CS Theses & Dissertations 1987

For 1987 graduation dates (in alphabetical order by last name):

Schema Labelling Applied to Hand Printed Chinese Character Recognition
Bult, Timothy Paul
URI : http://hdl.handle.net/2429/26175
Degree : Master of Science – MSc
Graduation Date :1987-05
Supervisor : Dr. Havens

Design and Implementation of an event monitor for the UNIX Operating System
Chan, Susan Chui-Sheung
URI : http://hdl.handle.net/2429/26187
Degree : Master of Science – MSc
Graduation Date : 1987-05
Supervisor : Dr. Chanson

An Estelle-C Compiler for Automatic Protocol Implementation
Chan, Robin Isaac Man-Hang
URI : http://hdl.handle.net/2429/26184
Degree : Master of Science – MSc
Graduation Date : 1987-11
Supervisor : Dr. Vuong

On Implementating the ISO FIle Transfer, Access and Management Protocol for a UNIX 4.2 BSD Environment
Goh, Mei Jean
URI : http://hdl.handle.net/2429/26263
Degree : Master of Science – MSc
Graduation Date : 1987-11
Supervisor : Dr. Chanson

Conformance Testing of OSI Protocols:  TRCO as an Example
Kou, Tian
URI : http://hdl.handle.net/2429/26427
Degree : Master of Science – MSc
Graduation Date : 1987-11
Supervisor : Dr. Vuong

A Schema and Constraint-Based Representation to Understanding Natural Language
Kuttner, Eliza
URI : http://hdl.handle.net/2429/25899
Degree : Master of Science – MSc
Graduation Date : 1987-05
Supervisor : Dr. Havens

Transformation of Set Schema into Relational Structures
Lee, Anna Li Phin
URI : http://hdl.handle.net/2429/26431
Degree : Master of Science – MSc
Graduation Date : 1987-11
Supervisor : Dr. Gilmore

Shape and Albedo from Shading - the Regularization Involving Discontinutities Approach
Leung, Franklin
Master’s essay available in print : https://bibrrs.library.ubc.ca/vwebv/holdingsInfo?bibId=111795
Degree : Master of Science – MSc
Graduation Date : 1987-11

A Power Line Local Area Network: Design and Implementation
Ma, Audivox Hing Ting
URI : http://hdl.handle.net/2429/26443
Degree : Master of Science – MSc
Graduation Date : 1987-11
Supervisor : Dr. Vuong

A Default Logic Approach to the Derivation of Natural Languages PRESUPPOSITIONS
Mercer, Robert Ernest
URI : http://hdl.handle.net/2429/27457
Degree : Doctor of Philosophy – PhD
Graduation Date : 1987-11
Supervisor : Dr. Rosenberg

A hearer's interpretation of the meaning of an utterance consists of more than what is conveyed by just the sentence itself. Other parts of the meaning are produced as inferences from three knowledge sources: the sentence itself, knowledge about the world, and knowledge about language use. One inference of this type is the natural language presupposition. This category of inference is distinguished by a number of features: the inferences are generated only, but not necessarily, if certain lexical or syntactic environments are present in the uttered sentence; normal interpretations of these presuppositional environments in the scope of a negation in a simple sentence produce the same inferences as the unnegated environment; and the inference can be cancelled by information in the conversational context. We propose a method for deriving presuppositions of natural language sentences that has its foundations in an inference-based concept of meaning. Whereas standard (monotonic) forms of reasoning are able to capture portions of a sentence's meaning, such as its entailments, non-monotonic forms of reasoning are required to derive its presuppositions. Gazdar's idea of presuppositions being consistent with the context, and the usual connection of presuppositions with lexical and syntactic environments motivates the use of Default Logic as the formal nonmonotonic reasoning system. Not only does the default logic approach provide a natural means to represent presuppositions, but also a single (slightly restricted) default proof procedure is all that is required to generate the presuppositions. The naturalness and simplicity of this method contrasts with the traditional projection methods. Also available to the logical approach is the proper treatment of 'or' and 'if ... then ...' which is not available to any of the projection methods. The default logic approach is compared with four others, three projection methods and one non-projection method. As well as serving the function of demonstrating empirical and methodological difficulties with the other methods, the detailed investigation also provides the motivation for the topics discussed in connection with default logic approach. Some of the difficulties have been solved using the default logic method, while possible solutions for others have only been sketched. A brief discussion of a new method for providing corrective answers to questions is presented. The novelty of this method is that the corrective answers are viewed as correcting presuppositions of the answer rather than of the question.

