bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
A formal specification tool for distributed office systems
Authors: Saiedian Hossein , Unger Elizabeth A.
Published: April 2007

Office Automation (OA) is an approach to the new way of handling information in an office and as such there is no universally accepted definition for it. We have defined it as the body of knowledge that is concerned with the analysis, design, implementation, efficiency and application of processes that transform information in an office. The trend toward full office automation has been the result of dramatic fall in the cost of computer hardware and technological advances in the field of communications. The result has been to make interconnected computer systems and computer networks a viable and cost effective solution to many problems in the offices.The purpose of this paper is to address some of the important issues surrounding the construction of office systems and to describe the design principles of a formal specification methodology for office systems. In particular, we discuss the desired properties of a computational model upon which a specification methodology for office systems should be based. An overview of ABSL, an object-oriented specification methodology that we are currently developing is presented and the main ideas in this methodology are described.
Performance comparison of extendible hashing and linear hashing techniques
Authors: Rathi Ashok , Lu Huizhu , Hedrick G. E.
Published: April 2007

Based on seven assumptions, the following comparison factors are used to compare the performance of linear hashing with extendible hashing: 1. storage utilization; 2. average unsuccessful search cost; 3. average successful search cost; 4. split cost; 5. insertion cost; 6. number of overflow buckets. The simulation is conducted with the bucket sizes of 10, 20, and 50 for both hashing techniques. In order to observe their average behavior, the simulation uses 50,000 keys which have been generated randomly.According to our simulation results, extendible hashing has an advantage of 5% over linear hashing in terms of storage utilization. Successful search, unsuccessful search, and insertions are less costly in linear hashing. However, linear hashing requires a large overflow space to handle the overflow records. Simulation shows that approximately 10% of the space should be marked as overflow space in linear hashing.Directory size is a serious bottleneck in extendible hashing. Based on the simulation results, the authors recommend linear hashing when main memory is at a premium.
Timing comparisons of the householder QR transformations with rank-1 and rank-2 updates
Authors: Rolfe Timothy J.
Published: April 2007

The Householder QR transformation using rank-1 updates and the transformation using rank-2 updates are both O(

N
3

) with the same cubic coefficient. While the rank-1 implementation has the smaller quadratic coefficient, the rank-2 implementation in practice is the faster algorithm, the amount of speed-up varying with the computer. This speed-up is not purely the result of replacing SAXPY operations with double GAXPY ones.
Fast Givens goes slow in MATLAB
Authors: Genz Alan , Lin Zongli , Jones Charles , Luo Dali , Prenzel Thorsten
Published: April 2007

Numerical results show that a straightforward implementation in MATLAB of an algorithm for the Fast Givens QR Factorization of an
m
x
n
matrix takes more time than an implementation of an algorithm that uses ordinary Givens transformations. Results of timing experiments for various operations in MATLAB are reported and models are constructed to explain why the standard theoretical analysis based on flop counts does not account for the actual times for the algorithms.
Adequacy of checksum algorithms for computer virus detection
Authors: Varney Doug
Published: April 2007

Checksums, long used for random error detection in communications, is now being employed to detect changes for integrity purposes. For example, checksums are being used for the detection of computer viruses [POZ86]. The checksum algorithms for detecting random errors are not sufficient against an entity that wishes to "fool" the checksum mechanism. This entity wants to be able to insert a forgery in place of the original data such that an unsuspecting user does not realize the forgery has occurred. This paper describes checksum algorithms and features of checksum algorithms to deter this type of forgery.
The first annual large dense linear system survey
Authors: Edelman Alan
Published: April 2007

In the March 24, 1991 issue of NA Digest, I submitted a questionnaire asking who was solving large dense linear systems of equations. Based on the responses, nearly all large dense linear systems today arise from either the benchmarking of supercomputers or applications involving the influence of a two dimensional boundary on three dimensional space. Not surprisingly, the area of computational aerodynamics or aero-electromechanics represents an important commercial application requiring the solution of such systems. The largest unstructured matrix that has been factored using Gaussian Elimination was a complex matrix of size 55,296. The largest dense matrix solved on a Sun using an iterative method was a real matrix of size 20,000. It is unclear at this time whether dense methods are truly needed at all for huge matrices. It is intended to survey users every year with the hope of including more applications as I am made aware of them.
ADA software for teaching modern computer arithmetic
Authors: Bartholomew-Biggs M. C.
Published: April 2007

This paper describes three
Ada
packages which support the teaching of some recent and important ideas in numerical computation. The first is designed to enable students to write and use applications programs demonstrating the behaviour of floating point arithmetic with different precisions and roundings. It also underpins the other two packages which provide simple computational tools for
interval
arithmetic and for
accurate
arithmetic.
Mortality play
Authors: Armour Phillip G.
Published: April 2007

