The purpose of the workshop is to demonstrate the effectiveness of the PSP/sup SM/ for software process improvement and how PSP brought it about. Presenters from industry describe how PSP was introduced into their company and what has happened since introduction. They present data to show the benefits of PSP for their software process. Presenters from academia describe how they have introduced PSP into their courses. The goals of the workshop are to demonstrate that PSP can be adopted and can be effective in different industrial settings and to describe how it can be introduced into academic courses.

While developing a two-dimensional sequence stratigraphy simulation to be used by geologists, our research group found tools such as portable graphics libraries and cross-platform compilers useful for supporting the simulation. The resources for developing the interface aspect of our work were inadequate, however. We have created several tools which aided the development of data entry mechanisms for large sets of numerical data. A major concern in designing our tool set was to enable our graphically oriented users to work in a natural manner, while still retaining the ability to achieve the precision required for an accurate simulation. Our Plotter mechanism allows users to view and edit curve data using the mouse on an X Window terminal. The DataSheet we developed provides a means for precise data entry from the keyboard. The Calculator works with ranges of values in the DataSheet to make large-scale changes. Although these tools were designed with a specific purpose in mind, they are more general and could be used for other applications.

This paper discusses the design and implementation of PLAYMAKER, a knowledge-based system for characterizing hydrocarbon plays. PLAYMAKER is a component of XX (eXpert eXplorer), a workstation-based tool that aids exploration geologists in a number of different tasks: sediment and carbonate simulation, play and field characterization, retrieval and storage of information in a geological database, comparison of the play or field under study with other fields in the database, and report generation. PLAYMAKER is implemented using MIDST (Mixed Inferencing Dempster-Shafer Tool), a rule-based expert system shell that incorporates mixed-initiative and inexact reasoning based on the Dempster-Shafer evidence combination scheme. This paper discusses the effectiveness of a two-level knowledge base structure adopted for the design and implementation of PLAYMAKER.

This paper reports the results of a numerical comparison of two versions of the fuzzy c-means (FCM) clustering algorithms. In particular, we propose and exemplify an approximate fuzzy c-means (AFCM) implementation based upon replacing the necessary ``exact'' variates in the FCM equation with integer-valued or real-valued estimates. This approximation enables AFCM to exploit a lookup table approach for computing Euclidean distances and for exponentiation. The net effect of the proposed implementation is that CPU time during each iteration is reduced to approximately one sixth of the time required for a literal implementation of the algorithm, while apparently preserving the overall quality of terminal clusters produced. The two implementations are tested numerically on a nine-band digital image, and a pseudocode subroutine is given for the convenience of applications-oriented readers. Our results suggest that AFCM may be used to accelerate FCM processing whenever the feature space is comprised of tuples having a finite number of integer-valued coordinates.