OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
A Preliminary Study for the development of an Early Method for the Measurement in Function Points of a Software Product
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2004
Year: 2004

The Function Points Analysis (FPA) of A.J. Albrecht is a method to determine the functional size of software products. The International Function Point Users Group, (IFPUG), establishes the FPA like a standard in the software functional size measurement. The IFPUG [3] [4] method follows the Albrecht's method and incorporates in its succesive versions modifications to the rules and hints with the intention of improving it [7]. The required documentation level to apply the method is the functional specification which corresponds to level I in the Rudolph's clasification [8]. This documentation is avalaible with some difficulty for those companies which are dedicated to develop software for third parties when they have to prepare the appropiate budget for this development. Then, we face the need of developing an early method [6] [9] for measuring the functional size of a software product that we will name to abbreviate it Early Method or EFPM (Early Function Point Method). The required documentation to apply the EFPM would be the User Requirements or some analogous documentations. This is a part of a research work now in process in Oviedo University. In this article we only show the following, results: From the measurements of a set of projects using the IFPUG method v. 4.1 we obtain the linear correlation coefficients between the total number of Function Points for each project and the counters of the ILFs number, ILFs+EIFs number and EIs+EOs+EQs number. Using the preliminary results we compute the regression functions. This results we will allow us to determine the factors to be considered in the development of EFPM and to estimate the function points.
Alchemi: A .NET-based Grid Computing Framework and its Integration into Global Grids
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2004
Year: 2004

Computational grids that couple geographically distributed resources are becoming the de-facto computing platform for solving large-scale problems in science, engineering, and commerce. Software to enable grid computing has been primarily written for Unix-class operating systems, thus severely limiting the ability to effectively utilize the computing resources of the vast majority of desktop computers i.e. those running variants of the Microsoft Windows operating system. Addressing Windows-based grid computing is particularly important from the software industry's viewpoint where interest in grids is emerging rapidly. Microsoft's .NET Framework has become near-ubiquitous for implementing commercial distributed systems for Windows-based platforms, positioning it as the ideal platform for grid computing in this context. In this paper we present Alchemi, a .NET-based grid computing framework that provides the runtime machinery and programming environment required to construct desktop grids and develop grid applications. It allows flexible application composition by supporting an object-oriented grid application programming model in addition to a grid job model. Cross-platform support is provided via a web services interface and a flexible execution model supports dedicated and non-dedicated (voluntary) execution by grid nodes.
A Numerical Example on the Principles of Stochastic Discrimination
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2004
Year: 2004

Studies on ensemble methods for classification suffer from the difficulty of modeling the complementary strengths of the components. Kleinberg's theory of stochastic discrimination (SD) addresses this rigorously via mathematical notions of enrichment, uniformity, and projectability of an ensemble. We explain these concepts via a very simple numerical example that captures the basic principles of the SD theory and method. We focus on a fundamental symmetry in point set covering that is the key observation leading to the foundation of the theory. We believe a better understanding of the SD method will lead to developments of better tools for analyzing other ensemble methods.
Redundancy and Robustness of the AS-level Internet topology and its models
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2004
Year: 2004

A comparison between the topological properties of the measured Internet topology, at the autonomous system level (AS graph), and the equivalent graphs generated by two different power law topology generators is presented. Only one of the synthetic generators reproduces the tier connectivity of the AS graph.
Computational complexity and simulation of rare events of Ising spin glasses
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2004
Year: 2004

We discuss the computational complexity of random 2D Ising spin glasses, which represent an interesting class of constraint satisfaction problems for black box optimization. Two extremal cases are considered: (1) the +/- J spin glass, and (2) the Gaussian spin glass. We also study a smooth transition between these two extremal cases. The computational complexity of all studied spin glass systems is found to be dominated by rare events of extremely hard spin glass samples. We show that complexity of all studied spin glass systems is closely related to Frechet extremal value distribution. In a hybrid algorithm that combines the hierarchical Bayesian optimization algorithm (hBOA) with a deterministic bit-flip hill climber, the number of steps performed by both the global searcher (hBOA) and the local searcher follow Frechet distributions. Nonetheless, unlike in methods based purely on local search, the parameters of these distributions confirm good scalability of hBOA with local search. We further argue that standard performance measures for optimization algorithms--such as the average number of evaluations until convergence--can be misleading. Finally, our results indicate that for highly multimodal constraint satisfaction problems, such as Ising spin glasses, recombination-based search can provide qualitatively better results than mutation-based search.
Memory As A Monadic Control Construct In Problem-Solving
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2004
Year: 2004