The cost of risk on software projects.
Online forums supporting grassroots participation in emergency preparedness and response
Authors: Palen Leysia , Hiltz Starr Roxanne , Liu Sophia B.
Published: April 2007

"When danger arises, the rule in normal situations is for people to help those next to them before they help themselves."
FAQs and figures
Authors: Notkin David
Published: April 2007

ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology (TOSEM) was founded in 1992 under the guidance of Rick Adrion as the charter Editor-in-Chief (EIC). Thompson ISI's Impact Factor rankings for 2005, the most recently published, ranks TOSEM second out of 79 journals in the software engineering category. The Impact Factor is a ratio of the number of citations in 2005 of a given journal compared to the journal's total articles for 2004 and 2003. In other words, Rick and his successors as EIC - Axel van Lamsweerde and Carlo Ghezzi - have taken TOSEM from zero to sixty in just 15 years. They didn't make this remarkable leap alone: they had help from ACM, from the exceptionally diligent editorial assistants, from the dedicated associate editors, and of course from the software engineering research community, in particular the reviewers and, even more, the authors.
Software engineering
Authors: Ellis Heidi
Published: April 2007

A much-needed book presenting the latest developments in software engineering education will be published in early 2008 by the IDEA Group, Inc. Titled
Software Engineering: Effective Teaching and Learning Approaches and Practices
, the book is edited by Heidi Ellis (Trinity College), Steven Demurjian (University of Connecticut), and Fernando Naveda (Rochester Institute of Technology). The book will contain contributions from approximately 20 software engineering educators from around the world and encompasses areas including student assessment and learning, innovative teaching methods, project-based software engineering, educational technology, professional practice and ethics, curriculum management and certification and licensing. To give you a taste of what is coming, tentative chapter titles include
Software Engineering Apprenticeship by Immersion, Managing the Intellectual Commons Associated with Academic Software Teams
, and
Professional Software Engineering Credentials: An International Perspective
.
Faster placement of hydrogens in protein structures by dynamic programming
Authors: Leaver-Fay Andrew , Liu Yuanxin , Snoeyink Jack , Wang Xueyi
Published: April 2007

M. Word and coauthors from the Richardsons' 3D Protein Structure laboratory at Duke University propose
dot scores
to measure interatomic interactions in molecular structures. Their program REDUCE uses these scores in a brute-force search to solve instances of the
NP
-hard problem of finding the optimal placement of hydrogen atoms in molecular structures determined by X-ray crystallography. We capture the central combinatorial optimization in the hydrogen placement problem with an abstraction that we call an interaction (hyper)graph. REDUCE's dot-based scoring function cannot be decomposed into the sum of pair interactions, but because the function is short ranged we are able to decompose it into the sum of single, pair, triple, and quadruple interactions that we represent by graph hyperedges. Almost every interaction graph we have observed has had a small treewidth. This fact allows us to replace the brute-force search by dynamic programming, giving speedups of nearly ten orders of magnitude. This dynamic programming has been incorporated into REDUCE and is available for download.
Supporting active learning and example based instruction with classroom technology
Authors: Anderson Richard , Anderson Ruth , Davis K. M. , Linnell Natalie , Prince Craig , Razmov Valentin
Published: April 2007

This paper describes an application of classroom technology in support of teaching through the use of examples and active learning techniques. Here we report on using Classroom Presenter, a Tablet PC based classroom interaction syst, in a senior level course in Algorithms -- a domain for which the instructor believes working on sample probls is critical to student learning in the classroom. The role of the technology was to integrate activities into the lecture so that students have the opportunity to work with concrete examples in class, while the instructor can collect and review student work in real time, incorporating selected student answers into the discussion. In this paper, we describe the pedagogical goals of the instructor, the types of activities used to achieve those goals, and the role that technology played in supporting those goals and activities. The contributions of the paper are in showing how classroom technology can be used to support pedagogical choices, as well as in phasizing the value of having clear pedagogical goals when incorporating a new technology in the classroom. We believe the application of technology as illustrated in this work could bring similar benefits to the instruction in other disciplines.
Tablet PC video based hybrid coursework in computer science
Authors: Subhlok Jaspal , Johnson Olin , Subramaniam Venkat , Vilalta Ricardo , Yun Chang
Published: April 2007

Online learning, defined broadly as recording and delivering classroom experience with technology, has tremendous potential. However, success to date has been very limited in science and engineering. We believe this is because traditional video recording is cumbersome and not suitable for technical lectures and removing live classroom interaction is detrimental to learning. Employing Tablet PCs with slide presentation software has made it simple and convenient to develop and record high quality lectures. We employ such videos in a hybrid model of coursework. All lectures are made available as online videos, but limited classroom interaction is an important component; the classroom is used for review of lecture material, examinations, demonstrations, tutorials, and hands-on sessions. The hybrid framework is particularly suitable for students with logistical difficulties, e.g., because of work schedule. This paper is an evaluation of the hybrid learning approach as applied to upper level computer science coursework. We report our experience in teaching a suite of hybrid courses at the University of Houston and discuss the detailed feedback we received from the students who participated in the courses.
Assessing the impact of inking technology in a large digital design course
Authors: Wolf Tilman
Published: April 2007

