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SDD-1, A System for Distributed Databases, is a distributed database system being developed by Computer Corporation of America (CCA), Cambridge, MA. SDD-1 permits data to be stored redundantly at several database sites in order to enhance the reliability and responsiveness of the system and to facilitate upward scaling of system capacity. This paper describes the method used by SDD-1 for updating data that are stored redundantly. Redundant updating can be costly because it may potentially involve extensive intercomputer communication overhead in order to lock all copies of data being updated. The method described here avoids this overhead by identifying cases in which it is not necessary to perform this global database locking. The identification of transactions that do not require global locking is based on a predefinition of transaction classes performed by the database administrator using an analysis technique described herein. The classes defined are used at run time to decide what level of synchronization is needed for a given transaction. It is important to note that this predefinition activity in no way limits the transactions that the system can accept; it merely permits more efficient execution of those types of transactions that were anticipated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The importance of software in defense systems continues to intensify as new systems emerge in response to increasing threats and declining force levels. The need to manage this software as a critical component of defense systems over their life cycle is becoming widely recognized. A general awareness of this need as an institutional problem requiring special attention within the Office of the Secretary of Defense has been growing as software problems have reached top level defense management visibility with increasing regularity. Soft- ware costs are continuing to multiply in step with advancing weapons systems sophistication, and opportunities for cost avoidance now are leveraged against large dollar investments. These conditions characterize the computer industry at large, but very little overall focus has been visible to improve the software development process. Consequently, the Department of Defense (DoD) has undertaken a two part effort to accelerate both near-term and long-term improvements in software development for weapons system applications. These efforts, the establishment of software life cycle management policy and practices, and the vigorous development and application of new software technology are discussed in considerable depth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This special collection of papers had its genesis at the IEEE Computer Society Workshop on Software Testing and Test Documentation held in Fort Lauderdale, Florida during December 18-20, 1978. This collection is devoted to selected papers on program testing that were presented at the Workshop. The thrust is towards approaches that can support the heuristic components of testing. There is increasing recognition that it is unlikely there will be a grand theory of testing which will lead to fully automated testing systems. Instead the tester will be called upon to use his intuition and problem-dependent knowledge in a discipline manner to test for a variety of specified error types. But it is crucial that this less ambitious, heuristic activity be nevertheless firmly embedded in an underlying framework which is logical, rigorous and well-understood.

The papers appearing in this special issue of the "IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering" periodical are based on papers that originally appeared in the proceedings of the First International Conference on Data Engineering which was held in Los Angeles, California, on April 25-27, 1984. The paper by Braegger, Dudler, Rebsamen and Zehnder was selected as the best paper at the conference by the awards committee, and concerns a database tool called Gambit. This design tool is based on an extended relational/entity relationship model and assists the designer with a wide variety of subtools. The paper by Farmer, King, and Myers is also about a design tool which is called the Semantic Database Constructor (Sedaco). It is based on a semantic data model which buffers the designer from most low level data structuring issues.

The Third International Conference on Data Engineering was held in Los Angeles, California on February 2 to 6, 1987. The conference was designed as an international forum for bringing together researchers, developers, managers, strategic planners and other users with an interest in the research, design and development of data engineering methodologies, strategies and systems. Its scope includes computer science, artificial intelligence, electrical engineering, and computer engineering. It featured papers from all major areas of data engineering, including database design and modeling, performance evaluation, algorithms, integrity, security, fault tolerance, query language, artificial intelligence approaches, knowledge bases, database machines, distributed databases and data engineering applications.

