The scheduling techniques of ESP2

The Mission Analysis Division of the Systems Analysis and Integration Laboratory at the Marshall Space Flight Center has developed a robust automatic scheduler which can produce detailed schedules for the multi-step activities required for payload operations on the Space Station. This scheduler, a part of the Expert Scheduling Program (ESP2), has five components: the bookkeeper, checker, loader, selector, and explainer. The bookkeeper maintains the usage profiles for nondepletable resources, consumables, equipment, crew, and the times of all the steps for the payload activities for several different schedules simultaneously. The checker searches the data maintained by the bookkeeper and finds times when the constraints of each step of an activity are satisfied. The loader is an expert system that uses the techniques of forward chaining, depth-first searching, and backtracking to manage the workings of the checker so that activities are placed in the schedule without violating constraints (such as crew, resources, and orbit opportunities). The checker searches the data maintained by the bookkeeper and finds times when the constraints of each step of an activity are satisfied. The loader is an expert system which uses the techniques of forward chaining, depth-first searching, and backtracking to manage the workings of the checker so that activities are placed in the schedule without violating the constraints. The selector has several methods of choosing the next activity for the loader to schedule. The explainer shows the user why an activity was or was not scheduled at a certain time; it offers a unique graphical explanation of how the expert system (the loader) works

Junior Leadership: To the 4-H Adult Leader

Junior leadership is intended to assist our young people to grow into adults who can adequately and satisfactorily care for themselves and their families, who are competent and willing to share and assume civic responsibilities. To be more specific, junior leadership has been developed in the 4-H club program to help young people meet their growing needs and make a major contribution to the effectiveness of the entire 4-H program. Junior leadership is intended to give the older, more experienced, more mature 4-H club members experience in leadership work. As they are provided opportunities for personal development, they are also helping other club members help themselves. Thus, younger members benefit. It gives the opportunity to have more members participate in club activities and do better project work. It provides help for the adult leaders by making junior leaders available to fill some of their duties. The junior leader injects the youth viewpoint into the club program and may generate club enthusiasm. Thus it serves as one tool to hold the club member. The importance of junior leaders is largely determined by the interest of leaders and the boys and girls

Junior Leadership: To the Junior Leader

As a junior leader, you are accepting a great challenge. To be a junior leader is an honor, an opportunity, a responsibility, and a privilege. Serving as a junior leader will be valuable experience for you as it will help develop your leadership and citizenship qualities, give an opportunity to be of service to others, and off er a challenge to learn more about yourself and others. Helping you with junior leadership will be your club leader. The two of you will plan and decide which activities you should do. Your leader is interested in your success and will help you. Discuss it with your leader

XenITH: Xen in the Hand

Usability and portability have been key commercial drivers for increasingly capable handheld devices, which have been enabled by advances in Moore’s Law and well as in wireless systems. The nature of such devices makes them extremely personal, and yet they offer an untapped resource for new forms of peer-to-peer and cooperative communications relaying. Taking advantage of such capabilities requires concurrent resource control of the handheld’s computational and communications capacities. Virtualization platforms, such as the Xen system, have opened the possibility of multiplexing a handheld device in useful and unobtrusive ways, as personal applications can be used while additional services such as decentralized communications are also in operation. The purpose of this project is to experimentally demonstrate the ability of modern smartphone units to support a programmable network environment. We attempt to validate the system with a series of measurement experiments which demonstrate concurrent use of two operating systems, each using computational and network resources, in two virtual machines. Moreover, we demonstrate an acceptable level of user performance while maintaining a MANET using a programmable network router

Nebraska Blueprint – Fall 2003

Table of Contents: From the Editor The Big Room Where They Smash Stuff – A closer look at the Structures Lab Interactive Innovation – Students and professionals create interactive engineering exhibit Making Their Way: Women Find Their Place in Engineering More Than Meets the Eye – Getting to know Dr. Jennifer Brand What We Wish We Had Known – At the close of their first semester, freshmen look back Taking Out the Garbage in Style – Computer Engineering students embark on new research A Conversation with Jeremy Befort – Student reaches out to others Book Review: Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years at Lockheed by Ben R. Rich and Leo Janos The Death of Productivity – Musings on man versus machine Building for the Bank – Students participate in Bell Tower Challeng

Toward privacy-preserving emergency access in EHR systems with data auditing

Widespread adoption of health information sharing is claimed to improve healthcare quality at reduced cost due to the ability for providers to share healthcare information rapidly, reliably, and securely. During emergency access, however, such sharing may affect patient privacy adversely and steps must be taken to ensure privacy is preserved. Australia and the US have taken different approaches toward health information sharing. The Australian approach broadly uses a push model where a summary record is extracted from local health records, and pushed into a centralized system accessed by providers. Under the US approach, providers during emergency access generally pull health records from a centralized system that typically replicates local health records. On the other hand, the centralized repository most likely will be a third party cloud provider that offers on demand availability of high quality and cost effective services. These features make cloud computing a perfect infrastructure for EHR systems. The fact that medical data are handled and managed by a third party cloud provider, however, requires additional security mechanisms, i.e. auditing, to preserve data confidentiality, integrity, and privacy. This thesis contrasts the Australian and US approaches to information sharing during emergency access, focusing on patient privacy preservation. It develops a generalized approach to enhance patient privacy during emergency access using push and pull approaches. It presents an auditing service implementation over a multi-cloud data repository. It finally shows preliminary results from a proof-of-concept EHR system