bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
DOLPHIN
Authors: Angiulli Fabrizio , Fassetti Fabio
Published: April 2009

In this work a novel distance-based outlier detection algorithm, named DOLPHIN, working on disk-resident datasets and whose I/O cost corresponds to the cost of sequentially reading the input dataset file twice, is presented.

It is both theoretically and empirically shown that the main memory usage of DOLPHIN amounts to a small fraction of the dataset and that DOLPHIN has linear time performance with respect to the dataset size. DOLPHIN gains efficiency by naturally merging together in a unified schema three strategies, namely the selection policy of objects to be maintained in main memory, usage of pruning rules, and similarity search techniques. Importantly, similarity search is accomplished by the algorithm without the need of preliminarily indexing the whole dataset, as other methods do.

The algorithm is simple to implement and it can be used with any type of data, belonging to either metric or nonmetric spaces. Moreover, a modification to the basic method allows DOLPHIN to deal with the scenario in which the available buffer of main memory is smaller than its standard requirements. DOLPHIN has been compared with state-of-the-art distance-based outlier detection algorithms, showing that it is much more efficient.
Generalizing neural branch prediction
Authors: Jiménez Daniel A.
Published: April 2009

Improved branch prediction accuracy is essential to sustaining instruction throughput with today's deep pipelines. Traditional branch predictors exploit correlations between pattern history and branch outcome to predict branches, but there is a stronger and more natural correlation between path history and branch outcome. We explore the potential for exploiting this correlation. We introduce
piecewise linear branch prediction
, an idealized branch predictor that develops a set of linear functions, one for each program path to the branch to be predicted, that separate predicted taken from predicted not taken branches. Taken together, all of these linear functions form a piecewise linear decision surface. We present a limit study of this predictor showing its potential to greatly improve predictor accuracy.

We then introduce a practical implementable branch predictor based on piecewise linear branch prediction. In making our predictor practical, we show how a parameterized version of it unifies the previously distinct concepts of perceptron prediction and path-based neural prediction. Our new branch predictor has implementation costs comparable to current prominent predictors in the literature while significantly improving accuracy. For a deeply pipelined simulated microarchitecture our predictor with a 256-KB hardware budget improves the harmonic mean normalized instructions-per-cycle rate by 8% over both the original path-based neural predictor and 2Bc-
gskew
. The average misprediction rate is decreased by 16% over the path-based neural predictor and by 22% over 2Bc-
gskew
.
Abstracting access patterns of dynamic memory using regular expressions
Authors: Jeon Jinseong , Shin Keoncheol , Han Hwansoo
Published: April 2009

Unless the speed gap between CPU and memory disappears, efficient memory usage remains a decisive factor for performance. To optimize data usage of programs in the presence of the memory hierarchy, we are particularly interested in two compiler techniques:
pool allocation
and
field layout restructuring
. Since foreseeing runtime behaviors of programs at compile time is difficult, most of the previous work relied on profiling. On the contrary, our goal is to develop a fully automatic compiler that statically transforms input codes to use memory efficiently. Noticing that
regular expressions
, which denote repetition explicitly, are sufficient for memory access patterns, we describe how to extract memory access patterns as regular expressions in detail. Based on static patterns presented in regular expressions, we apply pool allocation to repeatedly accessed structures and exploit field layout restructuring according to field affinity relations of chosen structures. To make a scalable framework, we devise and apply new abstraction techniques, which build and interpret access patterns for the whole programs in a bottom-up fashion. We implement our analyses and transformations with the CIL compiler. To verify the effect and scalability of our scheme, we examine 17 benchmarks including 2 SPECINT 2000 benchmarks whose source lines of code are larger than 10,000. Our experiments demonstrate that the static layout transformations for dynamic memory can reduce L1D cache misses by 16% and execution times by 14% on average.
Learning more about active learning
Authors: Stemp-Morlock Graeme
Published: April 2009

Active learning algorithms are producing substantial savings in label complexity over passive learning approaches.
IT ecosystem in peril
Authors: Joch Alan
Published: April 2009

