented programming courses. We present a number of language features we have designed for Grace and implemented in our self-hosted compiler. We describe the design of a pattern-matching system with object-oriented structure and minimal extension to the language. We give a design for an object-based module system, which we use to build dialects, a means of extending and restricting the language available to the programmer, and of implementing domain-specific languages. We show a visual programming interface that melds visual editing (à la Scratch) with textual editing, and that uses our dialect system, and we give the results of a user experiment we performed to evaluate the usability of our interface

Occupied Memory: Polish Composers and German Music after the Second World War

The occupation of Poland by Germany and the Soviet Union during the Second World War had profoundly negative impacts on Polish cultural life. Although conflict ostensibly ended in 1945, the ensuing four decades of communist rule proved just as devastating. Until now, much of the discourse on Poland has concentrated on the effects and legacy of Communism, while consideration of the ‘German question’ has largely been neglected. Using the composers Witold Lutosławski (1913–1994) and Henryk Górecki (1933–2010) as case studies, this thesis focuses on the web of musical interactions between Germany and Poland in the decades following WWII, tracing how these composers came to terms with the music of their occupiers. The investigation is driven by questions intersecting with issues of memory, aesthetics, and national identity: what were Lutosławski and Górecki’s attitudes toward pre-war German music? Did they have similar responses to post-war German music? How were they able to face these problems against the backdrop of Soviet hegemony? Above all, the fundamental debate over music’s ineffable, abstract qualities persists: to what extent is music (and art in general) able to transcend messy cultural concerns, and remain untainted by political events? In asking these questions, I probe the complex artistic landscape of mid-century Eastern Europe, along with music’s specific role in this process of negotiation. Both composers responded quite differently to Poland’s cultural landscape after 1945. Lutosławski retreated into abstraction and sought refuge in realms of music deemed absolute, while Górecki, on the other hand, moved in the opposite direction toward a musical style grounded in the here-and-now, and tethered umbilically to concerns of the everyday. Also telling are the similarities between them: a shared love of Bach and Viennese Classicism, a more equivocal relationship with Schoenberg and his followers, and an underlying, deeply wrought humanism