Recent advances in programming languages study and design have established a standard way of grounding computational systems representation in category theory. These formal results led to a better understanding of issues of control and side-effects in functional and imperative languages. This framework can be successfully applied to the investigation of the performance of Artificial Intelligence (AI) inference and cognitive systems. In this paper, we delineate a categorical formalisation of memory as a control structure driving performance in inference systems. Abstracting away control mechanisms from three widely used representations of memory in cognitive systems (scripts, production rules and clusters) we explain how categorical triples capture the interaction between learning and problem-solving.
The pre-history of quantum computation
Venue: arXiv cs.GL 2004
Year: 2004

The main ideas behind developments in the theory and technology of quantum computation were formulated in the late 1970s and early 1980s by two physicists in the West and a mathematician in the former Soviet Union. It is not generally known in the West that the subject has roots in the Russian technical literature. The author hopes to present as impartial a synthesis as possible of the early history of thought on this subject. The role of reversible and irreversible computational processes is examined briefly as it relates to the origins of quantum computing and the so-called Information Paradox in physics.
Transformation Rules for Locally Stratified Constraint Logic Programs
Venue: arXiv cs.PL 2004
Year: 2004

We propose a set of transformation rules for constraint logic programs with negation. We assume that every program is locally stratified and, thus, it has a unique perfect model. We give sufficient conditions which ensure that the proposed set of transformation rules preserves the perfect model of the programs. Our rules extend in some respects the rules for logic programs and constraint logic programs already considered in the literature and, in particular, they include a rule for unfolding a clause with respect to a negative literal.
Lexical Base as a Compressed Language Model of the World (on the material of the Ukrainian language)
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2004
Year: 2004

In the article the fact is verified that the list of words selected by formal statistical methods (frequency and functional genre unrestrictedness) is not a conglomerate of non-related words. It creates a system of interrelated items and it can be named "lexical base of language". This selected list of words covers all the spheres of human activities. To verify this statement the invariant synoptical scheme common for ideographic dictionaries of different language was determined.
The role of behavior modifiers in representation development
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2004
Year: 2004

We address the problem of the development of representations and their relationship to the environment. We study a software agent which develops in a network a representation of its simple environment which captures and integrates the relationships between agent and environment through a closure mechanism. The inclusion of a variable behavior modifier allows better representation development. This can be confirmed with an internal description of the closure mechanism, and with an external description of the properties of the representation network.
Polymorphic lemmas and definitions in Lambda Prolog and Twelf
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2004
Year: 2004

Lambda Prolog is known to be well-suited for expressing and implementing logics and inference systems. We show that lemmas and definitions in such logics can be implemented with a great economy of expression. We encode a higher-order logic using an encoding that maps both terms and types of the object logic (higher-order logic) to terms of the metalanguage (Lambda Prolog). We discuss both the Terzo and Teyjus implementations of Lambda Prolog. We also encode the same logic in Twelf and compare the features of these two metalanguages for our purposes.
Extending the SDSS Batch Query System to the National Virtual Observatory Grid
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2004
Year: 2004

The Sloan Digital Sky Survey science database is approaching 2TB. While the vast majority of queries normally execute in seconds or minutes, this interactive execution time can be disproportionately increased by a small fraction of queries that take hours or days to run; either because they require non-index scans of the largest tables or because they request very large result sets. In response to this, we added a multi-queue job submission and tracking system. The transfer of very large result sets from queries over the network is another serious problem. Statistics suggested that much of this data transfer is unnecessary; users would prefer to store results locally in order to allow further cross matching and filtering. To allow local analysis, we implemented a system that gives users their own personal database (MyDB) at the portal site. Users may transfer data to their MyDB, and then perform further analysis before extracting it to their own machine. We intend to extend the MyDB and asynchronous query ideas to multiple NVO nodes. This implies development, in a distributed manner, of several features, which have been demonstrated for a single node in the SDSS Batch Query System (CasJobs). The generalization of asynchronous queries necessitates some form of MyDB storage as well as workflow tracking services on each node and coordination strategies among nodes.
The World Wide Telescope: An Archetype for Online Science
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2004
Year: 2004

Most scientific data will never be directly examined by scientists; rather it will be put into online databases where it will be analyzed and summarized by computer programs. Scientists increasingly see their instruments through online scientific archives and analysis tools, rather than examining the raw data. Today this analysis is primarily driven by scientists asking queries, but scientific archives are becoming active databases that self-organize and recognize interesting and anomalous facts as data arrives. In some fields, data from many different archives can be cross-correlated to produce new insights. Astronomy presents an excellent example of these trends; and, federating Astronomy archives presents interesting challenges for computer scientists.
The Sloan Digital Sky Survey Science Archive: Migrating a Multi-Terabyte Astronomical Archive from Object to Relational DBMS
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2004
Year: 2004

