Textual Commands Research Articles

Automated mapping of large binary objects using primitive fragment type classification

Security analysts, reverse engineers, and forensic analysts are regularly faced with large binary objects, such as executable and data files, process memory dumps, disk images and hibernation files, often Gigabytes or larger in size and frequently of unknown, suspect, or poorly documented structure. Binary objects of this magnitude far exceed the capabilities of traditional hex editors and textual command line tools, frustrating analysis. This paper studies automated means to map these large binary objects by classifying regions using a multi-dimensional, information-theoretic approach. We make several contributions including the introduction of the binary mapping metaphor and its associated applications, as well as techniques for type classification of low-level binary fragments. We validate the efficacy of our approach through a series of classification experiments and an analytic case study. Our results indicate that automated mapping can help speed manual and automated analysis activities and can be generalized to incorporate many low-level fragment classification techniques.

A Method for Acquiring Body Movement Verbs for a Humanoid Robot through Physical Interaction with Humans

In this paper, we propose a language grounding method that relates verbs which imply body manipulation to motor angle patterns in a humanoid robot to make robots more entertaining. In established methods, verbs are represented by statistical models based on trajectories or motor patterns of a trajector. In our method we use a novel representation model that has six features including both trajector-reference point relationships and the trajector's trajectory. By using this model, some verbs which do not depend on a trajectory, e.g. "move the right hand close to the left hand." are represented more adequately. In our language grounding method a humanoid robot generates abstract verb meanings independent of context. As input it uses sets of a user input textual command and a motor pattern. The motor pattern is taught using direct physical feedback resembling playing with child. We implemented the algorithm in a humanoid robot and conducted a verb acquisition experiment. As a result, four problematic verbs, "place-on", "move-close-to", "move-away-from", and "touch-with" were acquired correctly.

Book Review: The Invisible Constitution, by Laurence H. Tribe

This is a brief review of Laurence H. Tribe's new book The Invisible Constitution, which is forthcoming in the Federalist Society's journal Engage. In this book, Tribe argues that the Constitution necessarily is composed not only of textual commands, but also of constitutional dark matter - principles and postulates that do not appear in the text but that have every bit as much weight, and are every bit as much part of the Constitution, as the text itself. I argue that Tribe's argument for the invisible Constitution is not simply a dig at textualism or originalism, all but the most wooden forms of which allow for some version of the invisible Constitution. Tribe's argument is mostly a careful and convincing one. But readers will rightly quarrel both with some of the specifics of Tribe's version of the invisible Constitution, and with his broader failure to explain why we should not accept only the most parsimonious version of an extratextual Constitution. Moreover, the most novel contribution of this book - its description of six modes of finding and interpreting the invisible Constitution - is not yet fully developed and is not especially persuasive as it currently stands. That said, Tribe's book is engaging at its best and may provoke useful discussion about the nature and boundaries of the Constitution.

Worthy Objects

This paper analyses Elizabeth Henrietta Macquarie's little-known 1809 account of her sea voyage to New South Wales, restoring her sea journal to the canon of travel writing. In recent analyses, nineteenth-century travel writing has been shorn of its pretence of disinterestedness, exposing the multiple and various connections between travel writing and imperial ideology, and between travel writing and a partial and deeply motivated language of aesthetics. The paper explores Macquarie's travel writing along these twin axes. This paper argues that the sense of self exposed in Macquarie's sea journal can not be dissociated from her place as a member of the British Protestant elite. Proceeding by way of a close reading of three moments of viewing recorded in the sea journal, the essay asks what formations of class, gender and subjectivity each scene of viewing encloses. The paper concludes by considering a countervailing textual impulse evident towards the end of her sea journal, linking the breakdown in Macquarie's textual command with her imminent arrival at her new colonial home.

Towards an adaptive natural language interface to command languages

Operating system command languages assist the user in executing commands for a significant number of common everyday tasks. On the other hand, the introduction of textual command languages for robots has provided the opportunity to perform some important functions that leadthrough programming cannot readily accomplish. However, such command languages assume the user to be expert enough to carry out a specific task in these application domains. On the contrary, a natural language interface to such command languages, apart from being able to be integrated into a future speech interface, can facilitate and broaden the use of these command languages to a larger audience. In this paper, advanced techniques are presented for an adaptive natural language interface that can (a) be portable to a large range of command languages, (b) handle even complex commands thanks to an embedded linguistic parser, and (c) be expandable and customizable by providing the casual user with the opportunity to specify some types of new words as well as the system developer with the ability to introduce new tasks in these application domains. Finally, to demonstrate the above techniques in practice, an example of their application to a Greek natural language interface to the MS-DOS operating system is given.

Visual system browser

The Visual System Browser is a tool for viewing the static structure of a software system in terms of trees representing the procedure calls. The focus in the browser's construction was on the ease of use and the flexibility of what can be seen. These two features encourage the user to view the system in many different ways, to "browse" through its call structure by creating a series of customized system views, and thus gradually build a solid understanding of its overall organization. Typical users are experienced programmers who wish to orient themselves within an unfamiliar software system. Since the use of the browser may be occasional, we have chosen a visual, direct-manipulation style of interface, which is easier to learn and retain than a textual command interface. The browser is written in VAX LISP™ and runs under the VMS operating system on a MicroVAX workstation. It currently browses LISP programs.

The text editor sam

AbstractSam is an interactive multi‐file text editor intended for bitmap displays. A textual command language supplements the mouse‐driven, cut‐and‐paste interface to make complex or repetitive editing tasks easy to specify. The language is characterized by the composition of regular expressions to describe the structure of the text being modified. The treatment of files as a database, with changes logged as atomic transactions, guides the implementation and makes a general ‘undo’ mechanism straightforward.Sam is implemented as two processes connected by a low‐bandwidth stream, one process handling the display and the other the editing algorithms. Therefore it can run with the display process in a bitmap terminal and the editor on a local host, with both processes on a bitmap‐equipped host, or with the display process in the terminal and the editor in a remote host. By suppressing the display process, it can even run without a bitmap terminal.