GOZARESH-E-COMPUTER
Computer Report
Vol. 14, No. 120
July-August 1993
Publisher : Informatics Society of Iran (ISI)
Manager : Ebrahim N. Mashayekh
Editor-in-Chief : Ali A. Parsa
Assistant Editor : Saeed Vahid
Circulation: CR is published bimonthly by ISI. Please address your
subscription requests to: Anoosh Hosseini, P.O.Box 61622, Sunnyvale,
CA 94088 USA.
membership: Annual subscription is included in membership fee.
Non-member price: US$ 25 per year ( 6 copies). CR features original and
translated articles, news and reviews on all aspects of computers in Iran and
abroad.
Submissions: Submit you article to: The Editor, Computer Report,
P.O.Box 1196, Tehran 14155, IRAN. All submissions are subject to editing for
style, clarity and space consideration.
Editorial: Unless otherwise stated, articles and reports reflect the
author's opinion. Inclusion does not neccessarily imply approval of ISI.
Mailing List Rental: ISI lists are available for computer-related
products and services.
Postmaster: Send address changes to: ISI, P.O.Box 1196, Tehran 14155,
IRAN.
Copyright (c) 1992 by Informatics Society of Iran. Copying
without fee is permitted with credit to the source.
CR's camera ready copies are produced using TeX-e-paarsi typesetting system.
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Articles:
Computer Networks in Science and Technology 21
Artistic Approach in Cybernetic Age 29
Structured Methods of System Development 35
Methodology and Application of ISOTEC 41
Software Crisis 48
Software
A Roundup of Persian Software Packages 64
Graphical User Interfaces 66
A Calm Approach to Unix 68
Solaris, A Heavy-Hitting Unix for PCs 70
Hardware
RISC vs CISC 68
Opinion
Informatics in the Second Five-Year Plan 77
CR Needs a Revolution 79
Toward Professional Groups 81
Departments
News 6
Letters 19
Interview 58
Book Review 61
Technically Speaking 84
Ergonomics 86
Calendar 8
Reports
A Report from Berlin 62
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News
Software Pirate Convicted
A person who was charged with illegal copying of software was convicted and
fined. Sina Software Company claims that the pirate had cracked the code of
the company's major software product and was selling copies below the market
price. This is the first legal case in which a court has convicted someone
on charges of software piracy in Iran.
Expert Traffic Control
Timing of traffic lights will be controlled and adjusted by traffic volume in
major intersections in Tehran. According to Traffic Control Company, Tehran,
the first phase of this project is to be implemented in the intersection of
Chamran Expressway and Vali-Asr Avenue. The system will receive traffic
information through magnetic sensors installed on the pavement, and a local
computer will compute the traffic volume and will adjust the timing for
traffic light.
New DTP Software
Saberin Publishing Company has announced version 5 of its ``Naghsh'' Persian
DTP product. The software has 600 dpi print capability, mouse support,
automatic index and table of contents compilation, among other capabilities.
An Arabic version is under development. Saberin can be reached by phone
(+9821) 854196.
New Piping Software
Alpha Afzar Company has announced its ``Alpha Duct'' and ``Alpha Pipe''
software products. Using Auto Lisp command language of Auto Cad, these
products can automate design and drawing of piping facilities. Alpha Afzar
claims that using these products, a design engineer can design and prepare
drawings at the same time. Contact Alpha Afzar by phone (+9821) 8821109.
Second Computer Conference
Second Conference of Computer Education, Research and Application will be
held in Tehran, Feb. 8-10, 1994. The conference is sponsored by University of
Technology and Industry of Iran, and Ministry of Culture and Higher
Education. Dead line for paper abstracts submission is Sep. 29, 1993. Contact
conference secretary by phone: (+9821) 771046.
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Farsi Computing Review
* An essential reading for anyone involved in development of Farsi and
Arabic applications.
* Addressing both practical and theoretical issues
* A valuable source of information for every researcher working on
language dependent aspects of computing
Farsi Computing Review is published quarterly in English by
Informatics Society of Iran in co-operation with BRAIN Computer Systems
Group. It is available through subscription. For subscription information
please contact: P.O. Box 14455-161, Tehran, Iran. Fax: +98 21 980102
sample copy available upon request
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Conference on Technological Advancement for Developing Countries
Anoosh Hosseini
The conference on technological advancement for developing countries was
held July 24-26 at Columbia University of New York. The conference had
five areas of focus; infrastructure, computer science and
telecommunication, general papers on technology in developing countries,
energy and minerals, and environmental science.
Dr.Bahram Bahramian of Beta Management Systems gave the keynote speech with
focus on Technology transfer. One of the points of his talk was the large
amount of resources required to implement advanced technology in a developing
country. He noted the need for education infrastructure, financing,
personnel, and Research and Development. In addition, the process of
industrialization had become much harder and expensive during the past 50
years, while at the same time the value of national resources which fund it
had only grown moderately. He next moved on to the issue of stability,
pointing out that investors are not willing to put their assets in long
term projects, such as heavy industry, if they are not sure of events in
the near future. Finally Dr. Bahramian brought up the issue of what
technology needs to be applied, older technology, or the latest?