The Sloan Digital Sky Survey Science Archive is the first in a series of multi-Terabyte digital archives in Astronomy and other data-intensive sciences. To facilitate data mining in the SDSS archive, we adapted a commercial database engine and built specialized tools on top of it. Originally we chose an object-oriented database management system due to its data organization capabilities, platform independence, query performance and conceptual fit to the data. However, after using the object database for the first couple of years of the project, it soon began to fall short in terms of its query support and data mining performance. This was as much due to the inability of the database vendor to respond our demands for features and bug fixes as it was due to their failure to keep up with the rapid improvements in hardware performance, particularly faster RAID disk systems. In the end, we were forced to abandon the object database and migrate our data to a relational database. We describe below the technical issues that we faced with the object database and how and why we migrated to relational technology.
Uniform Proofs of Order Independence for Various Strategy Elimination Procedures
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2004
Year: 2004

We provide elementary and uniform proofs of order independence for various strategy elimination procedures for finite strategic games, both for dominance by pure and by mixed strategies. The proofs follow the same pattern and focus on the structural properties of the dominance relations. They rely on Newman's Lemma established in 1942 and related results on the abstract reduction systems.
An Application of Rational Trees in a Logic Programming Interpreter for a Procedural Language
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2004
Year: 2004

We describe here a simple application of rational trees to the implementation of an interpreter for a procedural language written in a logic programming language. This is possible in languages designed to support rational trees (such as Prolog II and its descendants), but also in traditional Prolog, whose data structures are initially based on Herbrand terms, but in which implementations often omit the occurs check needed to avoid the creation of infinite data structures. We provide code implementing two interpreters, one of which needs non-occurs-check unification, which makes it faster (and more economic). We provide experimental data supporting this, and we argue that rational trees are interesting enough as to receive thorough support inside the language.
Tournament versus Fitness Uniform Selection
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2004
Year: 2004

In evolutionary algorithms a critical parameter that must be tuned is that of selection pressure. If it is set too low then the rate of convergence towards the optimum is likely to be slow. Alternatively if the selection pressure is set too high the system is likely to become stuck in a local optimum due to a loss of diversity in the population. The recent Fitness Uniform Selection Scheme (FUSS) is a conceptually simple but somewhat radical approach to addressing this problem - rather than biasing the selection towards higher fitness, FUSS biases selection towards sparsely populated fitness levels. In this paper we compare the relative performance of FUSS with the well known tournament selection scheme on a range of problems.
Generating connected acyclic digraphs uniformly at random
Venue: arXiv cs.DM 2004
Year: 2004

We describe a simple algorithm based on a Markov chain process to generate simply connected acyclic directed graphs over a fixed set of vertices. This algorithm is an extension of a previous one, designed to generate acyclic digraphs, non necessarily connected.
Delimited continuations in natural language: quantification and polarity sensitivity
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2004
Year: 2004

Making a linguistic theory is like making a programming language: one typically devises a type system to delineate the acceptable utterances and a denotational semantics to explain observations on their behavior. Via this connection, the programming language concept of delimited continuations can help analyze natural language phenomena such as quantification and polarity sensitivity. Using a logical metalanguage whose syntax includes control operators and whose semantics involves evaluation order, these analyses can be expressed in direct style rather than continuation-passing style, and these phenomena can be thought of as computational side effects.
Tabular Parsing
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2004
Year: 2004

This is a tutorial on tabular parsing, on the basis of tabulation of nondeterministic push-down automata. Discussed are Earley's algorithm, the Cocke-Kasami-Younger algorithm, tabular LR parsing, the construction of parse trees, and further issues.
Tycoon: A Distributed Market-based Resource Allocation System
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2004
Year: 2004

P2P clusters like the Grid and PlanetLab enable in principle the same statistical multiplexing efficiency gains for computing as the Internet provides for networking. The key unsolved problem is resource allocation. Existing solutions are not economically efficient and require high latency to acquire resources. We designed and implemented Tycoon, a market based distributed resource allocation system based on an Auction Share scheduling algorithm. Preliminary results show that Tycoon achieves low latency and high fairness while providing incentives for truth-telling on the part of strategic users.
Parrondo's games with chaotic switching
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2004
Year: 2004