Experts warn the U.S. may soon relinquish its leadership role in IT research and development.
Emerging marketsIT and the world's "bottom billion"
Authors: Heeks Richard
Published: April 2009

How can information technology be best applied to address problems and provide opportunities for inhabitants of the world's poorest countries?
Kode viciousSystem changes and side effects
Authors: Neville-Neil George V.
Published: April 2009

Comparing the potential benefits of system changes that help and the detriments of changes made for the sake of change.
Technology strategy and managementStrategies for difficult (and Darwinian) economic times
Authors: Cusumano Michael
Published: April 2009

How the axiom of survival of the fittest applies in the context of a global economic downturn.
ViewpointComputing as social science
Authors: Buckley Michael
Published: April 2009

Changing the way computer science is taught in college by encouraging students to develop solutions to socially relevant problems.
Cybercrime 2.0
Authors: Provos Niels , Rajab Moheeb Abu , Mavrommatis Panayiotis
Published: April 2009

Web-based malware attacks are more insidious than ever. What can be done to stem the tide?
Roofline
Authors: Williams Samuel , Waterman Andrew , Patterson David
Published: April 2009

The Roofline model offers insight on how to improve the performance of software and hardware.
A direct path to dependable software
Authors: Jackson Daniel
Published: April 2009

Who could fault an approach that offers greater credibility at reduced cost?
Underground coal mine monitoring with wireless sensor networks
Authors: Li Mo , Liu Yunhao
Published: April 2009

Environment monitoring in coal mines is an important application of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) that has commercial potential. We discuss the design of a Structure-Aware Self-Adaptive WSN system, SASA. By regulating the mesh sensor network deployment and formulating a collaborative mechanism based on a regular beacon strategy, SASA is able to rapidly detect structure variations caused by underground collapses. We further develop a sound and robust mechanism for efficiently handling queries under instable circumstances. A prototype is deployed with 27 mica2 motes in a real coal mine. We present our implementation experiences as well as the experimental results. To better evaluate the scalability and reliability of SASA, we also conduct a large-scale trace-driven simulation based on real data collected from the experiments.
Security model and framework for information aggregation in sensor networks
Authors: Manulis Mark , Schwenk Jörg
Published: April 2009

Information aggregation is an important operation in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) executed for the purpose of monitoring and reporting environmental data. Due to the performance constraints of sensor nodes the in-network form of the aggregation is especially attractive since it allows saving expensive resources during frequent network queries. Easy accessibility of networks and nodes and almost no physical protection against corruptions raise high security challenges. Protection against attacks aiming to falsify the aggregated result is considered to be of prime importance.

In this article we design the first general framework for secure information aggregation in WSNs focusing on scenarios where aggregation is performed by one of its nodes. The framework achieves security against node corruptions and is based solely on the symmetric cryptographic primitives that are more suitable for WSNs in terms of efficiency. We analyze performance of the framework and unlike many previous approaches increase confidence in it by a rigorous proof of security within the specially designed
formal security model.
SGF
Authors: Huang Pei , Chen Hongyang , Xing Guoliang , Tan Yongdong
Published: April 2009

Limitation on available resources is a major challenge in wireless sensor networks. Due to high rates of unexpected node/link failures, robust data delivery through multiple hops also becomes a critical issue. In this article we present a state-free gradient-based forwarding (SGF) protocol to address these challenges. Nodes running SGF do not maintain states of neighbors or network topology and thus can scale to very large networks. Without using routing tables, SGF builds a cost field called
gradient
that provides each node the direction to forward data. The maintenance of gradient is purely driven by data transmissions and hence incurs little overhead. To adapt to transient channel variations and topology changes, the forwarder of a routing node is selected opportunistically among multiple candidate nodes through a distributed contention process. Simulation results show that SGF achieves significant energy savings and outperforms several existing data forwarding protocols in terms of packet delivery ratio and end-to-end delay.
Path coverage by a sensor field
Authors: Manohar Pallavi , Ram S. Sundhar , Manjunath D.
Published: April 2009

