It Perspective On Systems Analysis In A Crm Implementation
Dawn Jenner, DataFlow Computer Resource Management, Santa Rosa
03/18/2004
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is fast becoming the preferred way businesses interact with their clients and customers. Yet, statistics show that mostCRM ventures fail, costing millions in lost revenue. Key to effective CRMimplementation is a systems analysis process that clearly focuses on the company's goals and client needs, while identifying the company's culture and resources, andaccurately matching the appropriate technology with the users' abilities.
Multifingered Grasping: From Grasp Reflexes To Context-Dependent Strategies
Jefferson Coelho, Sonoma State University Computer and Engineering Science Graduate Program & Agilent, Santa Rosa
03/25/2004
Grasping plays an important role in human cognitive development, helping infantsdevelop primitive problem solving strategies and aiding the onset of perceptual categorization. Grasp controllers can be suitable for implementation on robotic devices. Grasp controllers are initially defined as simple grasp primitives, the first step in the bootstrap procedure leading to context-dependent strategies. Physical objects can be autonomously defined by the robot, based on the history of grasp interactions. Theresulting grasp controller is being implemented in Nasa's robonaut, a robotic helper for astronauts.
Scalable Management Of Computer Security (Anti-Worm, Anti-Virus, Ids, Fw)
Patrick Lincoln, SRI International, Menlo Park
04/01/2004
The antivirus/antiworm talk is based on a paper and presentation at WORM 2003, CCS, and a paper Dr. Lincoln and his coworkers at SRI are currently writing forUsenix Security, as well as general pontification on his part about these issues.
Who Makes The Best Partner? Neural Networks With Personalities
Gerald Eisman, San Francisco State University Computer Science Department
04/15/2004
Since J.J. Hopfield invented the "energy" function for recurrent neural networks in the early '80s, these systems have been used to find approximate solutions to combinatorial problems such as the Task Assignment problem or the Traveling Salesman problem. Improved results can be obtained by partnering two networks to work on a problem together. The individuals seek their own energy minima but periodically communicate their partial results to one another and then adjust their search accordingly. By giving the networks "personalities" (e.g. stubborn networks refuse to change course, forgetful networks frequently reset and begin again), we find that certain pairs perform better than others.
Improving Mpi For Linux Clusters
Greg Benson, University of San Francisco Computer Science Department
04/22/2004
The Message Passing Interface (MPI) has become a dominant programming paradigm for scientific and numerical parallel computing. In addition, Linux clusters base on switched networks allow for rapid and low-cost deployment parallel computing systems. This talk will summarize our recent efforts to improve MPI for Linux clusters. In particular, our own implementation of MPI, called USFMPI, performs better than both MPICH and LAM-MPI in many cases. Unlike MPICH and LAM-MPI, the USFMPI implementation is relatively compact making it easy to explore alternative implementation techniques. Experiments with the dissemination algorithm for allgather collective communication will be described.