bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Benchmark, sample & measure
Authors: Lucido Anthony P.
Published: April 2007

The routine I will describe was started as a PL/I routine written by Mr. Gib Scranton, at ISU, for a graduate course. The routine used much core (70-80k), and that is a commodity that is quite scarce in any installation. A second iteration was performed in Assembler F by Mr. Dana Zimmerli, an instructor and systems analyst.
SIGPLAN symposium
Authors: Swenson J. Richard
Published: April 2007

SIGPLAN held a symposium on Languages for Systems Implementation at Purdue University on October 25-26, 1971. The proceedings of this symposium have appeared as volume 6, number 9 (Oct. 1971) of the SIGPLAN Notices. These will be available from ACM Headquarters for a charge. A notice will be included in the next issue of OSR.
BGP routing dynamics revisited
Authors: Li Jun , Guidero Michael , Wu Zhen , Purpus Eric , Ehrenkranz Toby
Published: April 2007

Understanding BGP routing dynamics is critical to the solid growth and maintenance of the Internet routing infrastructure. However, while the most extensive study on BGP dynamics is nearly a decade old, many factors that could affect BGP dynamics have changed considerably. We revisit this important topic in this paper, focusing on not only comparing with the previous results, but also issues not well explored before. We have found that, compared to almost a decade ago, although certain characteristics remain unchanged (such as some temporal properties), BGP dynamics are now 'busier,' and more importantly, now have much less pathological behavior and are 'healthier'; for example, forwarding dynamics are now not only dominant, but also more consistent across different days. Contributions to BGP dynamics by different BGP peers-which are not proportional to the size of a peer's AS-are also more stable, and dynamics due to policy changes or duplicate announcements are usually from specific peers
Analysis of the SPV secure routing protocol
Authors: Raghavan Barath , Panjwani Saurabh , Mityagin Anton
Published: April 2007

We analyze a secure routing protocol, Secure Path Vector (SPV), proposed in SIGCOMM 2004. SPV aims to provide authenticity for route announcements in the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) using an efficient alternative to ordinary digital signatures, called constant-time signatures. Today, SPV is often considered the best cryptographic defense for BGP.

We find subtle flaws in the design of SPV which lead to attacks that can be mounted by 60% of Autonomous Systems in the Internet. In addition, we study several of SPV's design decisions and assumptions and highlight the requirements for security of routing protocols. In light of our analysis, we reexamine the need for constant-time signatures and find that certain standard digital signature schemes can provide the same level of efficiency for route authenticity.
An edge-to-edge filtering architecture against DoS
Authors: Huici Felipe , Handley Mark
Published: April 2007

Defending against large, distributed Denial-of-Service attacks is challenging, with large changes to the network core or to end-hosts often suggested. To make matters worse, spoofing adds to the difficulty, since defenses must resist attempts to trigger filtering of other people's traffic. Further, any solution has to provide incentives for deployment, or it will never see the light of day. We present a simple and effective architectural defense against distributed DoS attacks that requires no changes to the end-hosts, minimal changes to the network core, is robust to spoofing, provides incentives for initial deployment, and can be built with off-the-shelf hardware
Flow rate fairness
Authors: Briscoe Bob
Published: April 2007

Resource allocation and accountability keep reappearing on every list of requirements for the Internet architecture. The reason we never resolve these issues is a broken idea of what the problem is. The applied research and standards communities are using completely unrealistic and impractical fairness criteria. The resulting mechanisms don't even allocate the right thing and they don't allocate it between the right entities. We explain as bluntly as we can that thinking about fairness mechanisms like TCP in terms of sharing out flow rates has no intellectual heritage from any concept of fairness in philosophy or social science, or indeed real life. Comparing flow rates should never again be used for claims of fairness in production networks. Instead, we should judge fairness mechanisms on how they share out the 'cost' of each user's actions on others
Can you hear me now?!
Authors: Kushman Nate , Kandula Srikanth , Katabi Dina
Published: April 2007

Industry observers expect VoIP to eventually replace most of the existing land-line telephone connections. Currently however, quality and reliability concerns largely limit VoIP usage to either personal calls on cross-domain services such as Skype and Vonage, or to single-domain services such as trunking, where a core ISP carries long-distance voice as VoIP only within its backbone, to save cost with a unified voice/data infrastructure. This paper investigates the factors that prevent cross-domain VoIP deployments from achieving the quality and reliability of existing land-line telephony (PSTN). We ran over 50,000 VoIP phone calls between 24 locations in US and Europe for a three-week period. Our results indicate that VoIP usability is hindered as much by BGP's slow convergence as network congestion. In fact, about half of the unintelligible VoIP samples in our data occur within 10 minutes of a BGP update
Future internet
Authors: Spyropoulos Thrasyvoulos , Fdida Serge , Kirkpatrick Scott
Published: April 2007