Since the introduction of inking technology, computer science and engineering education has experienced a flurry of new instructional approaches. Many studies have assessed qualitative improvements over traditional classroom presentation techniques. In this paper, we present
quantitative results
on the improved student perception of teaching when using Classroom Presenter instead of PowerPoint for classroom presentation. We present an overview on how Classroom Presenter was used in a large undergraduate digital design course and discuss the assessment of results and their analysis. Our data shows with statistical significance that students perceive lectures with Classroom Presenter as more interesting and more adequately paced.
Status report on the SIGCSE committee on models for evaluating faculty scholarship
Authors: Fink Shmuel , Kruse Gerald , Olson Keith
Published: April 2007

In this special session, the members of the SIGCSE Committee on Models for Evaluating Faculty Scholarship would like to meet with interested SIGCSE members. In particular we would like to give an update on our progress in the last year, as well as solicit feedback and guidance.
Students teaching students
Authors: Dankel Douglas D. , Ohlrich Jonathan
Published: April 2007

This paper presents the structure of a new elective course at the University of Florida, Artificial Intelligence in Computer Games, which addresses not only the technical aspects of creating realism within computer games, but also the need for more experiences in oral communication. Key elements of this course include the students conducting a majority of the teaching and actively participating in evaluating each other.
A games first approach to teaching introductory programming
Authors: Leutenegger Scott , Edgington Jeffrey
Published: April 2007

In this paper we argue for using a "Game First" approach to teaching introductory programming. We believe that concerns over whether an OO approach or a procedural approach should be used first are secondary to the course assignment and example content. If examples are not compelling, student interest often lags thus making the OO versus procedural argument moot. We believe that game programming motivates most new programmers. Compelling assignments mean that students are far more likely to learn because they are interested, and the visual component allows students to see mistakes in their code as manifested in the resultant graphics. We describe our experiences after redesigning and offering a new introductory computer science sequence using 2D game development as a unifying theme. We teach fundamental programming concepts via two dimensional game development in Flash and ActionScript during the first quarter, transition to C++ to solidify concepts and add pointers during the second quarter, then teach a multi-phase project based game approach using C++ and openGL (2D graphics only) during the third quarter. Our surveys show that this approach improved student understanding of all seven basic topics examined.
A study of algorithm animations on mobile devices
Authors: Hürst Wolfgang , Lauer Tobias , Nold Eveline
Published: April 2007

Compared to desktop PCs, mobile devices have several constraints such as restricted screen size and reduced interactivity. Hence, it is not clear if it is helpful to provide educational multimedia material for mobile media players. In this paper, we present a study of algorithm animations on mobile devices, i.e. an Apple iPod with video functionality. The results of our experiment indicate that despite limitations there is an actual learning effect and therefore mobile media players offer a potential to increase learning that deserves further investigation.
Teaching students java bytecode using lego mindstorms robots
Authors: Jipping Michael J. , Calka Cameron , O'Neill Brian , Padilla Christopher R.
Published: April 2007

Assbly language is a valuable subject to teach, yet one of the most underappreciated by students. Students do not see the need for assbly language and they get through it as quickly as possible. Given the time in a computer organization course to teach assbly language, assignments -- either quick-and-easy ones or those contrived-to-teach-a-point -- contribute to this attitude of malaise. This paper documents a project to inject some fun into the teaching of assbly language. First, we switch the language to Java bytecode. Second, we use unique assignments to use Java bytecode with Lego Mindstorms robotics.
Through the looking glass
Authors: Powers Kris , Ecott Stacey , Hirshfield Leanne M.
Published: April 2007

This work analyzes the advantages and disadvantages of using the novice programming environment Alice in the CS0 classroom. We consider both general aspects as well as specifics drawn from the authors' experiences using Alice in the classroom over the course of the last academic year.
Scratch for budding computer scientists
Authors: Malan David J. , Leitner Henry H.
Published: April 2007