We analyze the statistical properties of the coverage of a one-dimensional path induced by a two-dimensional nonhomogeneous random sensor network. Sensor locations form a nonhomogeneous Poisson process and sensing area for the sensors are circles of random independent and identically distributed radii. We first characterize the coverage of a straight-line path by the nonhomogeneous one-dimensional Boolean model. We then obtain an equivalent M

t

/G

t

/∞, queue whose busy period statistics is the same as the coverage statistics of the line. We obtain
k
-coverage statistics for an arbitrary point and a segment on the
x
-axis. We provide upper and lower bounds on the probability of complete
k
-coverage of a segment. We illustrate all our results for the case of the sensor deployment having a “Laplacian” intensity function.
Analytic evaluation of target detection in heterogeneous wireless sensor networks
Authors: Lazos Loukas , Poovendran Radha , Ritcey James A.
Published: April 2009

In this article, we address the problem of target detection in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). We formulate the target detection problem as a line-set intersection problem and use integral geometry to analytically characterize the probability of target detection for both stochastic and deterministic deployments. Compared to previous work, we analyze WSNs where sensors have heterogeneous sensing capabilities. For the stochastic case, we evaluate the probability that the target is detected by at least
k
sensors and compute the free path until the target is first detected. For the deterministic case, we show an analogy between the target detection problem and the problem of minimizing the average symbol error probability in 2D digital modulation schemes. Motivated by this analogy, we propose a heuristic sensor placement algorithm, called DATE, that makes use of well-known signal constellations for determining good WSN constellations. We also propose a heuristic called CDATE for connected WSN constellations, that yields high target detection probability.
A software framework for abstract expression of coordinate-free linear algebra and optimization algorithms
Authors: Padula Anthony D. , Scott Shannon D. , Symes William W.
Published: April 2009

The Rice Vector Library is a collection of C++ classes expressing core concepts (vector, function,…) of calculus in Hilbert space with minimal implementation dependence, and providing standardized interfaces behind which to hide application-dependent implementation details (data containers, function objects). A variety of coordinate-free algorithms from linear algebra and optimization, including Krylov subspace methods and various relatives of Newton's method for nonlinear equations and constrained and unconstrained optimization, may be expressed purely in terms of this system of classes. The resulting code may be used
without alteration
in a wide range of control, design, and parameter estimation applications, in serial and parallel computing environments.
An out-of-core sparse Cholesky solver
Authors: Reid John K. , Scott Jennifer A.
Published: April 2009

Direct methods for solving large sparse linear systems of equations are popular because of their generality and robustness. Their main weakness is that the memory they require usually increases rapidly with problem size. We discuss the design and development of the first release of a new symmetric direct solver that aims to circumvent this limitation by allowing the system matrix, intermediate data, and the matrix factors to be stored externally. The code, which is written in Fortran and called HSL_MA77, implements a multifrontal algorithm. The first release is for positive-definite systems and performs a Cholesky factorization. Special attention is paid to the use of efficient dense linear algebra kernel codes that handle the full-matrix operations on the frontal matrix and to the input/output operations. The input/output operations are performed using a separate package that provides a virtual-memory system and allows the data to be spread over many files; for very large problems these may be held on more than one device.

Numerical results are presented for a collection of 30 large real-world problems, all of which were solved successfully.
KSSOLV—a MATLAB toolbox for solving the Kohn-Sham equations
Authors: Yang Chao , Meza Juan C. , Lee Byounghak , Wang Lin-Wang
Published: April 2009

We describe the design and implementation of KSSOLV, a MATLAB toolbox for solving a class of nonlinear eigenvalue problems known as the
Kohn-Sham equations
. These types of problems arise in electronic structure calculations, which are nowadays essential for studying the microscopic quantum mechanical properties of molecules, solids, and other nanoscale materials. KSSOLV is well suited for developing new algorithms for solving the Kohn-Sham equations and is designed to enable researchers in computational and applied mathematics to investigate the convergence properties of the existing algorithms. The toolbox makes use of the object-oriented programming features available in MATLAB so that the process of setting up a physical system is straightforward and the amount of coding effort required to prototype, test, and compare new algorithms is significantly reduced. All of these features should also make this package attractive to other computational scientists and students who wish to study small- to medium-size systems.
Distributed SBP Cholesky factorization algorithms with near-optimal scheduling
Authors: Gustavson Fred G. , Karlsson Lars , Kågström Bo
Published: April 2009