While the Internet is hardly "broken", it has proved unable to integrate new ideas, new architectures, and provide paths for future integration of data, voice, rich media and higher reliability. The reason is that the basic concept of the Internet as an end-to-end packet delivery service has made its middle layer, networking services through TCP/IP, untouchable. If we wish to see any disruptive enhancements to security, routing flexibility and reliability, and robust quality of service guarantees in coming years, we will need to move towards an Internet in which networking environments offering differing strengths can coexist on a permanent basis. This view is gaining currency in the US, advocated by the FIND/GENI initiative [7, 6] and in Europe, where it forms the heart of the activities reviewed by ARCADIA. The ARCADIA activity, sponsored by COST [1] has been chartered to look at critical areas in which research on fundamentals in the Internet's architecture and protocols, supported by accurate experiment, can unlock some of the Internet impasses. This paper attempts to describes the insight gained and conclusions drawn from the first ARCADIA workshop on the Future of the Internet, organized around the main themes of Virtualization, Federation and Monitoring/Measurement
Mining motion patterns using color motion map clustering
Authors: Lai Chih , Rafa Taras , Nelson Dwight E.
Published: April 2007

Automatically extracting previously unknown behavior patterns from videos that track animals with various physical conditions can accelerate our understanding of animal behaviors and their influential factors, resulting in major medical and economic benefits. Unfortunately, extracting behavior patterns from videos recordings remains as a very challenging task due to their extensive duration and the unstructured natures. This task is further complicated in a completely darken animal cage with inconsistent infrared lighting, moving reflections, or other cage debris such as the cage bedding. In this research, we propose a new motion model that enables us to measure the similarities among different animal movements in high precision so a clustering method can correctly separate recurring movements from infrequent random movements. More specifically, our model first transforms the spatial and temporal features of animal movements into a sequence of color images, referred to as
color motion maps (CMMs).
The task of mining recurring behavior patterns is then reduced to clustering similar color images in a database. We will use a real infrared video to demonstrate the capability of our model in capturing distinguished but brief animal movements that are embedded within a sequence of other animal movements.
Utility-based anonymization for privacy preservation with less information loss
Authors: Xu Jian , Wang Wei , Pei Jian , Wang Xiaoyuan , Shi Baile , Fu Ada Wai-Chee
Published: April 2007

Privacy becomes a more and more serious concern in applications involving microdata. Recently, efficient anonymization has attracted much research work. Most of the previous methods use global recoding, which maps the domains of the quasi-identifier attributes to generalized or changed values. However, global recoding may not always achieve effective anonymization in terms of discernability and query answering accuracy using the anonymized data. Moreover, anonymized data is often used for analysis. As well accepted in many analytical applications, different attributes in a data set may have different utility in the analysis. The utility of attributes has not been considered in the previous methods.

In this paper, we study the problem of
utility-based anonymization.
First, we propose a simple framework to specify utility of attributes. The framework covers both numeric and categorical data. Second, we develop two simple yet efficient heuristic local recoding methods for utility-based anonymization. Our extensive performance study using both real data sets and synthetic data sets shows that our methods outperform the state-of-the-art multidimensional global recoding methods in both discernability and query answering accuracy. Furthermore, our utility-based method can boost the quality of analysis using the anonymized data.
Maximizing classifier utility when training data is costly
Authors: Weiss Gary M. , Tian Ye
Published: April 2007

Classification is a well-studied problem in machine learning and data mining. Classifier performance was originally gauged almost exclusively using predictive accuracy. However, as work in the field progressed, more sophisticated measures of classifier
utility
that better represented the value of the induced knowledge were introduced. Nonetheless, most work still ignored the cost of acquiring training examples, even though this affects the
overall
utility of a classifier. In this paper we consider the costs of acquiring the training examples in the data mining process; we analyze the impact of the cost of training data on learning, identify the optimal training set size for a given data set, and analyze the performance of several progressive sampling schemes, which, given the cost of the training data, will generate classifiers that come close to maximizing the overall utility.
On the medical frontier
Authors: Lane Terran , Rao Bharat , Bi Jinbo , Liang Jianming , Salganicoff Marcos
Published: April 2007

The 2006 KDD Cup Competition featured three data mining tasks drawn from a medical imaging domain. At the core, all of these tasks were concerned with identifying pulmonary embolisms (PEs) from pre-processed computed tomography (CT) images of human lungs. However, these tasks were complicated by features such as multi-instance learning, stringent performance standards, hard-threshold evaluation functions, spatial correlations, and small training sets. This paper gives an overview of the data and medical imaging tasks, the competition and evaluation, and the competition victors.
Modifying boosted trees to improve performance on task 1 of the 2006 KDD challenge cup
Authors: Bell Robert M. , Haffner Patrick G. , Volinsky Chris
Published: April 2007