Though there were several sections, each with very interesting talks such as
transportation modeling, building for earth quake resistance, and petroleum
engineering to point a few, the rest of this report focuses on the
information technology papers.
The paper by Babak Farzami of Advanced Networks & Services provided an
overview of Wide-Area Networking. Topics covered were terrestrial
infrastructure which is commonly used by telephone companies for voice and
data transfer, wireless communications (microwave and cellular phones), LAN
and various wide area networking technologies. His paper then went on to a
case study of the Internet, and finally some thoughts on issues facing
developing countries. During his presentation Mr.Farzami took a much more
global approach and discussed the general trend and effects of technology
on society.
The next presentation was by Dr. Parsa of InterDigital Communications Corp.
who discussed modern telecommunication systems with the focus on wireless
communication. The talk began with current trends in industrialized
countries and compared and contrasted the situation to that of developing
countries. He noted that the number of communication lines and investment
in communication infrastructure was proportional to the Country's GNP
(Gross National Product). Due to the high cost of building these
communication systems, governments are allowing different levels of
privatization, balanced with regulations on operation. An overview of the
current state of telecommunications and approaches taken by the Iranian
PTT was then given. Next Dr. Parsa pointed out the restrictions on mobility
that current systems pose, and foresaw a general trend towards high
bandwidth wireless communication capable of providing a highly interactive
interface to the user. In the concluding remarks, the environment required to
create a dynamic telecommunication industry was put forth. Areas pointed out
were further privatization, creation of standard setting organizations, and
funding of research and development and long term solutions.
Anooshiravan Hosseini of Silicon Graphics Inc. presented his paper on
Development of a Persian Graphical User Interface. Both language and
computer know how presently slow down the progress of developing
countries, however recent advances in software technology provide more
friendly and intuitive computer interfaces. In addition new standards in
developing Internationalized software has made the task of localizing
operating systems and applications more straight forward. In the case
study, the methodology and issues addressed while localizing the Microsoft
Windows environments were discussed. A demonstration of the implementation
was also given during the presentation.
The next speaker was Dr. Beigi of IBM Watson Research Center who gave and
overview of hand writing recognition, covering both on line and off-line
recognition systems. He pointed out some of the issues in recognizing Persian
text, such as the cursive nature of the script, and the classification of
characters based on dots above and below the text. It was noted that
Optical Character Recognition (OCR) was critical for the transfer of vast
amounts of typed information onto databases. OCR has also been deployed by
many postal systems for sorting mail. On-line hand writing recognition
has been vital to the development of pen based user interfaces. A Persian
version would allow users who are not proficient in Persian typing to become
active computer users. In conclusion Dr. Beigi stressed that much research
still remains to be done in the area of Persian OCR. however he was
hopeful, since researchers have had success in dealing with more
complicated scripts such as Chinese.
Following Dr. Beigi, his colleague Dr. Analoui, also from IBM Watson
Research Center presented his paper on Speech Recognition based on the
Hidden Markov Model. Dr. Analoui began with some of the applications of
voice recognition, followed by some of the working constraints. Two speech
recognition system were described; word based and phoneme based. The former
is best for recognition of a small set of words and is usually accurate
for the voices that it has been trained with. The latter approach breaks down
voice into a sequence of phonemes.
Using test data, probabilities are assigned to each phoneme within a sequence
based on the Hidden Markov Model. Dr. Analoui concluded that though much of
the theory can be applied to recognizing Persian voice, the phoneme set for
Persian is different than English. In addition, part of the recognition
process requires modeling the language grammar which is again different.
The final presentation in the area of Informatics was by Dr. Mehran
Moshfeghi who gave a review of Medical Imaging technology. During the talk,
the significant influence of computer technology in the area of Medical
Imaging was discussed. Dr. Moshfeghi covered advances in X-Ray computerized
tomography, Magentic Resonance Imaging (MRI), and ultrasound. These
technologies provided non intrusive methods for evaluating a patient's
condition. Medical images no longer need to be stored on film, rather can
be digitized, subject to image enhancement, and finally distributed on
computer networks. Data from several images can be combined to render
three-dimensional representation of organs on graphical workstations. Dr.
Moshfeghi indicated there was significant research in the area of image
interpretation such as automatic detection of tumors.
In summary the conference provided an opportunity for professionals and
researchers to present their work, and exchange ideas and views. An informal
dinner gathering after the first day provided a relaxed forum for further
discussion of issues raised during the presentations. In the concluding
phase of conference, the floor was opened to an open debate on what needs to
be done and directions to be taken in the future. The only unfortunate part
of the conference was that none of the three speakers from Iran were granted
visa to attend and give their presentations.
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