of Dissertation

Telecommunications systems were among the first to use modeling and analysis to improve designs. Since those early days, researchers have made many advances in the technology and tools. Performance models have been successfully applied to a variety of other computer systems design problems. When we consider the current state of the art and state of the practice, are we satisfied with the result...

This paper deals with the role of performance modeling tools. It introduces 3 major tool development centers and shows how a given tool can be applied to investigate the performance of a finite-source retrial queueing system.

Predictions from individual distribution models for Mexican Geotrupinae species were overlaid to obtain a total species richness map for this group. A database (GEOMEX) that compiles available information from the literature and from several entomological collections was used. A Maximum Entropy method (MaxEnt) was applied to estimate the distribution of each species, taking into account 19 clim...

Despite the centrality of the median voter prediction in political economy models, overwhelming empirical evidence shows that legislators regularly take positions that diverge significantly from the preferences of the median voter in their districts. However, all these empirical studies to date lack the necessary data to directly measure the preferences of the median voter. We utilize a unique ...

There has been a recent push in extraction of 3D spatial layout of scenes. However, none of these approaches model the 3D interaction between objects and the spatial layout. In this paper, we argue for a parametric representation of objects in 3D, which allows us to incorporate volumetric constraints of the physical world. We show that augmenting current structured prediction techniques with vo...

We describe a technique for structured prediction, based on canonical correlation analysis. Our learning algorithm finds two projections for the input and the output spaces that aim at projecting a given input and its correct output into points close to each other. We demonstrate our technique on a language-vision problem, namely the problem of giving a textual description to an “abstract scene.”