Task 1 of the 2006 KDD Challenge Cup required classification of pulmonary embolisms (PEs) using variables derived from computed tomography angiography. We present our approach to the challenge and justification for our choices. We used boosted trees to perform the main classification task, but modified the algorithm to address idiosyncrasies of the scoring criteria. The two main modifications were: 1) changing the dependent variable in the training set to account for multiple PEs per patient, and 2) incorporating neighborhood information through augmentation of the set of predictor variables. Both of these resulted in measurable predictive improvement. In addition, we discuss a statistically based method for setting the classification threshold.
Voting with a parameterized veto strategy
Authors: Tikk Domonkos , Kardkovács Zsolt T. , Szidarovszky Ferenc P.
Published: April 2007

This paper presents our winner solution for the KDD Cup 2006 problem. It is based on the results of three different supervised learning techniques which are then combined in a classifier committee, and finally a single solution is obtained with a voting procedure. The voting procedure assigns weights to each member of the committee according to their average performance on a ten-fold cross-validation test and it also takes into account the confidence values returned by the three algorithms. The final decision of the committee is determined by means of a parameterized veto strategy, which takes into consideration the maximal allowed error rate beside the confidence values of the committee members. The solution presented here won Task 2 and became runner-up at Task 1 in the competition.
Parameter optimized, vertical, nearest-neighbor-vote and boundary-based classification
Authors: Perrizo William , Perera Amal
Published: April 2007

In this paper, we describe a reliable high performance classification system that includes a Nearest Neighbor Vote based classification and a Local Decision Boundary based classification combined with an evolutionary algorithm for parameter optimization and a vertical data structure (Predicate Tree or P-tree
1
for processing efficiency.
What are the grand challenges for data mining?
Authors: Piatetsky-Shapiro Gregory , Djeraba Chabane , Getoor Lise , Grossman Robert , Feldman Ronen , Zaki Mohammed
Published: April 2007

We discuss what makes exciting and motivating Grand Challenge problems for Data Mining, and propose criteria for a good Grand Challenge. We then consider possible GC problems from multimedia mining, link mining, large-scale modeling, text mining, and proteomics. This report is the result of a panel held at KDD-2006 conference.
BIOKDD06
Authors: Zaki Mohammed J. , Karypis George , Yang Jiong
Published: April 2007

Data Mining is the process of automatic discovery of novel and understandable models and patterns from large amounts of data. Bioinformatics is the science of storing, analyzing, and utilizing information from biological data such as sequences, molecules, gene expressions, and pathways. Development of novel data mining methods will play a fundamental role in understanding these rapidly expanding sources of biological data. The extensive databases of biological information create both challenges and opportunities for developing novel data mining methods.
Data mining for business applications
Authors: Ghani Rayid , Soares Carlos
Published: April 2007

Even though data mining has been successful in becoming a major component of various business processes as well as in transferring innovations from academic research into the business world, the gap between the problems that the research community works on and real-world ones is still significant. We believe that it is essential for the business and the academic research communities to interact frequently. The goal of the KDD-2006 Workshop on Data Mining for Business Applications was to gather both researchers and business practitioners and talk about their different perspectives and to share their latest problems and idea. We wanted to not only bring them together at KDD but also to create relationships that would continue and grow after the event as well.
WebKDD 2006
Authors: Nasraoui Olfa , Spiliopoulou Myra , Srivastava Jaideep , Mobasher Bamshad , Masand Brij
Published: April 2007

In this report, we summarize the contents and outcomes of the recent WebKDD 2006 workshop on Web Mining and Web Usage Analysis that was held in conjunction with the 12th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD 2006), August 20-23, 2006, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. In 2006, WebKDD was organized for the eighth time. It solicited papers on the broad overview subject
"Knowledge Discovery on the Web"
and on new directions for Web mining research. We reflect on the results of the workshop, as captured in presentations and plenary discussions.
UBDM 2006
Authors: Zadrozny Bianca , Weiss Gary , Saar-Tsechansky Maytal
Published: April 2007

In this report we provide a summary of the Second International Workshop on Utility-Based Data Mining (UBDM-06) held in conjunction with the 12
th
ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining. The workshop was held on August 20, 2006 in Philadelphia, PA, USA. As was the case for the first UBDM workshop, this workshop brought together researchers who currently investigate how to incorporate economic utility aspects into the data mining process and practitioners who have real-world experience with how these factors influence data mining applications.
Can exclusive clustering on streaming data be achieved?
Authors: Orlowska Maria E. , Sun Xingzhi , Li Xue
Published: April 2007

