OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Users Guide for SnadiOpt: A Package Adding Automatic Differentiation to Snopt
Venue: arXiv cs.MS 2001
Year: 2001

SnadiOpt is a package that supports the use of the automatic differentiation package ADIFOR with the optimization package Snopt. Snopt is a general-purpose system for solving optimization problems with many variables and constraints. It minimizes a linear or nonlinear function subject to bounds on the variables and sparse linear or nonlinear constraints. It is suitable for large-scale linear and quadratic programming and for linearly constrained optimization, as well as for general nonlinear programs. The method used by Snopt requires the first derivatives of the objective and constraint functions to be available. The SnadiOpt package allows users to avoid the time-consuming and error-prone process of evaluating and coding these derivatives. Given Fortran code for evaluating only the values of the objective and constraints, SnadiOpt automatically generates the code for evaluating the derivatives and builds the relevant Snopt input files and sparse data structures.
Software Toolkit for Building Embedded and Distributed Knowledge-based Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2001
Year: 2001

The paper discusses the basic principles and the architecture of the software toolkit for constructing knowledge-based systems which can be used cooperatively over computer networks and also embedded into larger software systems in different ways. Presented architecture is based on frame knowledge representation and production rules, which also allows to interface high-level programming languages and relational databases by exposing corresponding classes or database tables as frames. Frames located on the remote computers can also be transparently accessed and used in inference, and the dynamic knowledge for specific frames can also be transferred over the network. The issues of implementation of such a system are addressed, which use Java programming language, CORBA and XML for external knowledge representation. Finally, some applications of the toolkit are considered, including e-business approach to knowledge sharing, intelligent web behaviours, etc.
Transformations of CCP programs
Venue: arXiv cs.PL 2001
Year: 2001

We introduce a transformation system for concurrent constraint programming (CCP). We define suitable applicability conditions for the transformations which guarantee that the input/output CCP semantics is preserved also when distinguishing deadlocked computations from successful ones and when considering intermediate results of (possibly) non-terminating computations. The system allows us to optimize CCP programs while preserving their intended meaning: In addition to the usual benefits that one has for sequential declarative languages, the transformation of concurrent programs can also lead to the elimination of communication channels and of synchronization points, to the transformation of non-deterministic computations into deterministic ones, and to the crucial saving of computational space. Furthermore, since the transformation system preserves the deadlock behavior of programs, it can be used for proving deadlock freeness of a given program wrt a class of queries. To this aim it is sometimes sufficient to apply our transformations and to specialize the resulting program wrt the given queries in such a way that the obtained program is trivially deadlock free.
From Neel to NPC: Colouring Small Worlds
Venue: arXiv cs.CC 2001
Year: 2001

In this note, we present results for the colouring problem on small world graphs created by rewiring square, triangular, and two kinds of cubic (with coordination numbers 5 and 6) lattices. As the rewiring parameter p tends to 1, we find the expected crossover to the behaviour of random graphs with corresponding connectivity. However, for the cubic lattices there is a region near p=0 for which the graphs are colourable. This could in principle be used as an additional heuristic for solving real world colouring or scheduling problems. Small worlds with connectivity 5 and p ~ 0.1 provide an interesting ensemble of graphs whose colourability is hard to determine. For square lattices, we get good data collapse plotting the fraction of colourable graphs against the rescaled parameter parameter $p N^{-ν}$ with $ν= 1.35$. No such collapse can be obtained for the data from lattices with coordination number 5 or 6.
Yet another zeta function and learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2001
Year: 2001

We study the convergence speed of the batch learning algorithm, and compare its speed to that of the memoryless learning algorithm and of learning with memory (as analyzed in joint work with N. Komarova). We obtain precise results and show in particular that the batch learning algorithm is never worse than the memoryless learning algorithm (at least asymptotically). Its performance vis-a-vis learning with full memory is less clearcut, and depends on certainprobabilistic assumptions. These results necessitate theintroduction of the moment zeta function of a probability distribution and the study of some of its properties.
Probabilistic asynchronous pi-calculus
Venue: arXiv cs.PL 2001
Year: 2001