Scratch is a "media-rich programming environment" recently developed by MIT's Media Lab that "lets you create your own animations, games, and interactive art." Although Scratch is intended to "enhance the development of technological fluency [among youths] at after-school centers in economically disadvantaged communities," we find rarkable potential in this programming environment for higher education as well.We propose Scratch as a first language for first-time programmers in introductory courses, for majors and non-majors alike. Scratch allows students to program with a mouse: programmatic constructs are represented as puzzle pieces that only fit together if "syntactically" appropriate. We argue that this environment allows students not only to master programmatic constructs before syntax but also to focus on probls of logic before syntax. We view Scratch as a gateway to languages like Java.To validate our proposal, we recently deployed Scratch for the first time in higher education via harvard Summer School's Computer Science S-1: Great Ideas in Computer Science, the summertime version of a course at harvard College. Our goal was not to improve scores but instead to improve first-time programmers' experiences. We ultimately transitioned to Java, but we first introduced programming itself via Scratch. We present in this paper the results of our trial.We find that, not only did Scratch excite students at a critical time (
i.e.,
, their first foray into computer science), it also familiarized the inexperienced among th with fundamentals of programming without the distraction of syntax. Moreover, when asked via surveys at term's end to reflect on how their initial experience with Scratch affected their subsequent experience with Java, most students (76%) felt that Scratch was a positive influence, particularly those without prior background. Those students (16%) who felt that Scratch was not an influence, positive or negative, all had prior programming experience.
Working with pedagogical patterns in PACT
Authors: Carle Andy , Clancy Michael , Canny John
Published: April 2007

We present several interesting applications for the Pattern-Annotated Course Tool (PACT) and pedagogical design patterns in the process of curriculum design. PACT is a visual editor in which content designers can create visual representations of their courses and annotate them with references to educational theory in the form of pedagogical patterns. Each usage scenario illustrates the opportunities for learning that PACT, the annotation process, and the artifacts that users create present to experts, novices, and everyone in between. Finally, we take an in-depth look at one ongoing course annotation being crafted by an experienced curriculum designer and examine his interesting findings from the process. An analysis of these discoveries demonstrates the utility of PACT in the curriculum design process.
MicroTiger
Authors: VanBuren Brian G. , Shaaban Muhammad
Published: April 2007

This paper describes the MicroTiger software that combines a graphical microcode simulator with a reconfigurable data-path. The resulting implented simulator is able to fill the void in microprogramming tools since there are no graphical microcode simulators that allow such customization of the datapath. The customization of the datapath goes beyond allowing different files specifying the datapath, it allows the datapath to be created and modified using the graphical interface like a circuit editor. In the acadic setting, MicroTiger provides easier microcode testing on the instruction level for instructors and provides simulation debugging through code tracing and breakpoints for students.
Having a BLAST
Authors: Cutter Pamela
Published: April 2007

DNA analysis is a subject that is in the news almost every day, whether it be a new advance in medical research, a criminal trial, or some other application. BLAST (Basic Local Alignment Search Tool) is an important tool used by biologists worldwide to compare DNA and protein sequences and to infer functional and evolutionary relationships between them. This paper presents a project for CS2 based on BLAST. The primary goal for this project is to provide an interesting, real-world application that reinforces the data structures and algorithms presented in CS2. This project also demonstrates object-oriented design techniques, and introduces computer science students to the new field of bioinformatics.
Using interdisciplinary bioinformatics undergraduate research to recruit and retain computer science students
Authors: Beck Jon , Buckner Brent , Nikolova Olga
Published: April 2007

An interdisciplinary undergraduate research project in bioinformatics, jointly mentored by faculty in computer science and biology, has been developed and is being used to provide top-quality instruction to biology and computer science students. This paper explains the benefits of such a collaboration to computer science students and to the computer science discipline. Specific goals of the project include increased recruitment of students into computer science and increased retention within the discipline. The project is also intended to be particularly attractive to women students.
The suitability of kinesthetic learning activities for teaching distributed algorithms
Authors: Sivilotti Paolo A. G. , Pike Scott M.
Published: April 2007

Kinesthetic learning is a process in which students learn by actively carrying out physical activities rather than by passively listening to lectures. Pedagogical research indicates that kinesthetic learning is a fundamental, powerful, and ubiquitous learning style. To date, efforts to incorporate this learning style within the computer science curriculum have focussed on introductory courses. Material in upper-level courses, however, can also benefit from a similar approach. In particular, courses on distributed computing, by the very nature of the material they cover, are uniquely suited to exploiting this learning technique. We have developed and piloted a collection of kinesthetic activities for a senior undergraduate or graduate-level course on distributed systems. We give detailed descriptions of these exercises and discuss factors that contribute to their success.
An introductory course format for promoting diversity and retention
Authors: Cohoon James P.
Published: April 2007