Clustering on streaming data aims at partitioning a list of data points into
k
groups of "similar" objects by scanning the data once. Most current one-scan clustering algorithms do not keep original data in the resulting clusters. The output of the algorithms is therefore not the clustered data points but the approximations of data properties according to the predefined similarity function, such that
k
centers and radiuses reflect the up-to-date data grouping. In this paper, we raise a critical question: can the partition-based clustering, or exclusive clustering, be achieved on streaming data by those currently available algorithms? After identifying the differences between traditional clustering and clustering on data streams, we discuss the basic requirements for the clusters that can be discovered from streaming data. We evaluate the recent work that is based on a subcluster maintenance approach. By using a few straightforward examples we illustrate that the subcluster maintenance approach may fail to resolve the exclusive clustering on data streams. Based on our observations, we also present the challenges on any heuristic method that claims solving the clustering problem on data streams in general.
Eulogy: Michael (Misha) Alekhnovich 1978-2006
Authors: Razborov Alexander (Sasha)
Published: April 2007

Misha Alekhnovich was born in Moscow, USSR, on October 26, 1978. In 1995 Misha began his studies at Moscow State University and graduated in 2000 with the equivalent of a B.A. in mathematics. In 2000-2001 Misha participated in the Special Year on Computational Complexity at the Institute for Advanced Study, and in 2001-2003 he attended graduate school at MIT. Upon receiving his PhD in 2003, Misha returned to IAS as a postdoctoral member and spent the next two years, 2003-2005, there. In 2005 he moved on to a faculty position at the University of California San Diego.
The joys of being an NSF program director
Authors: Sloan Robert H.
Published: April 2007

It is once again the season when our community needs to find a new volunteer to serve as program director for the "Theory of Computing program" or "Theoretical Foundations cluster" or whatever name our home insidé CISE at NSF may have in the future. It feels to me as if I only recently finished my service in that role, but in fact I served from January 2001 through August of 2002, and it is now time for us to find a replacement for the redoubtable William Steiger, my successor's successor.
Surfing the net for software engineering notes
Authors: Doernhoefer Mark
Published: April 2007

The subtitle to this month's article is just meant to grab your attention. I assure you, this column will
not
be solving the software quality problem. What I do hope to do is point you at some interesting web sites that discuss potential solutions to the software quality problem and let you solve it on your own.
A requirements analysis framework for open systems requirements engineering
Authors: Bastani Behzad
Published: April 2007

Requirements Engineering [26, 27] is an old discipline which has been conveniently subject to being overlooked by system designers. Most requirements analysis writings either advise general guidelines which are short of any concrete operational aspects, or they are not simply at the scale of complex open systems construction. This paper presents a new analytical framework and a method which considers an end-to-end view of a system, and is specifically designed to support the requirements analysis and design of open systems. The paper briefly discusses the conceptual shortcomings in this area, presents an analytical perspective for requirements engineering, and proposes a new framework called "Abstraction-oriented Frames". This framework is a hybrid model consisting of three major parts offering a specific operational approach based on a consistent end-to-end analytical view of the system.
Fostering web use in some real environments
Authors: Fass Leona F.
Published: April 2007

Web-based systems accessed in real environments are analyzed, identifying technical and non-technical factors critical to good practice and effective use. User-centric and e-enabling approaches to successful deployment are suggested, applying theoretical background and interactions with practitioners to assess feasibility of practice. Specific technical innovations by Web and Semantic Web researchers and practitioners are recommended, as is user education and community support, to foster widespread successful Web and Semantic Web use.
Measurement theory and validation criteria for software complexity measures
Authors: Misra Sanjay , Kilic Hurevren
Published: April 2007

The relation between measurement theory and evaluating criteria for software complexity measure is well established by several researchers. A new software complexity measure should also be satisfied by the measurement theory criteria. However, most of the developers of new complexity measures do not care about measurement theory. In this paper, we evaluate measurement theory and point out why measurement theory is not well applicable for evaluating complexity measure.
Discovering trends in software engineering with google trend
Authors: Rech Jörg
Published: April 2007

Trends are a valuable tool to shape one's research, decide on acquisitions, inform about technologies or standards used in the development process. Google Trends is a new service by Google for researching the amount of searches and news articles collected by their search engines, which can be used to discover trends in software engineering. In May 2006 Google Trends was opened to the public to support researching trends based on searches to Google Search and news articles collected in Google News. This short paper shows how information from Google Trend can be used to analyze media attention, search interests, and cause-effect relations of one topic or between multiple topics such as technologies, tools, or methodologies.
A formal framework for middleware behavioural specification
Authors: Rosa Nelson Souto , Cunha Paulo Roberto Freire
Published: April 2007

The number of open specifications of middleware systems and middleware services is increasing. Despite their complexity, they are traditionally described through APIs (the operation signatures) and informal prose (the behaviour). This fact often leads to ambiguities, whilst making difficult a better understanding of what is actually described. This paper presents a formal framework, specified in LOTOS (Language Of Temporal Ordering Specification), for the specification of middleware systems. The framework consists of a set of basic/common middleware components and some guidelines on how to compose them. The components of the framework facilitate the formal specification of different middleware systems. In order to illustrate how the framework may be used, it is adopted to specify procedural (synchronous) and message-oriented (asynchronous) middleware systems.
Software synthesis for hard real-time embedded systems with multiple processors
Authors: Tavares Eduardo , Barreto Raimundo , Maciel Paulo , Oliveira Meuse , Amorim Leonardo , Rocha Fernando , Lima Ricardo
Published: April 2007

