Database transformations is a critical task that occurs in many different domains. Schema evolution is one important class of problems for database transformations. In our work, we use existing technology and standards (ODMG, OQL, basic schema evolution primitives) to bring flexibility, extensibility and re-usability to current schema evolution systems, thus allowing the users to conveniently s...

High-throughput scientific instruments are generating massive amounts of data. Today, one of the main challenges faced by researchers is to make the best use of the world’s growing wealth of data. Data (re)usability is becoming a distinct characteristic of modern scientific practice. By data (re)usability, we mean the ease of using data for legitimate scientific research by one or more communit...

Course management systems (CMSs) enable institutions to engage users efficiently, increase enrollment without major facilities investments, and serve geographically dispersed student markets on an ongoing basis. The full benefits of technology cannot be realized if faculty do not adopt the new technology and use it to achieve their instructional design objectives. From a faculty perspective, pe...

This paper reports on the design and re-design of an Ontological Sketch Model. OSM is a representation and method of usability assessment that is based on descriptions of the device model and the user’s conceptual model of that device. The ultimate aim of this work is to develop an approach that focuses attention on device and conceptual models, and that is usable, useful and widely available f...

Problem statement: A well designed user interface is comprehensible and controllable, helping users to complete their work successfully and efficiently and to feel competent and satisfied. To improve the usability of a software system, usability patterns can be applied. However, there are short comes shows that the software architecture of a system restricts certain usability patterns from bein...

Natural language understanding is the core of the human computer interactions. However, building new domains and tasks that need a separate set of models is a bottleneck for scaling to a large number of domains and experiences. In this paper, we propose a practical technique that addresses this issue in a web-scale language understanding system: Microsoft’s personal digital assistant Cortana. T...

1. Introduction: There is significant interest in concurrent programming due to widespread availability of parallel and distributed systems. The design and implementation of concurrent programs for the parallel and distributed systems has proven to be extremely difficult. Concurrent programs are difficult to design, implement, and maintain because changes in a concurrent program (through additi...