SUrface

Didactic Architecture of the Caribbean Resort

Erwin Riefkohl — Mon, 14 May 2012 13:21:37 PDT

I believe that architecture is a communicative artifact that has the capacity to carry meaning. Architecture has the capacity to reconnect us to nature and sympathetic to local Culture. The reconnection is made by the phenomenological experiences that an architectural artifact has the potential to provide. This architecture should be seen as a didactic tool that fosters a hyperawareness of the occurrences in the natural environment. This artifact also reflects to local culture through the engagement of the theory of critical regionalism. As a sum of these two ideas the artifact will be designed with intent to foster meditation on our relation to the world's phenomena.

[re]Formulating the Informal

Sebastien Coles — Mon, 14 May 2012 13:21:35 PDT

The identity associate with the inhabitants of the "Bidonvilles" of Haiti is arguably nonexistent aside from its connection to the impoverished conditions of the Haitian slum/shantytown. This thesis contends that with the insertion of a reformative intervention in the heart of the community promoting a conducive and educational environment while overlaying a currently absent infrastructure, will help in creating a positive inner growth within the informal typology. More specifically architecture will act as a form of "pride of place," enticing interaction through the direction connection to culture.

59th Street Bridge Museum and Market

Marciano Martin — Mon, 14 May 2012 12:59:36 PDT

This thesis is to serve as an investigation and response into the architectural issue of scale juxtaposition. In this case the condition which occurs is the result of a modern feat of engineering at one scale, disrupting and imposing itself onto an urban and historical context which is at a more intimate scale. Consequently, there is a loss of identity or spatial relationships in the urban context, which may have existed prior to this modern intervention. It is my goal to take advantage and develop a response to these disparate scales and their images. It is also the opportunity for spatially redefining a rare opening in a dense urban fabric that the difference of the two scales has created.

Architecture News; The Newsletter for the Syracuse University School of Architecture

Bruce J. Abbey — Mon, 14 May 2012 12:59:30 PDT

Architecture News: The newsletter of the Syracuse University School of Architecture Vol. 4 , No. 2, Spring 1996

Echoing the Sounds of Time: Pennsylvania Station

Michael D. Wade Jr. — Mon, 14 May 2012 12:59:21 PDT

The intent of my thesis is an investigation that will exist on two primary levels. The first level is an investigation of urban design and will deal with the development of a city within the city using a multi-programatic complex, as the vehicle. The second level is an investigation of a modern transformation of an existing typology using the primary piece of the complex, the railroad station, as the vehicle and will deal with attempting to re-establish the station and the idea or memory of travel and arrival as an important event within the fabric of the city.

Activating Memorial: Rally Space at Christopher Park

William Fellis — Mon, 14 May 2012 12:55:59 PDT

This thesis is an exploration of the memorial as a constructed place, as a program that portrays more, than a memory and understanding of historical, physical, and cultural contexts, but inspires a progressive action.

The Continuing Exodus: The Synagogue and Jewish Urban Migration

Samuel Gruber — Mon, 14 May 2012 12:50:49 PDT

Catalog essay in Silent Witnesses: Migration Stories Through Synagogues Transformed, Rebuilt or Abandoned (Farmington Hills, MI, 2012) that deals with Jewish settlement and migration in American cities (especially New York, Boston and Cleveland) and the religious and community buildings erected and left behind in the process.

Polish Influence on American synagogue architecture

Samuel Gruber — Mon, 14 May 2012 12:50:46 PDT

Hundreds of thousands of Jews from Poland came to America after 1880. Many built synagogues with details recalling synagogues in their homeland. Immigrant artisans brought motifs and methods of Poland. Many of these synagogues were small, so the relationship to Polish art was on the inside in the painted and carved decoration. Established architects also had access to Polish synagogues as sources. With publication of the Jewish Encyclopedia (1901-06) images of Polish synagogues, such as the Warsaw’s Tlomackie Street Synagogue, became part of many Jewish libraries. More Polish influence came in the 1950s. Most architects were building modern synagogues, but some looked for an architecture that was also Jewish and commemorative. The catalyst was the Piechotka’s Wooden Synagogues, published in Polish in 1957 (English edition, 1959). In the 1960s and ‘70s almost every Jewish architect was studying the book. Subsequently, references to wooden synagogues have been added to scores synagogues.

Benchmarking the CM-5 for Image Processing Applications

Ravi V. Shankar et al. — Mon, 07 May 2012 07:01:16 PDT

This paper presents benchmarking results for image processing algorithms on the Connection Machine model CM-5 and compares them with the results from the CM-2 and the Sun-4. Image processing algorithms with varying communication and computational requirements were implemented, tested and timed. The performance and the scalabilty of the CM-5 were analyzed and compared with that of the CM-2.

Conceptual Background for Symbolic Computation

Klaus Berkling — Mon, 07 May 2012 07:01:14 PDT

This paper is a tutorial which examines the three major models of computation--the Turing Machine, Combinators, and Lambda Calculus--with respect to their usefulness to practical engineering of computing machines. While the classical von Neumann architecture can be deduced from the Turing Machine model, and Combinator machines have been built on an experimental basis, no serious attempts have been made to construct a Lambda Calculus machine. This paper gives a basic outline of how to incorporate a Lambda Calculus capability into a von Neumann type architecture, maintaining full backward compatibility and at the same time making optimal use of its advantages and technological maturity for the Lambda Calculus capability.