Hard real-time embedded systems have stringent timing constraints that must be met in order to ensure the correct functioning of the system. In many cases, these systems are composed of several CPU-bound tasks, which may need to rely on multiple processors, since just a single processor may not allow meeting all timing constraints. In order to deal with stringent constraints, specialized operating system kernels are often adopted in real-time embedded systems. However, the operating system usage may introduce significant overheads in execution time as well as in memory requirement. Software synthesis is an alternative approach to operating systems usage, since it can generate tailored code that satisfy: (i) functional, performance, and resource constraints; and (ii) other features such as scheduling, resource management, communication and synchronization. In this paper, a software synthesis approach based on a formalism, namely, time Petri nets, is presented in order to generate predictable scheduled code for hard real-time embedded systems with multiple processors.
Probabilistic localization for outdoor wireless sensor networks
Authors: Peng Rong , Sichitiu Mihail L.
Published: April 2007

Recent advances in wireless communication, low power sensors and microcontrollers enable the deployment of large-scale wireless sensor networks. Localization is a fundamental service required by many wireless sensor network applications. We consider a distributed, probabilistic approach, suitable for outdoor systems with inaccurate range measurements. The approach restricts the possible locations of the nodes by using a combination of positive and negative constraints. We reduce the computational complexity of the algorithm by using two-dimensional fast Fourier transforms (FFTs). We evaluated the proposed probabilistic approach through simulations based on real-world measurements; the results are compared with two other localization schemes and the Cramer-Rao lower bound (CRLB). The results show that, for inaccurate range measurements, the proposed probabilistic approach outperforms existing methods and approaches the CRLB.
Fast/fair mobile localization in infrastructure wireless sensor networks
Authors: Yedavalli Kiran , Krishnamachari Bhaskar , Venkatraman Lakshmi
Published: April 2007

We introduce the problem of fast and fair localization of mobile units in indoor infrastructure wireless sensor networks. We define metrics and derive expressions for delay and fairness of localization and investigate a heuristic algorithm for fast and fair localization. Simulation results show that localization is faster for lower levels of location estimate accuracy, irrespective of anchor density, and that it is fairer for higher anchor densities, irrespective of location estimate accuracy. Also, localization is faster and fairer for grid deployment of anchors as compared to random deployment. The results also suggest that a guarantee on the desired level of location estimate accuracy can be provided for the entire localization area for specific speeds of movement of the mobile unit, and that these speeds are higher for denser anchor deployments.
Addendum to "Numerical Methods Disguised" (SIGNUM Newsletter, July 1986, 21: 31-32)
Authors: Fulda Joseph S.
Published: April 2007

I regret the copy of "Numerical Methods Disguised" (SIGNUM Newsletter, July 1986, 21: 31-32) that I forwarded to you had the last paragraph omitted. It reads:An analytical solution of the same problem should also be presented. Thus for a seller's market, the compromise price will be
B
+ (2/3)(
S - B
). The figure 2/3 is obtained by observing that the bargaining procedure uses successive halving. Hence the series 1 - 1/2+1/4 - 1/8+1/16 - 1/32+1/64 - ... which converges to 2/3. How close to 2/3 the compromise price will be depends on the tolerance, i.e., on how many terms in the series will be summed. Identical reasoning gives the compromise price in a buyer's market as
B
+(1/3)(
S - B
). Note that these expressions are algebraically identical to (2/3)
S
+(1/3)
B
and (1/3)
S
+(2/3)
B
respectively, which, in that form, nicely covey the idea behind a seller's or buyer's market.
DPUP: a distributed processing utilities package
Authors: Gardner Timothy J
Published: April 2007

DPUP is a library of utilities that support distributed concurrent computing on a local area network of computers. The library is built upon the interprocess communication facilities in Berkeley Unix 4.2bsd. Thus it will run on any network, connected by an Ethernet, where each computer runs a version of the Unix operating system that supports the Berkeley Unix interprocess communication facilities. DPUP supports two models of distributed concurrent computation, a master-slave model based upon stream sockets, and a broadcast model based upon datagram sockets. With each model, facilities for creating and terminating remote processes, establishing communications between them, and sending and receiving data between these processes are provided. This paper describes the facilities provided in DPUP and gives examples of their use.
Management guidelines for PC security
Authors: Anderson Troy E.
Published: April 2007