We report on a pilot section of an introductory computing course offered at a top tier university through its engineering school. Although targeted for students with no prior programming experience, its goals were same as the goals of the other sections. The course enrolled 43 students. They were 49% female, 23% black, and 12% Hispanic. The demographics are different from the typical 1st year class at the school, which is 26% female, 6% black, and 3% Hispanic. Two important pedagogies differentiated the pilot section from other sections: computer availability at all class meetings and the methodology for selecting motivating examples. A priori only one student in the section intended a computing major, but upon completion the students chose a computing major at a higher rate than the rates for other sections: 19% versus 13%. More striking is that 33% of the pilot section women and 27% of its minority students chose a computing major. All students completed the course and no student left the school. These outcomes compare favorably to a school course withdrawal rate of 12% and a school attrition rate of 10%, a female attrition rate of 12%, and a minority rate attrition of 25%.
Gender, perceptions, and reality
Authors: Madigan Elinor M. , Goodfellow Marianne , Stone Jeffrey A.
Published: April 2007

Recent studies have found that gender gaps in information and communication technology (ICT) skills exist, despite changing gender role expectations for men and women. In this paper we report on survey results from an ongoing longitudinal study of ICT skills which found that--in general-- first-year students were confident in their ICT skills. However, comparison of student skills in four major technology domain areas indicates that there are differences between the male and fale first-year students in levels of confidence. We also report on a second, follow-up study designed to examine the actual ICT skills of the first-year students. This investigation indicates that both male and fale students have greater confidence than actual skill. The study also found that both male and fale students have approximately the same level of actual ICT skills. These findings suggest that fale students, although possessing ICT skills similar to their male counterparts, do not perceive thselves as competent users of technology. These differences in ICT skill confidence have implications for fluency with technology in acadia as well as the recruitment and retention of women in the Computer and Information Sciences.
RobotStudio
Authors: Xu Li
Published: April 2007

The recent report by the ACM Job Migration Task Force points to the immediate need to teach "programming-in-the-large", the skills to work with and develop large and complex production-grade software and systems, so young computing professionals can stay competitive in the face of IT globalization and offshoring of software [4, 13]. However, current computer science curricula are inadequate to prepare college graduates to meet the reality of computing. Most course projects fall into the "programming-in-the-small" mode, in which students implement small, isolated projects to explore the course subject matter and with little emphasis on how the smaller pieces can be integrated to build sophisticated larger scale systems.This paper presents a modern IDE-based approach to address this inadequacy. We develop RobotStudio --- an extensible framework for building IDEs targeting a simple yet versatile educational robot platform. Student projects are implemented as plugin modules of RobotStudio and, when put together, they form a comprehensive IDE for programming the robotic environment.This paper describes the architecture of the RobotStudio framework, its extension mechanisms, and the teaching practice of using RobotStudio in an introductory compiler construction class to illustrate "programming-in-the-large" principles.
Engaging students in formal language theory and theory of computation
Authors: Sigman Scott
Published: April 2007

Engaging and maintaining student engagement with the content of a course in formal language theory and the theory of computation is notoriously difficult. A major factor is student's perception of the relevance of the required mathematical material to computer science as they have studied the discipline. Usually, the mathematical material discourages students and for many it forms an insurmountable barrier. This paper describes the construction of a course using the discovery learning technique known as the Moore Method that directly addresses student engagement with this material. The results of the delivery of this course were that students remained engaged with the course throughout the semester and enthusiastically received the pedagogical approach employed. While the course described was delivered to a small class in a liberal arts college, it may be adapted to larger class sizes and taught in any computer science program.
Network security auditing as a community-based learning project
Authors: Lincke Susan J.
Published: April 2007

Security courses can focus on encryption/authentication algorithm design, attack/defend methodologies, or security techniques. Our goal is to train computer personnel in how to secure networks. What better way than to work with real equipment and real organizations? This course includes a community-based project which involves students auditing part of a syst for local organizations. Auditing is common in industry, and requires students to be well-versed in security techniques, the auditing process, and the application of results. This paper outlines our experiences in bringing community-based audit projects into the classroom.
Computer games in the classroom, or, how to get perfect attendance, even at 8 AM
Authors: Burd Bary , Goulden John , Ladd Brian , Rogers Michael , Stewart Kris
Published: April 2007

In this special session, we will compare and contrast several game engines that have been used in game development courses, and describe our experiences teaching such courses.
Threshold concepts in computer science
Authors: Boustedt Jonas , Eckerdal Anna , McCartney Robert , Moström Jan Erik , Ratcliffe Mark , Sanders Kate , Zander Carol
Published: April 2007

Yes, and Yes.We are currently undertaking an pirical investigation of "Threshold Concepts" in Computer Science, with input from both instructors and students. We have found good pirical evidence that at least two concepts---Object-oriented programming and pointers--are Threshold Concepts, and that there are potentially many more others.In this paper, we present results gathered using various experimental techniques, and discuss how Threshold Concepts can affect the learning process.
Gendered experiences of computing graduate programs
Authors: Cohoon J. McGrath
Published: April 2007