We propose an extension of the asynchronous pi-calculus with a notion of random choice. We define an operational semantics which distinguishes between probabilistic choice, made internally by the process, and nondeterministic choice, made externally by an adversary scheduler. This distinction will allow us to reason about the probabilistic correctness of algorithms under certain schedulers. We show that in this language we can solve the electoral problem, which was proved not possible in the asynchronous $π$-calculus. Finally, we show an implementation of the probabilistic asynchronous pi-calculus in a Java-like language.
The Effect of Native Language on Internet Usage
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2001
Year: 2001

Our goal is to distinguish between the following two hypotheses: (A) The Internet will remain disproportionately in English and will, over time, cause more people to learn English as second language and thus solidify the role of English as a global language. This outcome will prevail even though there are more native Chinese and Spanish speakers than there are native English speakers. (B) As the Internet matures, it will more accurately reflect the native languages spoken around the world (perhaps weighted by purchasing power) and will not promote English as a global language. English's "early lead" on the web is more likely to persist if those who are not native English speakers frequently access the large number of English language web sites that are currently available. In that case, many existing web sites will have little incentive to develop non-English versions of their sites, and new sites will tend to gravitate towards English. The key empirical question, therefore, is whether individuals whose native language is not English use the Web, or certain types of Web sites, less than do native English speakers. In order to examine this issue empirically, we employ a unique data set on Internet use at the individual level in Canada from Media Metrix. Canada provides an ideal setting to examine this issue because English is one of the two official languages. Our preliminary results suggest that English web sites are not a barrier to Internet use for French-speaking Quebecois. These preliminary results are consistent with the scenario in which the Internet will promote English as a global language.
Communications Convergence, Spectrum Use and Regulatory Constraints, Or Property Rights, Flexible Spectrum Use and Satellite v. Terrestrial Uses and Users
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2001
Year: 2001

As far as many consumers and businessmen and women are concerned, increasingly wireline and wireless services, including those provided by terrestrial and satellite systems, are considered to be substitutes and sometimes complements, regardless of the laws and regulations applicable to them. At the same time, many writers and even government agencies (such as the FCC) have suggested that users of the spectrum should be given more property-like rights in the use of the spectrum and at a minimum should be given much more flexibility in how they may use the spectrum. Two recent developments have important implications with respect to "convergence," spectrum property rights and flexible use of the spectrum. The first development involves several proposals to provide terrestrial wireless services within spectrum in use or planned to be used to provide satellite services. The second development is the passage of the 2000 ORBIT Act which specifically forbids the use of license auctions to select among mutually exclusive applicants to provide international or global satellite communications service. The purpose of this paper is to discuss some of the questions raised by these two events, but not necessarily to provide definitive answers or solutions.
Competing DNS Roots: Creative Destruction or Just Plain Destruction?
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2001
Year: 2001

The Internet Domain Name System (DNS) is a hierarchical name space that enables the assignment of unique, mnemonic identifiers to Internet hosts and the consistent mapping of these names to IP addresses. The root of the domain name system is the top of the hierarchy and is currently managed by a quasi-private centralized regulatory authority, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). This paper identifies and discusses the economic and policy issues raised by competing DNS roots. The paper provides a precise definition of root-competition and shows that multiple roots are a species of standards competition, in which network externalities play a major role. The paper performs a structural analysis of the different forms that competing DNS roots can take and their effects on end-user compatibility. It then explores the policy implications of the various forms of competition. The thesis of the paper is that root competition is caused by a severe disjunction between the demand for and supply of top-level domain names. ICANN has authorized a tiny number of new top-level domains (7) and subjected their operators to excruciatingly slow and expensive contractual negotiations. The growth of alternate DNS roots is an attempt to bypass that bottleneck. The paper arrives at the policy conclusion that competition among DNS roots should be permitted and is a healthy outlet for inefficiency or abuses of power by the dominant root administrator.
Learning class-to-class selectional preferences
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2001
Year: 2001

Selectional preference learning methods have usually focused on word-to-class relations, e.g., a verb selects as its subject a given nominal class. This papers extends previous statistical models to class-to-class preferences, and presents a model that learns selectional preferences for classes of verbs. The motivation is twofold: different senses of a verb may have different preferences, and some classes of verbs can share preferences. The model is tested on a word sense disambiguation task which uses subject-verb and object-verb relationships extracted from a small sense-disambiguated corpus.
Knowledge Sources for Word Sense Disambiguation
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2001
Year: 2001