"PC crime is a corporate fact of life, and as proprietary information becomes a strategic resource, its loss through manipulation, theft and viral infection threatens the very survival of businesses [Bakst, pg 44]." Awareness of security is an increasingly important topic in the business world, and in many other areas where computers are an essential part of the organization. As corporations attempt to protect their competitive positions in the national and international markets, managers are striving to prevent situations that could compromise the secrecy of their corporate information. One could speculate that protecting a company's information reserves and its information processing machinery would be a top priority security concern, but it's interesting to note that in a survey of Fortune 500 companies with average MIS budgets of approximately 20 million, over half allocated less than 0.5% to security [Farhoomand and Murphy, pg 67]. Awareness is increasing, but resources have not been allocated in response.
N-factorial computations, timing, etc.
Authors: Huber William H.
Published: April 2007

Dexter Schnebly's article in Volume 17, Number 1 (Spring 1991) raises some interesting questions regarding the timing of a program to compute the base-10 representations of factorials of small integers 3 <= N <= 21000. I wrote a short program to investigate.
SCinet '91—Supercomputing '91s gigabit network
Authors: Nussbaum Alex
Published: April 2007

Albuquerque, NM: In a spirit of cooperation unparalleled in the computing business, technicians, company CEOs, scientists, and engineers worked together to create SCinet '91, a gigabit network designed specifically for the fourth conference on high-performance computing, SUPERCOMPUTING '91, held November 18-22 in Albuquerque. In addition to hundreds of person-hours in the past few weeks and several months of planning, donations of cable and equipment came from Cray Research, IBM, Digital Equipment, USWest Communications, Network Systems, Ultra Network Technologies, SynOptics Communications, Broadband Communications Products, Interop, Aquila Group, and Siecor to develop this unique example of the cooperation and networking envisioned in the National Research and Education Network (NREN). NREN is part of the President's High Performance Computing and Communication initiative, a bill that just passed in the House of Representatives and is currently in the Senate. D. Allan Bromley, Science Advisor to the President, gave the keynote address at SUPERCOMPUTING '91 and expressed strong hope that the bill would pass.
Visual programming in an X Windows workstation environment
Authors: Canning James , Pelland David , Sliger Sharon
Published: April 2007

The concept of visual programming, merged with contemporary user interfaces for workstations has tremendous potential to transform non high level programmers into visual programmers. Furthermore, visual programming provides an excellent prototyping environment, one which allows the user to intuitively grasp difficult concepts. In this paper we describe our visual programming environment, termed
Eyes
, and explain how we intend to apply it toward education.
XWIB
Authors: Tagliavini Roberta , Rondeau Stephen , Chin Steven
Published: April 2007

Input to scientific programs (particularly, numerical simulation programs) traditionally requires an in-depth knowledge of complex and interdependent syntactic, semantic, and conceptual information. The effort to acquire this knowledge can deter a novice user from learning a program or cause an expert user to make errors. The XWIB (X-Windows Interface Builder) tool is designed to reduce this cognitive burden by supporting the specification and execution of a graphical user interface oriented toward creating input files for scientific programs.
An examination of strategies for estimating capacity to share among private workstations
Authors: Mutka Matt W.
Published: April 2007

The effective management of a cluster of private workstations requires an examination of the characteristics of the usage patterns of workstations. This paper analyzes workstation usage patterns in order to understand opportunities for exploiting idle capacity. Our study is based on traces of user workstation activity in a university environment. It identifies two areas where enhancements can be made. One identified area is the ability of a manager of the shared capacity of a workstation cluster to schedule jobs with deadline constraints. This opportunity is the result of an ability to make good predictions of the time-varying amount of capacity that is available for sharing. A simple prediction strategy is developed which is shown to have only a small amount of error. For the second area of enhancement, we show that it is feasible to allocate partitions of workstations for specific periods. This aids those users who on occasions need exclusive access to several machines. We examine the profile of periods during which exclusive access to partitions can be given, the rate that owners preempt users of partitions, and the distribution of inter-preemption intervals.
SID
Authors: Crawford Tami L.
Published: April 2007

Humans have powerful image processing systems which can assist in managing large amount of information. Program visualization can be used to exploit this capability to make complex systems manageable. In addition to being a tool for managing complexity, program visualization can support the maintenance of conceptual integrity, by providing a framework for viewing the program as a whole.This paper presents SID, a program visualization tool. The program view is determined by a control panel, which is accessed by the user and a knowledge based assistant called the Gue. SID is a prototype system for viewing C++ programs.
The role of LIA-1 in software portability
Authors: Dawson Jeffrey , Payne Mary , Schaffert Craig
Published: April 2007

The second committee draft of
Language independent arithmetic - Part 1: Integer and floating point arithmetic
is now available. This document was formerly called the
Language Compatible Arithmetic Standard
(LCAS) and is now referred to as LIA-1. This draft was prepared by ISO/IEC JTC1/SC22/WG11, with assistance from standards committees in several countries.
A class of numerical integration rules with first order derivatives
Authors: Al-Alaoui Mohamad Adnan
Published: April 2007