The minimal block storage Distributed Square Block Packed (DSBP) format for distributed memory computing on symmetric and triangular matrices is presented. Three algorithm variants (Basic, Static, and Dynamic) of the blocked right-looking Cholesky factorization are designed for the DSBP format, implemented, and evaluated. On our target machine, all variants outperform standard full-storage implementations while saving almost half the storage. Communication overhead is shown to be virtually eliminated by the Static and Dynamic variants, both of which take advantage of hardware parallelism to hide communication costs. The Basic variant is shown to yield comparable or slightly better performance than the full-storage ScaLAPACK routine PDPOTRF while clearly outperformed by both Static and Dynamic. Models of execution assuming zero communication costs and overhead are developed. For medium- and larger-sized problems, the Static schedule is near optimal on our target machine based on comparisons with these models and measurements of synchronization overhead.
P/PA-SPTF
Authors: Bahn Hyokyung , Lee Soyoon , Noh Sam H.
Published: April 2009

MEMS-based storage is foreseen as a promising storage media that provides high-bandwidth, low-power consumption, high-density, and low cost. Due to these versatile features, MEMS storage is anticipated to be used for a wide range of applications from storage for small handheld devices to high capacity mass storage servers. However, MEMS storage has vastly different physical characteristics compared to a traditional disk. First, MEMS storage has thousands of heads that can be activated simultaneously. Second, the media of MEMS storage is a square structure which is different from the platter structure of disks. This article presents a new request scheduling algorithm for MEMS storage called P-SPTF that makes use of the aforementioned characteristics. P-SPTF considers the parallelism of MEMS storage as well as the seek time of requests on the two dimensional square structure. We then present another algorithm called PA-SPTF that considers the aging factor so that starvation resistance is improved. Simulation studies show that PA-SPTF improves the performance of MEMS storage by up to 39.2% in terms of the average response time and 62.4% in terms of starvation resistance compared to the widely acknowledged SPTF algorithm. We also show that there exists a spectrum of scheduling algorithms that subsumes both the P-SPTF and PA-SPTF algorithms.
A new approach to secure logging
Authors: Ma Di , Tsudik Gene
Published: April 2009

The need for secure logging is well-understood by the security professionals, including both researchers and practitioners. The ability to efficiently verify all (or some) log entries is important to any application employing secure logging techniques. In this article, we begin by examining the state of the art in secure logging and identify some problems inherent to systems based on trusted third-party servers. We then propose a different approach to secure logging based upon recently developed Forward-Secure Sequential Aggregate (FssAgg) authentication techniques. Our approach offers both space-efficiency and provable security. We illustrate two concrete schemes—one private-verifiable and one public-verifiable—that offer practical secure logging without any reliance on online trusted third parties or secure hardware. We also investigate the concept of immutability in the context of forward-secure sequential aggregate authentication to provide finer grained verification. Finally we evaluate proposed schemes and report on our experience with implementing them within a secure logging system.
Techniques for Design and Implementation of Secure Reconfigurable PUFs
Authors: Majzoobi Mehrdad , Koushanfar Farinaz , Potkonjak Miodrag
Published: April 2009

Physically unclonable functions (PUFs) provide a basis for many security and digital rights management protocols. PUF-based security approaches have numerous comparative strengths with respect to traditional cryptography-based techniques, including resilience against physical and side channel attacks and suitability for lightweight protocols. However, classical delay-based PUF structures have a number of drawbacks including susceptibility to guessing, reverse engineering, and emulation attacks, as well as sensitivity to operational and environmental variations.