Two kinds of systems have been defined during the long history of WSD: principled systems that define which knowledge types are useful for WSD, and robust systems that use the information sources at hand, such as, dictionaries, light-weight ontologies or hand-tagged corpora. This paper tries to systematize the relation between desired knowledge types and actual information sources. We also compare the results for a wide range of algorithms that have been evaluated on a common test setting in our research group. We hope that this analysis will help change the shift from systems based on information sources to systems based on knowledge sources. This study might also shed some light on semi-automatic acquisition of desired knowledge types from existing resources.
Testing for Mathematical Lineation in Jim Crace's "Quarantine" and T. S. Eliot's "Four Quartets"
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2001
Year: 2001

The mathematical distinction between prose and verse may be detected in writings that are not apparently lineated, for example in T. S. Eliot's "Burnt Norton", and Jim Crace's "Quarantine". In this paper we offer comments on appropriate statistical methods for such work, and also on the nature of formal innovation in these two texts. Additional remarks are made on the roots of lineation as a metrical form, and on the prose-verse continuum.
Analyzing ENUM Service and Administration from the Bottom Up: The addressing system for IP telephony and beyond
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2001
Year: 2001

ENUM creates many new market opportunities and raises several important policy issues related to the implementation and administration of the ENUM database and services. Recent World Telecommunications Policy Forum 2001 dealt with the emergence of ENUM as an important numbering issue of IP telephony. This paper prepares some important emerging issues of ENUM administration and policy by taking an empirical research approach from the bottom up. We will identify potential key ENUM services, and estimating the size of the service market opportunities created by the availability of PSTN-IP addressing and mapping mechanisms, particularly in the context of IP telephony. Also, we analyze the possible administrative models and relationship scenarios among different ENUM players such as Registry(ies), Registrars, Telephone Service Providers, ENUM Application Service Providers, etc. Then, we will assess the effects of various administrative model architectures of ENUM service by looking at the market opportunities and motivations of the players. From the empirical findings, we will draw the implications on transactions among different kinds of ENUM service providers. Finally, the results of the model analysis will be used for the discussion of policy related issues around the ENUM and IP telephony services. Keywords: IP Telephony, ENUM, Internet Policy, Numbering and Addressing System, Service and Market Study, Administration Model, Empirical Market Study.
Signing Initiative Petitions Online: Possibilities, Problems and Prospects
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2001
Year: 2001

Many people expect the Internet to change American politics, most likely in the direction of increasing direct citizen participation and forcing government officials to respond more quickly to voter concerns. A recent California initiative with these objectives would authorize use of encrypted digital signatures over the Internet to qualify candidates, initiatives, and other ballot measures. Proponents of Internet signature gathering say it will significantly lower the cost of qualifying initiatives and thereby reduce the influence of organized, well-financed interest groups. They also believe it will increase both public participation in the political process and public understanding about specific measures. However, opponents question whether Internet security is adequate to prevent widespread abuse and argue that the measure would create disadvantages for those who lack access to the Internet. Beyond issues of security, cost, and access lie larger questions about the effects of Internet signature gathering on direct democracy. Would it encourage greater and more informed public participation in the political process? Or would it flood voters with ballot measures and generally worsen current problems with the initiative process itself? Because we lack good data on these questions, answers to them today are largely conjectural. We can be fairly sure, however, that Internet petition signing, like Internet voting, will have unintended consequences.
A Framework for Assessing Universal Service Obligations: A Developing Country Perspective
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2001
Year: 2001

A critical element of most national telecom policy objectives is advancing universal service. In a multi-operator context, this is usually operationalized through Universal Service Obligations (USO), by which various operators are mandated to provide a part of their services to rural areas or to high cost to serve customers at "affordable" prices. This paper highlights the various issues in USO from a developing country perspective. The first part of this paper gives an overview of USO practices and issues. The second part reviews the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India's recommendations on USO cost estimation. In the third part, the paper analyzes characteristics of rural exchanges with a view to evolve a framework for assessing USO. This framework is applicable to developing countries as the study carried out in this paper is in the context of a developing country characterized by low telecom penetration and non-availability of data with regulators.
Ideological and Policy Origins of the Internet, 1957-1969
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2001
Year: 2001