A novel approach to deriving a family of quadrature formulae is presented. The first member of the new family is the corrected trapezoidal rule. The second member, a two-segment rule, is obtained by interpolating the corrected trapezoidal rule and the Simpson one-third rule. The third member, a three-segment rule, is obtained by interpolating the corrected trapezoidal rule and the Simpson three-eights rule. The fourth member, a four-segment rule is obtained by interpolating the two-segment rule with the Boole rule. The process can be carried on to generate a whole class of integration rules by interpolating the proposed rules appropriately with the Newton-Cotes rules to cancel out an additional term in the Euler-MacLaurin error formula. The resulting rules integrate correctly polynomials of degrees less or equal to n+3 if n is even and n+2 if n is odd, where n is the number of segments of the single application rules. The proposed rules have excellent round-off properties, close to those of the trapezoidal rule. Members of the new family obtain with two additional functional evaluations the same order of errors as those obtained by doubling the number of segments in applying the Romberg integration to Newton-Cotes rules. Members of the proposed family are shown to be viable alternatives to Gaussian quadrature.
Restructuring the BLAS level 1 routine for computing the modified givens transformation
Authors: Hopkins Tim
Published: April 2007

We look at how both logical restructuring and improvements available from successive versions of Fortran allow us to reduce the complexity (measured by a number of the commonly used software metrics) of the Level 1 BLAS code used to compute the modified Givens transformation. With these reductions in complexity we claim that we have improved both the maintainability and clarity of the code; in addition, we report a fix to a minor problem with the original code. The performance of two commercial Fortran restructuring tools is also reported.
A comparison of methods for accelerating convergence of Newton's method for multiple polynomial roots
Authors: McNamee John Michael
Published: April 2007

Newton's method for solving polynomial equations converges only linearly to a multiple root. The speed of several methods for accelerating the convergence have been compared numerically. The Madsen-Reid method proved to be the fastest, with the Aitken and Ostrowsky methods close behind.
Obstacles which split computer science and numerical analysis
Authors: Chan Tony F.
Published: April 2007

This article reports on a panel discussion with the same title at the "Workshop on Problems Relating Computer Science to Numerical Analysis" held at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute at Berkeley, California on January 17, 1986. Speeches by the four panelists (Chorin, Collela, Kahan and Karp) are summarized, as well as discussions initiated by other participants. Additional comments by four leading scientists in this interdisciplinary area (Denning, Gear, Perlis and Rice) are included in an appendix.
A review of point five: an analysis and modeling system
Authors: MArcoulides George A. , Marcoulides Laura D.
Published: April 2007

Point Five (Pacific Crest Software Inc.) is an analysis and modelling system designed for a wide range of users. In its simplest form, Point Five can be considered a calculator with over 50 built in functions for statistics, matrix algebra, finance, accounting, and a simple graphics package for visually displaying results.
Note on a pseudorandom number generator
Authors: Fullerton James
Published: April 2007

A function for generating pseudorandom numbers on programmable calculators is evaluated and found to be deficient.
Designing software to be used up and protecting it from pirates
Authors: Ehlmann Byron K.
Published: April 2007

Software products by their very nature are designed to be used forever. However, there are some real advantages in purposefully designing them to be "used up." These advantages accrue to both the software vendor and the customer and pertain to product marketing, pricing, support, and protection from software piracy. what is being proposed here is "exhaustible software" versus the normal inexhaustible variety.
A few notes on simulating program efficiency
Authors: Kozlowski Aleksander T.
Published: April 2007

Methods of increasing program efficiency are presented on the basis of program simulating data reception phenomena coded in Pascal-Turbo and executed on an IBM PC using Intel 8086 μP under DOS 3.1. The results obtained show clearly that these methods are realy effective, reducing the average program execution time by roughly 35 times - i.e. form 105 to roughly 3 hours. Although, all the results were obtained using a particular high-level language and PC, the methods described are so versatile and general that they can be recommended for any high-level language and any PC.
Response to "The NeXT Computer" by Tim Dietrich
Authors: Byrne Thomas
Published: April 2007

Just a few quick lines to express gratitude for the August 1989 issue. Tim Dietrich's "The NeXT Computer" was exactly what was needed at the right moment. I would like to know more about this system specifically about any plans to expand into multiuser capability, support for plotters and scanners, spreadsheet (123, EXEL), running MS DOS things (perhaps on a board), transfering MS DOS things, preserving the value of past investment (what can be ported over and what can't).
Design of a simplified pipeline processor for floating point addition (SFPA)
Authors: Bhama Satyendra
Published: April 2007

The SPFA processor is a pipeline processor for floating point addition. The arithmatic unit, as well as the memory unit, have been pipelined, and thus, constitute four basic modules on which four sets of data are operated upon simultaneously. Apart from these, there is a control unit which performs the sequencing of operations, a latch enable unit and an input unit with a keyboard which allows human interface.
Fortran 8x—its public review
Authors: Smith Brian T.
Published: April 2007