Approaches to Procedural Adequacy in Logic Programming Using Connection Graphs
Moens, Theodore Warren Bernelot
URI : http://hdl.handle.net/2429/26499
Degree : Master of Science – MSc
Graduation Date : 1987-11

Reliable Client-Server Communication in Distributed Programs
Ravindran, K.
URI : http://hdl.handle.net/2429/27514
Degree : Doctor of Philosophy – PhD
Graduation Date : 1987-11
Supervisor : Dr. Chanson

Remote procedure call (RPC) and shared variable are communication abstractions which allow the various processes of a distributed program, often modelled as clients and servers, to communicate with one another across machine boundaries. A key requirement of the abstractions is to mask the machine and communication failures that may occur during the client-server communications. In practice, many distributed applications can inherently tolerate failures under certain situations. If such application layer information is available to the client-server communication layer (RPC and shared variable), the failure masking algorithms in the communication layer may relax the constraints under which the algorithms may have to operate if the information is not available. The relaxation significantly simplifies the algorithms and the underlying message transport layer and allows formulation of efficient algorithms. This application-driven approach forms the backbone of the failure masking techniques described in the thesis, as outlined below: Orphan handling in RPCs: Using the application-driven approach, the thesis introduces a new technique of adopting the orphans caused by failures during RPCs. The adoption technique is preferable to orphan killing because orphan killing wastes any work already completed and requires rollback which may be expensive and sometimes not meaningful. The thesis incorporates orphan adoption into two schemes of replicating a server: i) Primary-secondary scheme in which one of the replicas of the server acts as the primary and executes RPCs from clients while the other replicas stand by as secondaries. When the primary fails, one of the secondaries becomes the primary, restarts the server execution from the most recent checkpoint and adopts the orphan, ii) Replicated execution scheme in which an RPC on the server is executed by more than one replica of the server. When any of the replicas fails, the orphan generated by the failure is adopted by the surviving replicas. Both schemes employ call re-executions by servers based on the application-level idempotency properties of the calls. Access to shared variables: Contemporary distributed programs deal with a new class of shared variables such as information on name bindings, distributed load and leadership within a service group. Since the consistency constraints on such system variables need not be as strong as those for user data, the access operations on the variables may be made simpler using this application layer information. Along this direction, the thesis introduces an abstraction, which we call application-driven shared variable, to govern access operations on the variables. The algorithms for the access operations on a variable use intra-server group communication and enforce consistency of the variable to the extent required by the application. The thesis describes complete communication models incorporating the application-driven approach to mask failures.

Using Lexical Knowledge and Parafoveal Information for the Recognition of Common Words and Suffixes
Rhone, Brock
URI : http://hdl.handle.net/2429/26520
Degree : Master of Science – MSc
Graduation Date : 1987-11
Supervisor : Dr. Rosenberg

LNTP - The Implementation and Performance of a New Local Area Network Transport Protocol
Robinson, James B.
URI : http://hdl.handle.net/2429/26523
Degree : Master of Science – MSc
Graduation Date : 1987-11
Supervisor : Dr. Chanson

The Design and Control of Visual Routines for the Computation of Simple Geometric Properties and Relations
Romanycia, Marc Hector Joseph
URI : http://hdl.handle.net/2429/26526
Degree : Master of Science – MSc
Graduation Date : 1987-11
Supervisor : Dr. Mackworth

Reliable Group Communications in Distributed Systems
Srivallipuranandan, Navaratnam
URI : http://hdl.handle.net/2429/26505
Degree : Master of Science – MSc
Graduation Date : 1987-11
Supervisors : Dr. Chanson, Dr. Neufeld

A Fully Automatic Analytic Approach to Budget-Constrained System Upgrade
Wong, Angela Sai On
URI : http://hdl.handle.net/2429/26670
Degree : Master of Science – MSc
Graduation Date : 1987-05
Supervisor : Dr. Chanson