This investigation of gendered experiences in computer science and computer engineering (CSE) doctoral programs uses survey data from a nationwide stratified random sample. Analyses of data from 41 departments show that women CSE doctoral students have less confidence than men students that they can achieve their educational goals. Moreover, women's confidence is significantly affected by their comfort asking questions in class, which is in turn affected by faculty beliefs about the relationship between diversity and student quality. Program rank also has a negative effect on confidence, but affects men and women similarly.
Can humanitarian open-source software development draw new students to CS?
Authors: Ellis Heidi J. C. , Morelli Ralph A. , de Lanerolle Trishan R. , Damon Jonathan , Raye Jonathan
Published: April 2007

In this paper, we present an example humanitarian open-source software project that has been used since January 2006 at a small liberal-arts college as an experiment in undergraduate CS education. Sahana (Sinhalese for
relief
) is a free and open-source disaster management system developed in Sri Lanka by a group of IT professionals following the 2004 Asian tsunami. It is a web-based tool that addresses the IT coordination problems that typically occur in trying to recover from a large-scale disaster. We are currently exploring the wider use of Sahana as a sustainable model and platform for teaching about open-source software development while at the same time allowing CS students and educators to make a socially useful contribution of their time, effort, and expertise. This paper presents our experiences with Sahana including the benefits for both academia and industry.
From the editors
Authors: McCartney Robert , Tenenberg Josh
Published: April 2007

As the new Editors-in-Chief, we outline our vision for building JERIC to become the premier journal in computing education. Doing so will require
authors
who submit high-quality articles--their „best stuff”,
reviewers
who provide the feedback and guidance to ensure that each article embodies a scholarly approach to teaching and learning while being of practical use to the computing educator, and
readers
who read the articles, critically evaluate and discuss the findings with others, and adapt, adopt, and evaluate these findings in their own classrooms.
Why is schema matching tough and what can we do about it?
Authors: Gal Avigdor
Published: April 2007

In this paper we analyze the problem of schema matching, explain why it is such a "tough" problem and suggest directions for handling it effectively. In particular, we present the monotonicity principle and see how it leads to the use of top-
K
mappings rather than a single mapping.
XML search
Authors: Amer-Yahia Sihem , Lalmas Mounia
Published: April 2007

The development of approaches to access XML content has generated a wealth of issues in information retrieval (IR) and database (DB) (e.g., [2, 15, 17, 20, 19, 47, 26, 32, 24]). While the IR community has traditionally focused on searching unstructured content, and has developed various techniques for ranking query results and evaluating their effectiveness, the DB community has focused on developing query languages and efficient evaluation algorithms for highly structured content. Recent trends in DB and IR research demonstrate a growing interest in merging IR and DB techniques for accessing XML content. Support for a combination of "structured" and full-text search for effectively querying XML documents was unanimous in a recent panel at SIGMOD 2005 [3], and is being widely studied in the IR community [20].
An online bibliography on schema evolution
Authors: Rahm Erhard , Bernstein Philip A.
Published: April 2007

We briefly motivate and present a new online bibliography on schema evolution, an area which has recently gained much interest in both research and practice.
ICDE 2006 Ph.D. workshop report
Authors: Yee Wai Gen , Navathe Shamkant B.
Published: April 2007

This report summarizes the Ph.D. Workshop held in conjunction with the 2006 IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering. This report includes a summary of the technical presentations as well as the panelist discussion.
Operating systems review
Authors: Matthews Jeanna N.
Published: April 2007

This issue marks the one-year anniversary of the new publication policy for
Operating Systems Review
. I hope you have enjoyed the new format and would welcome any comments or suggestions.
Introduction
Authors: Riedel Erik
Published: April 2007

The topic area of
file systems
has traditionally been a part of the larger research area of operating systems. Research work in
storage systems
, often focusing more on the hardware aspects, has appeared in research areas including computer architecture and computer systems. As outlined below, there are also many related research areas that impact the technology for stored data, including databases, computer security, ubiquitous computing, human-computer interaction, knowledge management, performance evaluation, high-performance computing and even computer networking.
A heterogeneous storage grid enabled by grid service
Authors: Deng Yuhui , Wang Frank
Published: April 2007

Due to the explosive increase of data, storage Grid is a new model for deploying and managing storage resources distributed across multiple systems and networks, making efficient use of available storage capacity. Building a storage Grid demands corresponding protocols and standards to provide interoperability among the large number of heterogeneous storage systems. Service is becoming a basic application pattern of Grid because the service offers a standard means of interoperating between different applications running on a variety of platforms. This paper proposes a storage Grid architecture that wraps all distributed and heterogeneous storage resources into Grid services to provide transparent, remote, and on demand data access. The storage oriented Grid service can be considered as a basic building block of an infinite storage pool which provides good scalability through its inherent parallelism, and facilitates simple incremental resource expansion (to add storage resources, one just adds storage services). Grid users can stack simple modular storage service piece by piece as demand grows instead of buying monolithic storage systems. An implemented proof-of-concept prototype validates that the storage Grid architecture trade 5% (at most) performance degradation for an infinite and heterogeneous storage pool.
Bayes-Nash equilibria for
m
th price auctions with multiple closing times
Authors: Vetsikas Ioannis A. , Selman Bart
Published: April 2007