This paper examines the ideological and policy consensus that shaped computing research funded by the Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO) within the Department of Defense's Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA). This historical case study of the period between Sputnik and the creation of the ARPANET shows how military, scientific, and academic values shaped the institutions and relations of a foundational period in the creation of the Internet. The paper probes three areas: the ideology of the science policy consensus, the institutional philosophy of IPTO under J. C. R. Licklider, and the ways that this consensus and philosophy shaped IPTO research in the period leading to the creation of the ARPANET. By examining the intellectual, cultural, and institutional details of the consensus that governed IPTO research between 1957 and 1969, we can understand the ways that these values defined the range of possibilities for network computing. The influence of the social values expressed by these actors was decisive: that government had an obligation to support a broad base of scientific research to promote both the public good and the national defense; that IPTO-sponsored computing research would accomplish both military and scientific objectives; and that IPTO could leverage its power within this consensus to create a network to share resources and unite researchers over geographical distance. A greater awareness of the ways that "consensus" worked in this period -- the "pre-history" of the Internet -- provides a richer context for evaluating the unique features of the Internet, such as its open architecture, collegial culture, and standards-based governance.
Bringing the Internet to Schools: US and EU policies
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2001
Year: 2001

The Internet is changing rapidly the way people around the world communicate, learn, and work. Yet the tremendous benefits of the Internet are not shared equally by all. One way to close the gap of the "digital divide" is to ensure Internet access to all schools from an early age. While both the USA and EU have embraced the promotion of Internet access to schools, the two have decided to finance it differently. This paper shows that the main costs of Internet access to schools are not communications-related (telecommunications and Internet services) but rather non-communications-related (hardware, educational training, software). This paper goes on to discuss whether the identified costs should be financed in any way by the universal service obligations funded by the telecommunications industry/sector/consumers (sector specific) or a general governmental budget (educational budget).
CLP Approaches to 2D Angle Placements
Venue: arXiv cs.PL 2001
Year: 2001

The paper presents two CLP approaches to 2D angle placements, implemented in CHIP v.5.3. The first is based on the classical (rectangular) cumulative global constraint, the second on the new trapezoidal cumulative global constraint. Both approaches are applied to a specific presented.
Out of the Loop: Problems in the development of next generation community networks
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2001
Year: 2001

Drawing on an ongoing longitudinal research study, we discuss problems in the development of five next generation community networking projects in central New York. The projects were funded under a state program to diffuse broadband technologies in economically depressed areas of the state. The networks are technologically complex and entail high costs for subscribers. The political economy of the development process has biased the subscriber base toward the resource rich and away from the resource poor, and toward tried-and-tested uses like Internet and intra-organizational connectivity and away from community-oriented uses. These trends raise troubling questions about network ontology and function, and about the relation between the network and its physical host community. The need for appropriate social policy, and new planning practices, is argued to effect desired change.
Coase's Penguin, or Linux and the Nature of the Firm
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2001
Year: 2001

The paper explains why open source software is an instance of a potentially broader phenomenon. Specifically, I suggest that nonproprietary peer-production of information and cultural materials will likely be a ubiquitous phenomenon in a pervasively networked society. I describe a number of such enterprises, at various stages of the information production value chain. These enterprises suggest that incentives to engage in nonproprietary peer production are trivial as long as enough contributors can be organized to contribute. This implies that the limit on the reach of peer production efforts is the modularity, granularity, and cost of integration of a good produced, not its total cost. I also suggest reasons to think that peer-production can have systematic advantages over both property-based markets and corporate managerial hierarchies as a method of organizing information and cultural production in a networked environment, because it is a better mechanism for clearing information about human capital available to work on existing information inputs to produce new outputs, and because it permits largers sets of agents to use larger sets of resources where there are increasing returns to the scale of both the set of agents and the set of resources available for work on projects. As capital costs and communications costs decrease in importance as factors of information production, the relative advantage of peer production in clearing human capital becomes more salient.
Pricing and Network Externalities in Peer-to-Peer Communications Networks (Draft)
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2001
Year: 2001

This paper analyzes the pricing of transit traffic in wireless peer-to-peer networks using the concepts of direct and indirect network externalities. We first establish that without any pricing mechanism, congestion externalities overwhelm other network effects in a wireless data network. We show that peering technology will mitigate the congestion and allow users to take advantage of more the positive network externalities. However, without pricing, the peering equilibrium breaks down just like a bucket brigade made up of free-riding agents. With pricing and perfect competition, a peering equilibrium is possible and allows many more users on the network at the same time. However, the congestion externality is still a problem, so peering organized through a club may be the best solution.