To address these limitations, we have developed a new set of techniques for FPGA-based PUF design and implementation. We demonstrate how reconfigurability can be exploited to eliminate the stated PUF limitations. We also show how FPGA-based PUFs can be used for privacy protection. Furthermore, reconfigurability enables the introduction of new techniques for PUF testing. The effectiveness of all the proposed techniques is validated using extensive implementations, simulations, and statistical analysis.
Trust-Based Design and Check of FPGA Circuits Using Two-Level Randomized ECC Structures
Authors: Dutt Shantanu , Li Li
Published: April 2009

A novel trust-based design method for FPGA circuits that uses error-correcting code (ECC) structures for detecting design tampers (changes, deletion of existing logic, and addition of extradesign logic-like Trojans) is proposed in this article. We determine ECC-based CLB (configuration logic block) parity groups and embed the check CLBs for each parity group in the FPGA circuit. During a trust-checking phase, a Test-Pattern Generator (TPG) and an Output Response Analyzer (ORA), configured in the FPGA, are used to check that each parity group of CLB outputs produce the expected parities. We use two levels of randomization to thwart attempts by an adversary to discover the parity groups and inject tampers that mask each other, or to tamper with the TPG and ORA so that design tampers remain undetected: (a) randomization of the mapping of the ECC parity groups to the CLB array; (b) randomization within each parity group of odd and even parities for different input combinations (classically, all ECC parity groups have even parities across all inputs). These randomizations along with the error-detecting property of the underlying ECC lead to design tampers being uncovered with very high probabilities, as we show both analytically and empirically. We also classify different CLB function structures and impose a parity group selection in which only similarly structured functions are randomly selected to be in the same parity group in order to minimize check function complexity. Using the 2D code as our underlying ECC and its 2-level randomization, our experiments with inserting 1-10 circuit CLB tampers and 1-5 extraneous logic CLBs in two medium-size circuits and a RISC processor circuit implemented on a Xilinx Spartan-3 FPGA show promising results of 100% tamper detection and 0% false alarms, obtained at a hardware overhead of only 7-10%.
Analysis of nonstationary stochastic simulations using classical time-series models
Authors: Brandão Rita Marques , Nova Acácio M. O. Porta
Published: April 2009

This article extends the use of classical autoregressive and moving average time-series models to the analysis of a variety of nonstationary discrete-event simulations. A thorough experimental evaluation shows that integrated and seasonal time-series models constitute very promising metamodels, especially for analyzing queueing system simulations under congested or cyclical traffic conditions. In some situations, stationarity-inducing transformations may be required before this methodology can be used. Our approach for efficient estimation of meaningful performance measures of selected responses in the target system is illustrated using a set of case studies taken from the simulation literature.
Web hypermedia content management system effort estimation model
Authors: Aggarwal Naveen , Prakash Nupur , Sofat Sanjeev
Published: April 2009

This study aims at creation of a well defined estimation model which can be used to estimate the effort required for designing and developing the web hypermedia content management systems. The data from the different content management system projects are studied and the linear regression approach is used to finalize the model. This model also provides guidelines to calculate phase wise distribution of effort. The model is designed to help project manager to estimate effort at the very early stage of requirement analysis. A set of questionnaire is used to estimate the complexity of the project, which has to be filled after completing the initial requirement analysis. Final effort is estimated using the project size and the different adjustment factors. For better calculation of these adjustments factors, these are categorized into three categories based on their characteristics such as Production and General system characteristics. This model is proposed to be used differently for the different types of projects. These projects are categorized based on their size and total/build effort ratio. The size of the project is estimated by using the modified object point analysis approach. The estimated effort is further phase wise distributed for better scheduling of the project. Another questionnaire is used to refine the model and it has to be filled by the project managers after completing the project. The proposed model is validated by studying twelve completed projects taken from industry and seventy different projects completed by the students. The proposed model shows a great improvement as compared to the earlier models used in effort estimation of CMS projects.
Models for software defects and testing strategies
Authors: Bagchi Tapan P.
Published: April 2009

