The World-Wide Web has been a remarkably successful system for distributing hypertext documents. The basic model for Web interaction is that a client requests a page of data which can include images and hyperlinks within it. This interaction model is inadequate for real-time multimedia (MM) applications, since the Web and its associated set of protocols, e.g. HTTP, do not support the real-time transfer of the continuous media (Audio/Video). Several solutions have been proposed to support real-time playout of continuous media via the Web, e.g. Netscape. Most of these solutions do not provide means to the user to negotiate the desired presentation quality (in terms of quality of service (QoS) parameters settings); even the proposals that provide QoS negotiation (more generally QoS management) are used in a rather static manner, that is, the video/audio servers are a priori known. The authors propose to integrate in the WWW a dynamic QoS management approach that allows (1) the user to negotiate the desired QoS; and (2) and to select the "best" video/audio server which might support the user requirements. This activity is based on the general structure of multimedia documents and associated QoS parameters, called meta-data, which they developed under an ongoing CITR project. The main objective of the paper is to integrate meta-data associated with MM document in WWW e.g. Netscape; this will allow one to use dynamic QoS management protocols.

The early study of fault tolerance in efficient sorting networks only achieved single-fault tolerance. By eliminating critical comparators, L. Rudolph (1985) presented a 1-fault tolerant design of the balanced sorting network (BSN) at the cost of one redundant stage of N/2 comparators and two permuters external to the network. In this paper, we show, however, that 1-fault tolerance of BSN can be achieved without introducing redundancy and external permuters. Furthermore, we provide solutions to the open question of how to achieve multiple-fault tolerance in BSN. We analyze the problem from a higher-level by introducing a new concept of critical stages, and find that all stages in previous designs are critical. A 2-fault tolerant design of BSN is then discovered after eliminating its critical stages. The new design has a similar network architecture (i.e., a multistage network with the output recirculated back to the input) and the same hardware cost as Rudolph's, but it has many distinguished features. The performance analysis shows that the new designs achieve much higher probabilities of correct sorting in the presence of faulty comparators than the previous reported designs.>

The need to add an automatic learning phase to the construction process of a knowledge base is stressed. This work introduces a new technique based on machine learning methodologies which automatically creates a particular knowledge representation structure called knowledge space, from which common generalizations of knowledge objects may be efficiently inferred. Also introduced are some of the improved and added processing capabilities made possible by this structure.>

In conventional Boolean retrieval systems, users have difficulty controlling the amount of output obtained from a given query. This paper describes the design of a user interface which permits gradual enlargement or refinement of the user's query by browsing through a graph of term and document subsets. This graph is obtained from a lattice automatically generated from the usual document-term relation. The major design features of the proposed interface are the integration of menu, fill-in the blank and direct manipulation modes of interaction within the “fisheye view” [Furnas, 1986] paradigm. A prototype user interface incorporating some of these ideas has been implemented on a microcomputer.

The switch-level abstraction of digital MOS circuits has been used primarily in simulators. In formal verification, a functional description must be first extracted from the switch network. It is shown here how the theory of characteristic functions can be applied to analyze such networks and to extract their functional description.>

Magnitude networks [1l, [2] have been used as a theoretical base for switch-level simulation of MOS VLSI circuits. We address in this paper the particular problem of evaluating the influence of switches in unknown state on the steady-state response of the network. A two-pass procedure based on local controllers attached to such switches is described and a hardware implementation is proposed which models magnitude networks as self-adjusting combinational circuits.

The simulator described functions within an object-cell oriented design environment. Leaf and composite cells are treated as abstract data types (objects) and their definition within a design is recursive. The leaf cells are simulated at the switch level using a functional description of transistor groups in terms of decision diagrams. These diagrams are extracted during a preprocessing step.

This paper describes a novel approach to switch-level simulation of MOS circuits. The circuit is first partitioned into connector-switch networks CSN [4]. Then each CSN is represented in terms of a decision diagram DD, which is particularly suitable for use in simulators. The advantages of DD's are that they are based on a solid theory and they permit fast evaluation of the network's response to any input vector. The CSN's are coupled through a 3-state automaton representing charge wells associated with transistor gates.

Investigates generalizations of triangular permuting networks in two directions: the connecting power of cells and the network topology. The main result indicates that permuting, coupling, and partitioning capabilities can be obtained by using 2-, 3-, and 4-state cells, respectively, in a large class of network topologies.

This paper presents a new method of obtaining couplings in networks.

The automatic synthesis of Boolean switching functions by adaptive tree networks is discussed. The concept of heuristic responsibility, by means of which parts of a tree become specialized to certain subsets of input vectors, is explained. Applications to pattern recognition and optical character recognition (OCR) problems are described.

A class of interconnection networks with n (even) terminals is considered where connections between any two terminals are possible. Synthesis of these networks is accomplished using 4-terminal, 3-state elementary switching cells. A network with a cell count growing as n1.7is described.