Understanding of software costs is important because of the overall magnitude of these costs (in 1985, roughly $70 billion per year in the U.S. and over $140 billion per year worldwide) and the fundamental impact software will have on our future quality of life. Section I of this paper discusses these issues. Section II, the main portion of the paper, discusses the two primary ways of understanding software costs. The "black-box" or influence-function approach provides useful experimental and observational in- sights oh the relative software productivity and quality leverage of various management, technical, environmental, and personnel options. The "glass-box" or cost distribution approach helps identify strategies for integrated software productivity and quality improvement programs, via such structures as the value chain and the software productivity opportunity tree. The individual strategies for improving software productivity identified in Section II are: • writing less code; • getting the best from people; • avoiding rework; • developing and using integrated project support environments. Section It provides overall surveys of early and recent progress along these and other lines identified by the opportunity tree. Better understanding of software costs leads to better methods of controlling software project costs, and vice versa. Section III discusses these issues. It points out that a good framework of techniques exists for controlling software budgets, schedules, and work completed, but that a great deal of further progress is needed to provide an overall set of planning and control techniques covering software product qualities and end-user system objectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a method for estimating software development effort in the early phases of a large software-intensive project and a "front-end" process incorporating the method. We describe the application of this methodology to the domestic U.S. 5ESS Switch project—a very large multiyear continuing effort, with new features incorporated into yearly releases. For each feature to be estimated, a "feature team" generates a detailed feature definition with high-level functionality requirements and a high-level design proposal. These are used in the estimeeting, a formal working meeting of estimators from affected parts of the project. The meeting produces a development estimate for use in deciding which features to include in the next release. The benefits of this methodology include well-defined milestones (high-level feature requirements, high-level designs, and estimates), and less tangible benefits like better working relationships between parts of the project, interorganizational synergy, and increased confidence in the front-end process. Further, once development begins, the estimates are sufficient to begin staffing and budgeting. However, market conditions may change during the project implementation; this could require changing some feature definitions, and even adding and deleting large features. Therefore it may be difficult to reconcile the original estimates with resources required as the product approaches delivery. At this writing the methodology has been used for three releases for the 5ESS Switch, and preliminary indications of the accuracy of its estimates are promising. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examines the impact of capital investment tax credit on federal research and development (R&D) spending. Relationship between long-term trends in R&D spending and research and experimentation credit; Enhanced competition for internal company funds as a result of the introduction of capital investment tax credit.

Explores the relationship between providing technical and managerial career opportunities to R&D (research and development) professionals and turnover. Relevance of current turnover theory; Factors influencing turnover in organizations; Listing of relationships under certain conditions; Description of methods; Results of study; Discussion of results; Implications of study; References.

Suggests an approach for analyzing technical organizations and tasks in terms of mission related functioning. Description of different efficiency drive approaches; Description of overall process and technique of organizational activity analysis; Examples of database utilization; Use of organizational analysis on an ongoing basis; Benefits of maintaining current database; Use of analysis for reorganization.

Shows the applicability of discriminant function between United States (US) and British and German R&D (research and development) projects. Description of R&D project termination; Purpose of study; Collection of data from these countries; Analysis of recurring set of variables in R&D project evaluation; Implications of the study for engineering management; Author's views on study; Discussion on discriminant analysis in appendix.

Discusses the role of the United States National Science Foundation in the provision of scientific computing facilities for colleges and universities in the period 1950 to 1973. Establishment of the discipline of computer science; Technical and financial challenges.

Suggests that the movement to make universities and federal laboratories responsive to industrial needs is a threat to research in the United States. Analysis of the support, production and utilization of research; Threat to the function of the university as supplier of basic science; Policies that increase funding levels of basic research.

Focuses on the measures used in the process of transferring government-funded technologies to private sector firms in the United States. Framework used in technology transfer; Role of individuals in the transfer of federally funded technologies; Recommendations for technology transfer practitioners.

Describes a decision support system (DSS) that assisted Texas Instruments Inc. in their printed wiring board assembly in Austin, Texas. Development of a management information system; Evaluation of the usefulness and the ease of use of the DSS; Use of the DSS for scheduling, planning and inventory management.

Describes a generic step-by-step method for business process management (BPM) which encompasses methods employed in industry from incremental improvements to reengineering. Survey of major US companies' approaches to process quality management; Continuous improvement; Critical success factors; Activity-based costing; Analytic hierarchy process.

