Meeting Agenda
Meeting Agenda
The little-known novel, Fat Men from Space, has had a seminal influence on both societal values and technical literature in the past few decades. This talk will describe its relationship to the remainder of the Fat Men oeuvre, concentrating on Fat Men from Space -- the Movie, and on the proof-reading chapter of Logorrhoea. It will also try to blow away a little of the smoke screen that obscures the influence of Fat Men on user interface design.
http://www.math.uwaterloo.ca/webnotice_internal/notice_prgms/wreg/notices_main.pl
Abstract:
An orthogonal drawing of a graph is an embedding of the graph into the rectangular grid, i.e., vertices are drawn as points or boxes, and edges are drawn as sequences of horizontal and vertical line segments. This graph drawing style has a wide variety of applications, in fields such as VLSI design, data bases, and data flow diagrams.
In this talk, we survey our work in orthogonal graph drawing, both for graphs with maximum degree 4 (vertices drawn as points) and for graphs with higher degrees. For maximum degree 4, we show that every graph with n vertices can be drawn in an nxn-grid with 2n+2 bends, and that the number of bends cannot be improved much in general. For higher degrees, we show that every graph with n vertices and m edges can be drawn in an mxm-grid (usually even smaller) with m-n+1 bends, and that the number of bends cannot be improved much in general. Time permitting, we will also present results for three-dimensional orthogonal drawings.
Abstract:
Today's computer industry has created many channels for providing timely information service. These services range from Internet Web browsing to asking for advice for Cable-TV repairment. To reduce the information overload on the user, we propose to build a network of service agents which can provide a user with high- quality information in real time. In this talk, I will give an overview of our work on developing information-service agent systems. I will first give an in-depth presentation of our work in building and maintaining large case bases that capture and reuse previous problem-solving knowledge. In this part I will emphasize on the problems of near-optimal case base construction, index maintenance and the processing of semi-structured text knowledge. I will then discuss how to extend the case base reasoning framework to networked service-agent systems based on an information broker super-structure. I will highlight an application we are working on with Rogers Cablesystems on Cable-TV diagnosis and troubleshooting.
Abstract:
In 1988, K. Clarkson and P. Shor revolutionized the field of computational geometry by introducing a framework that enabled random sampling techniques to be applied to many fundamental problems. Often these randomized techniques yield not only the best theoretical results but also simpler solutions. In this talk, we discuss several new geometric applications (mostly in low dimensions), including: efficient data structures for range searching (e.g., how to report all ``post offices'' within a given radius of a query point), and faster algorithms for constructing well-known geometric structures (such as higher-order Voronoi diagrams and ``levels'' in arrangements).
Abstract:
Recent models of education tend to be more learner-centered than previous models which were teacher-centered. At UW, we have developed an online toolkit that supports the design of learner-centered educational material. The kit supports: a) doing detailed learner profiling, b) using learning scenarios to describe learner situations, and c) visualizing certain key aspects of the design of learning activities. In this workshop, you will use the ideas from the application and apply them to some learning activities that already exist in your academic area.
Bring lunch. Free juice. Register by Friday, March 5, 1999: email trace@watserv1.uwaterloo.ca