In this paper we compute Bayes-Nash equilibria for first price single unit auctions and

m
th

price multi unit auctions, when the auction has a set of possible closing times, one of which is chosen randomly for the auction to end at. Thus the auctions have one or more rounds of sealed bids. We compute such equilibria for a wide range of assumptions and demonstrate the method used by an agent to generate these strategies.
Relaxed-criteria G-negotiation for Grid resource co-allocation
Authors: Sim Kwang Mong
Published: April 2007

Supporting resource co-allocation is essential for realizing the Grid vision because computational intensive applications may require more resources than a single computing machine can provide in one administrative domain. Given that the various stakeholders often have their own requirements and supply-and-demand patterns, successfully obtaining commitments through concurrent negotiations with multiple resource owners to simultaneously access several resources is a very challenging task. This position paper (i) suggests that a relaxed-criteria G-negotiation mechanism may be used to enhance the success rates of negotiation agents in Grid resource co-allocation, (ii) proposes a testbed for realizing the relaxed-criteria G-negotiation mechanism, (iii) discusses experimental designs for evaluating the proposed mechanism, and (iv) discusses previous results obtained from using a relaxed-criteria G-negotiation protocol for Grid resource allocation.
Web usage of the GP bibliography
Authors: Langdon William B.
Published: April 2007

A recent upgrade to the Genetic Programming bibliography enables monitoring of its www usage. Downloads are dominated by automated software robotic agents (web bots), particularly Yahoo and other search engine spiders. These are very variable and cast doubt that some world wide web hits statistics relate to people. Some 62% of GP papers are on line. PDF is twice as common as postscript. On average papers in the cache can be downloaded in two seconds.
Erratum: "Assisting E-Government Users with Animated Talking Faces" by P. Foglia, F. Giuntoli, C. A. Prete, and M. Zanda
Authors: Staff interactions
Published: April 2007

The references were inadvertently removed from an article entitled "Assisting E-Government Users with Animated Talking Faces" in the January-February 2007 issue of

. We apologize for this oversight. The information is available below.

1. Cullen, R., O'Connor D., Veritt A. An Evaluation of Local Government Web sites in New Zealand. In The World of EGovernment (ed. Curtin G.C., Sommer M.H., Sommer V.), Haworth, 2003.

2. Foglia P., Prete C.A., Zanda M. Modelling Public Administration Portals. In Encyclopaedia of Portal Technology and Application (ed. Tatnall A.), Idea Group (in press).

3. Haxby J.V., Gobbini M.I., Furey M.L., Ishai A., Schouten, J.L., Pietrini P. Distributed and overlapping representations of faces and objects in ventral temporal cortex. Science, Sept. 28; 293(5539):2405-7, 2001.

4. Nielsen J. Talking-Head video is boring online, AlertBox, Dec. 5, 2005.

5. Qiu L., Benbasat I. An Investigation into the effects of text-to-speech voice and 3D avatars on the perception of presence and flow of live help in electronic commerce. ACM Transactions on Computer Human Interaction (TOCHI), 12(4); 2005.

6. Reis F. E-Government: Internet based interaction with the European businesses and citizens; Statistics in Focus; Eurostat, 2005.

7. Stewart O., Huerta J.M. Transition relevance place: a proposal for adaptive user interface in natural language dialog management systems. ACM SIGCHI Conference Work in progress, 2006.
Repurposing Consumer Hardware
Authors: Creeger Mache
Published: April 2007

These days you have to be more and more creative when tackling home technology projects because the inventory of raw material is changing so rapidly. Market and product cycles continue to shrink, standard form factors are being discarded to drive down costs, and pricing is becoming more dependent on market value and less on direct manufacturing cost. As a result, standard modular building blocks are disappearing. New alternative uses for obsolete or low-price products are emerging, however. I enjoy finding ways to extract new value from new or used hardware platforms, so I think it’s still a good time to be a technology hobbyist.
Making SIP Make Cents
Authors: Fischl Jason , Tschofenig Hannes
Published: April 2007

The Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) is used to set up realtime sessions in IP-based networks. These sessions might be for audio, video, or IM communications, or they might be used to relay presence information. SIP service providers are mainly focused on providing a service that copies that provided by the PSTN (public switched telephone network) or the PLMN (public land mobile network) to the Internet-based environment.
Desktops in 3D
Authors: Weiss Aaron
Published: April 2007

Advances in graphics technologies are pushing interface design in new directions
Creeping ubiquity
Authors: Treese Win
Published: April 2007