Focuses on the 50th anniversary of the birth of the electronic numerical integrator and computer (ENIAC) at the Moore School of Engineering of the University of Pennsylvania. Demonstration of the first working electronic digital computer; Forerunners of the technological revolution; Progress of the technology from 1943-1946; Birth of modern computing.

Reports on plans for the `virtual' tour of the National Air and Space Museum on the World Wide Web.

Reports that the University of Southwestern Louisiana has donated to the Boston Computer Museum an extensive repository of microprogramming artifacts and documentation to the historical museum.

Reports that Ben Gross is gathering sources on the history of computing relating to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Presents the results of case study research on the adoption of concurrent engineering (CE) at a major United States automotive firm. Key business objectives; Organizational and technological changes needed to implement CE; Platform team structure and function; Supplier integration; Plant employee participation; Human resource practices; Technological enablers; Challenges.

Places the computing industry within the context of American political economy. Firm behavior and competitive structure in American computing; View that dominant firms such as International Business Machines, Apple, and Microsoft have demonstrated an affinity for striking compromises between innovation and stability; The government's tolerance and encouragement of such behavior; Comparison to the telephony and electric power industries.

This paper describes methods for automatically analyzing formal, state-based requirements specifications for some aspects of completeness and consistency. The approach uses a low-level functional formalism, simplifying the analysis process. State-space explosion problems are eliminated by applying the analysis at a high level of abstraction; i.e., instead of generating a reachability graph for analysis, the analysis is performed directly on the model. The method scales up to large systems by decomposing the specification into smaller, analyzable parts and then using functional composition rules to ensure that verified properties hold for the entire specification. The analysis algorithms and tools have been validated on TCAS II, a complex, airborne, collision-avoidance system required on all commercial aircraft with more than 30 passengers that fly in U.S. airspace. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focuses on the market prospects for smart cards in the United States. Visa International's trial of its smart card in the 1996 Summer Olympic Games in Atlanta, Georgia; Fundamental applications of cards; Types of cards; Security concerns for smart cards; Technology for smart cards.

Describes multiparameter radar observations of repeated ice crystal orientation associated with lightning in the echoes from the tops of Florida thunderstorms. Typical frequency of the ice crystal orientation; Description of the theory of multiparameter radar measurements; Propagation effects through the cloud top.

Focuses on the activities taken by the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate regulation of hazardous air pollutant (HAP) emissions from Portland, Oregon cement plants. Designation of Portland cement as a major source of HAP; Program developed by the city's cement manufacturing industry to cope with Title III of the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments.

Presents an overview of the developments, related activities and applications of superconducting magnetic energy storage (SMES). Brief history of SMES development in the United States; Description of the SMES plant; Cost estimates of SMES development; Applications for SMES; Conclusions.

Considers the cooling hole design in Bitter disks, a concept developed and tested at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory (NHMFL). Background information on Bitter and polyhelix magnets; Cooling hole configuration; Application of the concept; Conclusions.

Reports on the validation of phasor calculations in a Macrodyne Phasor Measurement Unit for the March 1993 California-Oregon Transmission Project. Filtering enhancements on the phasor calculations; Network resonance signal and validation of transient performance; Decimation of the raw phasors.

Provides information about the anti-knockoff intellectual property protection proposal submitted by the Institute of Electrical & Electronics Engineers-USA to the US Congress. Reasons why there exists a need for such legislation; Details of the proposal; Articles to be protected under the proposal.

Presents preliminary results generated from the semantic retrieval research component of the Illinois Digital Library Initiative (DLI) project. Alleviating the vocabulary problem using concept spaces; Vocabulary association and thesaurus work; Concept of space principles; Computer engineering concept space generation using CM-5 and Power Challenge.

Presents advice on invention documentation for patent purposes in the United States. Definition of patents; Patent applications; Need for documentation; Types of information that need to be recorded.