This paper investigates the different effects of chaotic switching on Parrondo's games, as compared to random and periodic switching. The rate of winning of Parrondo's games with chaotic switching depends on coefficient(s) defining the chaotic generator, initial conditions of the chaotic sequence and the proportion of Game A played. Maximum rate of winning can be obtained with all the above mentioned factors properly set, and this occurs when chaotic switching approaches periodic behavior.
The Effect of Faults on Network Expansion
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2004
Year: 2004

In this paper we study the problem of how resilient networks are to node faults. Specifically, we investigate the question of how many faults a network can sustain so that it still contains a large (i.e. linear-sized) connected component that still has approximately the same expansion as the original fault-free network. For this we apply a pruning technique which culls away parts of the faulty network which have poor expansion. This technique can be applied to both adversarial faults and to random faults. For adversarial faults we prove that for every network with expansion alpha, a large connected component with basically the same expansion as the original network exists for up to a constant times alpha n faults. This result is tight in the sense that every graph G of size n and uniform expansion alpha(.), i.e. G has an expansion of alpha(n) and every subgraph G' of size m of G has an expansion of O(alpha(m)), can be broken into sublinear components with omega(alpha(n) n) faults. For random faults we observe that the situation is significantly different, because in this case the expansion of a graph only gives a very weak bound on its resilience to random faults. More specifically, there are networks of uniform expansion O(sqrt{n}) that are resilient against a constant fault probability but there are also networks of uniform expansion Omega(1/log n) that are not resilient against a O(1/log n) fault probability. Thus, a different parameter is needed. For this we introduce the span of a graph which allows us to determine the maximum fault probability in a much better way than the expansion can. We use the span to show the first known results for the effect of random faults on the expansion of d-dimensional meshes.
Extraction of topological features from communication network topological patterns using self-organizing feature maps
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2004
Year: 2004

Different classes of communication network topologies and their representation in the form of adjacency matrix and its eigenvalues are presented. A self-organizing feature map neural network is used to map different classes of communication network topological patterns. The neural network simulation results are reported.
A note on dimensions of polynomial size circuits
Venue: arXiv cs.CC 2004
Year: 2004

In this paper, we use resource-bounded dimension theory to investigate polynomial size circuits. We show that for every $i\geq 0$, $\Ppoly$ has $i$th order scaled $\pthree$-strong dimension 0. We also show that $\Ppoly^\io$ has $\pthree$-dimension 1/2, $\pthree$-strong dimension 1. Our results improve previous measure results of Lutz (1992) and dimension results of Hitchcock and Vinodchandran (2004).
Model checking for Process Rewrite Systems and a class of action--based regular properties
Venue: arXiv cs.OH 2004
Year: 2004

We consider the model checking problem for Process Rewrite Systems (PRSs), an infinite-state formalism (non Turing-powerful) which subsumes many common models such as Pushdown Processes and Petri Nets. PRSs can be adopted as formal models for programs with dynamic creation and synchronization of concurrent processes, and with recursive procedures. The model-checking problem for PRSs and action-based linear temporal logic (ALTL) is undecidable. However, decidability for some interesting fragment of ALTL remains an open question. In this paper we state decidability results concerning generalized acceptance properties about infinite derivations (infinite term rewriting) in PRSs. As a consequence, we obtain decidability of the model-checking (restricted to infinite runs) for PRSs and a meaningful fragment of ALTL.
Quantum Computers
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2004
Year: 2004

This research paper gives an overview of quantum computers - description of their operation, differences between quantum and silicon computers, major construction problems of a quantum computer and many other basic aspects. No special scientific knowledge is necessary for the reader.
Is Neural Network a Reliable Forecaster on Earth? A MARS Query!
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2004
Year: 2004

Long-term rainfall prediction is a challenging task especially in the modern world where we are facing the major environmental problem of global warming. In general, climate and rainfall are highly non-linear phenomena in nature exhibiting what is known as the butterfly effect. While some regions of the world are noticing a systematic decrease in annual rainfall, others notice increases in flooding and severe storms. The global nature of this phenomenon is very complicated and requires sophisticated computer modeling and simulation to predict accurately. In this paper, we report a performance analysis for Multivariate Adaptive Regression Splines (MARS)and artificial neural networks for one month ahead prediction of rainfall. To evaluate the prediction efficiency, we made use of 87 years of rainfall data in Kerala state, the southern part of the Indian peninsula situated at latitude -longitude pairs (8o29'N - 76o57' E). We used an artificial neural network trained using the scaled conjugate gradient algorithm. The neural network and MARS were trained with 40 years of rainfall data. For performance evaluation, network predicted outputs were compared with the actual rainfall data. Simulation results reveal that MARS is a good forecasting tool and performed better than the considered neural network.