A Declarative Foundation of λProlog with Equality

Mino Bai — Mon, 07 May 2012 07:01:12 PDT

We build general model-theoretic semantics for higher-order logic programming languages. Usual semantics for first-order logic is two-level: i.e., at a lower level we define a domain of individuals, and then, we define satisfaction of formulas with respect to this domain. In a higher-order logic which includes the propositional type in its primitive set of types, the definition of satisfaction of formulas is mutually recursive with the process of evaluation of terms. As result of this in higher-order logic it is extremely difficult to define an effective semantics. For example to define T p operator for logic program P, we need a fixed domain without regard to interpretations. In usual semantics for higher-order logic, domain is dependent on interpretations. We overcome this problem and argue that our semantics provides a more suitable declarative basis for higher-order logic programming than the usual general model semantics. We develop a fix point semantics based on our model. We also show that a quotient of the domain of our model can be the domain of a model for higher-order logic programs with equality.

Fault-Detection in Networks

H. F. Mattson Jr — Mon, 07 May 2012 07:01:11 PDT

To find broken links in networks we use the cut-set space. Information on which nodes can talk, or not, to which other nodes allows reduction of the problem to that of decoding the cut-set code of a graph. Special classes of such codes are known to have polynomial-time decoding algorithms. We present a simple algorithm to achieve the reduction and apply it in two examples.

A Non-Deterministric Parallel Sorting Algorithm

Xue Shirley Li et al. — Mon, 07 May 2012 07:01:09 PDT

A miniswap Si,1 ≤ i < n, compares two adjacent keys Пi, Пi+1 in the sequence (П1, ... , Пn), and transposes them if they are out of order. A full sweep is any composition of all n - 1 possible miniswaps. We prove that the composition of any n- 1 full sweeps is a sorting function.

Embedding Data Mappers with Distributed Memory Machine Compilers

Ravi Ponnusamy et al. — Mon, 07 May 2012 07:01:07 PDT

In scalable multiprocessor systems, high performance demands that computational load be balanced evenly among processors and that interprocessor communication be limited as much as possible. Compilation techniques for achieving these goals have been explored extensively in recent years [3, 9, 11, 13, 17, 18]. This research has produced a variety of useful techniques, but most of it has assumed that the programmer specifies the distribution of large data structures among processor memories. A few projects have attempted to automatically derive data distributions for regular problems [12, 10, 8, 1]. In this paper, we study the more challenging problem of automatically choosing data distributions for irregular problems.

A Probabilistic Analysis of a Locality Maintaining Load Balancing Algorithm

Kishan G. Mehrotra et al. — Mon, 07 May 2012 07:01:06 PDT

This paper presents a simple load balancing algorithm and its probabilistic analysis. Unlike most of the previous load balancing algorithms, this algorithm maintains locality. We show that the cost of this load balancing algorithm is small for practical situations and discuss some interesting applications for data remapping.

General Model Theoretic Semantics for Higher-Order Horn Logic Programming

Mino Bai et al. — Mon, 07 May 2012 07:01:04 PDT

We introduce model-theoretic semantics [6] for Higher-Order Horn logic programming language. One advantage of logic programs over conventional non-logic programs has been that the least fixpoint is equal to the least model, therefore it is associated to logical consequence and has a meaningful declarative interpretation. In simple theory of types [9] on which Higher-Order Horn logic programming language is based, domain is dependent on interpretation [10]. To define T p operator for a logic program P, we need a fixed domain without regard to interpretation which is usually taken to be a set of atomic propositions. We build a semantics where we can fix a domain while changing interpretations. We also develop a fixpoint semantics based on our model, and show that we can get the least fixpoint which is the least model. Using this fixpoint we prove the completeness of the interpreter of our language in [14].

Designing Efficient Maximum-Likelihood Soft-Decision Decoding Algorithms for Linear Block Codes Using Algorithm A*

Yunghsiang S. Han et al. — Mon, 07 May 2012 07:01:02 PDT

In this report we present a class of efficient maximum-likelihood soft-decision decoding algorithms for linear block codes. The approach used here is to convert the decoding problem into a search problem through a graph which is a trellis for an equivalent code of the transmitted code. Algorithm A*, which uses a priority-first search strategy, is employed to search through this graph. This search is guided by an evaluation function f defined to take advantage of the information provided by the received vector and the inherent properties of the transmitted code. This function f is used to drastically reduce the search space and to make the decoding efforts of this decoding algorithm adaptable to the noise level. For example, simulation results for the (128,64) binary extended BCH code indicate that for most real channels the proposed decoding algorithm is at least fifteen orders of magnitude more efficient in time and in space than that proposed by Wolf. Simulation results for the (104, 52) binary extended quadratic residue code are also given. These simulation results indicate that the use of Algorithm A* for decoding has resulted not only in an efficient soft-decision decoding algorithm for hitherto intractable linear block codes, but an algorithm which is in fact optimal as well.

Parallel Monte Carlo Trials

Per Brinch Hansen — Mon, 07 May 2012 07:01:00 PDT

The best results of Monte Carlo methods are generally obtained by performing the same computation many times with different random numbers. We develop a generic algorithm for parallel execution of Monte Carlo trials on a multicomputer. The generic algorithm has been adapted for simulated annealing and primality testing by simple substitutions of data types and procedures. The performance of the parallel algorithms was measured on a Computing Surface.

Simulated Annealing

Per Brinch Hansen — Mon, 07 May 2012 07:00:58 PDT

This tutorial describes simulated annealing, an optimization method based on the principles of statistical mechanics. Simulated annealing finds near-optimal solutions to optimization problems that cannot be solved exactly because they are NP-complete. The method is illustrated by a Pascal algorithm for the traveling salesperson problem. The performance of the algorithm was measured on a Computing Surface.

Primality Testing

Per Brinch Hansen — Mon, 07 May 2012 07:00:56 PDT

This tutorial describes the Miller-Rabin method for testing the primality of large integers. The method is illustrated by a Pascal algorithm. The performance of the algorithm was measured on a Computing Surface.