The ANSI Standards Subcommittee X3J3 has recently released the draft proposed Fortran standard [1] for public review. The proposed revision, informally known as Fortran 8x, is being reviewed, beginning October 23, 1987, and ending February 23, 1988. It represents an upward compatible revision of the current standard Fortran 77 [2] in the sense that all Fortran 77 standard-conforming programs conform to the proposed Fortran 8x language.
Query optimization using the concept of restricted topologies
Authors: Unger E. A. , Jantz Diane
Published: April 2007

Optimizing the time and or cost of processing a query within a distributed network involves consideration of a large number of factors that reside with a complex problem environment. The complexity of this environment has led most research in the field to simplify the problem by assuming many factors to be constant or by ignoring them. After an evaluation of the entire problem environment, a method termed topologies is proposed for simplifying the problem without necessarily ignoring factors. Topologies are environments which describe the problem space either statically or dynamically. These can be used in combination to determine a reasonable problem space to the level of dynamic change that is required. Once a query topology (i.e., a subnetwork which can respond to the query) is formed from the topologies describing the system, the problem space is constrained to accommodate the user request, and an extant optimization procedure can be applied to effect a solution.
Automated temperature scanning for hyperthermia therapy
Authors: Engler Mark J. , Gleicher Michael L.
Published: April 2007

Hyperthermia is a recently legitimized method for the treatment of cancer. Hyperthermia treatments consist of raising tumor temperatures above 42°C. These temperatures are usually induced with electromagnetic or ultrasonic applicators. Hyperthermia has been found especially effective in conjunction with conventional radiotherapy. In comparison with other more established therapies, hyperthermia is in an early state of technological development.
The stiff integrators in the NAG library
Authors: Berzins M. , Brankin R. W. , Gladwell I.
Published: April 2007

We have designed a new generation of stiff ordinary differential equation (ODE) solvers for the NAG LIbrary. They replace existing routines which are functionally inferior and have much less user-friendly interfaces. The redesign provides:(i) continuity and stability for users of NAG stiff solvers;(ii) general simplification of interfaces;(iii) new functionality - solving implicit and differential/algebraic systems;(iv) flexibly structured open ended software (based on implicit ODE methods) so that adding new integration methods is a simple matter;(v) a design which facilitates using the solvers from other packages;(vi) an interface which permits the solvers to be used at the "assembly language" level in packages written in more "robust" languages than Fortran77 (for example ADA).
Fuzzy system models on an IBM PC
Authors: Thorndike Alan M.
Published: April 2007

Explanations of fuzzy sets usually start out with some example like the statement "John is tall". The statement conveys some information to us, but there is an element of uncertainty and no measurement of John's height is provided. It implies some set of heights greater than perhaps 5 feet 11 inches that would normally be considered tall, but there is not even any clear dividing line between "tall", "medium", and "short". Much human knowledge and thinking is like that. Fuzzy sets and systems are a rather ponderous attempt to provide a well-defined mathematical and logical procedure for dealing with such information. In general they appeal to people interested in such areas as artificial intelligence and linguistics.
The precursors of personal computing
Authors: Press Larry
Published: April 2007

I am compiling an anthology of historical papers which laid the groundwork for today's workstations and personal computers. The following list is preliminary, based mostly on personal recollection and a little library research and suggestions from others.
A Bayesian probability approach to predicting student performance in introductory computer science courses
Authors: Wiig D. M.
Published: April 2007

This writer is currently conducting research on the academic performance of students in the introductory computing classes at Grand View College. The major premise of the study is that although these introductory courses have been taught for the past nine years, there has been no systematic attempt to evaluate causal factors pertaining to student performance in these classes, and to then incorporate that information into curriculum planning and development.
Attitudes toward unauthorized software copying: general public vs. business faculty member
Authors: Lin J.
Published: April 2007

Computer criminals can take many forms; such as the computer hacker in Superman III who divert funds, cheques or currency; or clerks who can access to a central computerized inventory system and steal merchandise without a trace; or managers who use computers to modify investment portfolios and pension fund holdings.
Computerized writing tools for the 80's and 90's
Authors: Hanson R.
Published: April 2007

The traditional setting for a person composing a paper is be seated in front of an aging typewriter surrounded by handwritten notes, empty coffee cups and crumpled typewriter pages. Today, at least for those with a sufficiently large computer budget, the typewriter has been replaced with a computer running a word processor. While word processors were a major step forward, they did not address all the steps of a writing effort. Producing a paper or book usually involves the following four steps:[TABLE]
A proof of H. K. Hodge's induction formula and the number of zeros in which
N
] ends
Authors: Rosselló C.
Published: April 2007

I have read the paper of H. K. Hodge on integer arithmetic and I find it very interesting. However two questions arised when I was reading the paper. First, is there an algorithm to compute the
exact
number of zeros in which
N
! ends?, and second, can we easily prove the induction formula?