Focuses on the key roles played by several women in the US National Bureau of Standards' development of numerical analysis. Background on the Math Tables Project started in 1938; Establishment of the National Applied Mathematics Laboratories; Development of the universal automatic computer (UNIVAC).

Comments on the need to balance risks and benefits in evaluating emerging medical technologies and the American government's inability to cope with this. Shortcomings of the Food and Drug Administration in approving new medical technologies; Issue of safety and efficacy of innovative medical devices; Recommendation of privatizing product approval process.

Looks at whether advances in medical technology would be able to drive down the cost of medical care. Economics of telemedicine and computerized medical records; Other drivers of health care costs.

Details the design and operation of a 40-MW, highly stabilized power supply installed at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory in Tallahassee, Florida. Specifications; Power circuit breaker and transformers; Passive filter; Rectifiers; Circuit diagram; Precommissioning tests.

Discusses the failure of the attempt to establish a computational center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the 1930s. What effect that decision had on the subsequent shift from analog to digital computing during the 1950s; The role played by MIT's Philip Morse in the inauguration of its Computation Center in 1957; His selective memory; Generational change; New agenda and Cold War fears; Other information.

Outlines the technological, professional, and intellectual context out of which the development of the continuous integraph or product integraph, as the immediate forerunner of Vannevar Bush's differential analyzer, evolved. The affinity between transmission line research and teaching at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's (MIT) electrical engineering department and the creation of the product integraph for evaluating integrals; More.

Presents an overview of the Cannon-Caliber Electromagnetic Gun (CCEMG) launcher design and describes the testing performed at University of Texas at Austin, Center for Electromechanics (UT-CEM) and U.S. Army Research Laboratory (ARL). Analysis on cannon-caliber design considerations; Discussion of testing the CCEMG by UT-CEM and ARL; Analysis on launcher performance and inspection; Conclusions.

Focuses on controversies relating to the applications and purposes of new technologies into the courtrooms in the United States. How to predict the outcome of adjudication; Numerous incidents of judicial consideration of the relationship between science and law; Some cases that have relationship in technological issues; What did the outcomes of the cases suggest.

Looks at an application of High Temperature Superconductor (HTS) technology, focusing on the development of a high performance antenna Beam Forming Network (BFN) for communication systems. Purpose of the system; Features of the system; How the system operates; Detailed information on the design of BFN.

Describes the replacement of a static starting system at the Mt. Elbert Pumped-Storage Powerplant, near Leadville, Colorado. Problems with the previous static starter; Design criteria for the replacement system; Installation issues and testing experience; Operating experience, training, and manufacturer's support.

This article provides information about extended versions of four of the best papers presented at the Eleventh Annual Conference on Computer Assurance, with the theme of "Industrial Strength Research," held at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Gaithersburg, Maryland, in June 1996. These papers address the issue of how to apply the theory of high assurance computing to system and software development. The first paper, "An Industrial-Strength Theorem Prover for a Logic Based on Common Lisp" describes a computational logic for Applicative Common Lisp (ACL2), a reimplemented, extended version of the Boyer-Moore theorem prover. In the second paper, titled, "Comparing Verification Systems: Interactive Consistency in ACL2," researchers have developed a multitude of formal techniques for specifying and verifying computer systems. The benchmark problem exists in this type of specification is the Oral Messages algorithm, a generalization of the Byzantine Generals problem. The third paper, "Using a Protean Language to Enhance Expressiveness in Specification," introduces a Protean specification language, a generalization of process algebras that allows the user to invent his own domain-specific operators to improve abstraction and readability.

Discusses Eco System, a cross-industry program to bridge conflicting electronic commerce platforms in the United States. Framework of extensive object-oriented components; Basis in the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA); Interfaces and common business language. INSETS: Major e-commerce platforms.;Marketware.;Payment interoperability.;AIMSNet, by Ram Sriram.

Discusses trends in electronic commerce in the United States. Improvement of enterprise information and workflows; Transformation of business transactions; Redefinition of corporate strategies.