Scenes from a laptop: A few weeks ago, I took a bus from the suburbs of Boston to New York. It was a business trip, so I might have flown on the shuttle or taken Amtrak. Although the flight time of the shuttle is about an hour, it turns out that the total travel time---house to destination in Manhattan---ends up being about the same for travel by airplane, train, or car. In this case, the lure of the bus was free wireless Internet access during the trip.
Defective rights management
Authors: Weiss Aaron
Published: April 2007

Someone should produce a reality show based in corporate conference rooms. Oh sure, at first this sounds about as exciting as a reality show about actuaries. But who wouldn't want to see how, for example, bankrupt Northwest Airlines decided to distribute a memo to laid-off employees suggesting that they take dates on nice walks instead of buying movie tickets, and not to be "shy" about "pulling something you like out of the trash." Didn't people wearing suits have to gather around a meeting table and agree that this was a good idea? Who wouldn't want to see that? Oh, to be a fly on the wall at a major record label or movie studio meeting as they discuss the merits of DRM, or digital rights management. Wait, did I say "merits"?
How to avoid disappointment by design
Authors: Nevo Dorit , Wade Michael R.
Published: April 2007

Avoid market failure by aligning system performance with stakeholder expectations.
Analysis of active intrusion prevention data for predicting hostile activity in computer networks
Authors: Green Ido , Raz Tzvi , Zviran Moshe
Published: April 2007

Using a generic and reliable model to anticipate future attack scenarios.
What are people searching on government web sites?
Authors: Chau Michael , Fang Xiao , Liu Sheng Olivia R.
Published: April 2007

A study of search activity on the Utah.gov Web site.
MTS - Michigan Terminal System
Authors: Boettner Donald W. , Alexander Michael T.
Published: April 2007

MTS, the Michigan Terminal System, is a terminal oriented time-sharing system that offers both batch and terminal usage. It was developed by the University of Michigan Computing Centre and is currently running on an IBM 360 model 67.
Dynamic load balancing without packet reordering
Authors: Kandula Srikanth , Katabi Dina , Sinha Shantanu , Berger Arthur
Published: April 2007

Dynamic load balancing is a popular recent technique that protects ISP networks from sudden congestion caused by load spikes or link failures. Dynamic load balancing protocols, however, require schemes for splitting traffic across multiple paths at a fine granularity. Current splitting schemes present a tussle between slicing granularity and packet reordering. Splitting traffic at the granularity of packets quickly and accurately assigns the desired traffic share to each path, but can reorder packets within a TCP flow, confusing TCP congestion control. Splitting traffic at the granularity of a flow avoids packet reordering but may overshoot the desired shares by up to 60% in dynamic environments, resulting in low end-to-end network goodput

Contrary to popular belief, we show that one can systematically split a single flow across multiple paths without causing packet reordering. We propose FLARE, a new traffic splitting algorithm that operates on bursts of packets, carefully chosen to avoid reordering. Using a combination of analysis and trace-driven simulations, we show that FLARE attains accuracy and responsiveness comparable to packet switching without reordering packets. FLARE is simple and can be implemented with a few KB of router state
10Gb/s Ethernet performance and retrospective
Authors: Pope Steven , Riddoch David
Published: April 2007

This paper presents both a retrospective of the development of network interface architecture, and performance and conformance data from a range of contemporary devices sporting various performance enhancing technologies. The data shows that 10Gb/s networking is now possible without statefull offoad and while consuming less than one CPU core on a contemporary commodity server.
Client-side web mining for community formation in peer-to-peer environments
Authors: Liu Kun , Bhaduri Kanishka , Das Kamalika , Nguyen Phuong , Kargupta Hillol
Published: April 2007

In this paper we present a framework for forming interests-based Peer-to-Peer communities using client-side web browsing history. At the heart of this framework is the use of an order statistics-based approach to build communities with hierarchical structure. We have also carefully considered privacy concerns of the peers and adopted cryptographic protocols to measure similarity between them without disclosing their personal profiles. We evaluated our framework on a distributed data mining platform we have developed. The experimental results show that our framework could effectively build interests-based communities.
Network reconstruction from dynamic data
Authors: Unnikrishnan K. P. , Ramakrishnan Naren , Sastry P. S. , Uthurusamy Ramasamy
Published: April 2007

Over the past decade, many powerful data mining techniques have been developed to analyze temporal and sequential data. The time is now fertile for addressing problems of larger scope under the purview of temporal data mining. The fourth SIGKDD workshop on temporal data mining focused on the question:
What can we infer about the structure of a complex dynamical system from observed temporal data?
The goals of the workshop were to critically evaluate the need in this area by bringing together leading researchers from industry and academia, and to identify promising technologies and methodologies for doing the same. We provide a brief summary of the workshop proceedings and ideas arising out of the discussions.