This note analytically assesses the risk of releasing defective software that cannot be exhaustively tested, and of needlessly testing defect-free software. Specifically, it quantifies the probability of committing Type I (α) and Type II errors (β) in software development when one may release software that still is faulty or do needless testing since the test methods themselves may not be perfect. The study uses Truncated-Poisson and geometric distributed path lengths and Bernoulli-type inspection errors to link α and β to software design features, the development philosophies employed, and certain aspects that include code quality, cyclomatic complexity and the average length of basis paths. For risk reduction this study finds quantitative justification for raising test coverage, perfecting the test methods, the adoption of recent innovations and programming methods such as component-based design, SOA and XP as ways to raise the likelihood that the product developed will be fault free. Results are relatively robust with respect to the probability distributions assumed.
Fairness and conspiracy concepts in concurrent systems
Authors: Bandyopadhyay Anup Kumar
Published: April 2009

Many different fairness notions are available in literature. One should choose the proper definition that match with the system under consideration. In this paper we consider two known fairness definitions, viz., weak fairness and strong fairness. It is argued that these concepts are suitable for determining the degree of fairness of a given system. For only starvation freedom we require a minimum degree of fairness which we call least fairness. This idea is illustrated using two practical examples. Conspiracy is another very important issue in concurrent system. We have defined conspiracy in connection with all the fairness notions. Conspiracy resistant implementation is illustrated using a starvation free solution to dining philosophers problem. Dijkstra's weakest precondition calculus is used as the analytical tool.
Metric based testability model for object oriented design (MTMOOD)
Authors: Khan R. A. , Mustafa K.
Published: April 2009

This paper does an extensive review on testability of object oriented software, and put forth some relevant information about class-level testability. Testability has been identified as a key factor to software quality, and emphasis is being drawn to predict class testability early in the software development life cycle. A Metrics Based Model for Object Oriented Design Testability (MTMOOD) has been proposed. The relationship from design properties to testability is weighted in accordance with its anticipated influence and importance. A suit of adequate object-oriented metrics useful in determining testability of a system has been proposed, which may be used to locate parts of design that could be error prone. Identification of changes in theses parts early could significantly improve the quality of the final product and hence decrease the testing effort. The proposed model has been further empirically validated and contextual interpretation has been drawn using industrial software projects.
Defining defects, errors, and service degradations
Authors: Levine Gertrude Neuman
Published: April 2009

The study of defects is a principal topic of software systems, af-fecting all phases of a system's lifecycle. Defects are the cause of errors and service degradations. Unresolved errors cause failures. If defects cannot be prevented effectively, then error control me-chanisms must be evaluated.

We introduce a model to distinguish between defects, errors, and service degradations. A two-dimensional classification scheme is developed for defects, defined by the types of process interaction and software corruption that are involved. A third dimension is added to this taxonomy for defects that cause service degradation, based on the deviations in service quality that are tolerated. We investigate the role of service degradation in error prevention.
Software faults prediction based on grey system theory
Authors: Mao Chengying
Published: April 2009

Whenever a new maintenance stage is started or a new software version is released, it is necessary to predict the possible number of failures. The data sequence recorded during software maintenance is characterized by small samples and uncertainty, so the modeling technology in grey system theory is very suitable for handling such data. The paper proposed the basic prediction framework based on grey model GM(1, 1) firstly, and then two prediction models and implementation steps are represented according to two special applications, respectively. One is used for interval prediction of software faults, and the other is used for predicting fault number with the direction of related factors recorded during software maintenance process. The results of two examples showed that using three different techniques for three different cases can achieved more accurate prediction.
Model-based test cases synthesis using UML interaction diagrams
Authors: Nayak Ashalatha , Samanta Debasis
Published: April 2009

UML 2.0 interaction diagrams model interactions in complex systems by means of operation fragments and a systematic testing approach is required for the identification and selection of test cases. The major problem for test cases synthesis from such an interaction diagram is to arrive at a comprehensive system behavior in the presence of multiple, nested fragments. In this regard, our approach is towards systematic interpretation of flow of controls as well as their subsequent usage in the test case synthesis. We also simplify the proposed flow of controls on the basis of control primitives resulting from UML 2.0 fragments and bring it to a testable form known as intermediate testable model (ITM), which is suitable for deriving system level test cases.
Relativity in software engineering measurements
Authors: Pandey R. K.
Published: April 2009

Though the relevance of the term relativity in software engineering measurements may appear strange, as the term has been known to have been associated with the name of the famous physicist of the 20thcentury Albert Einstien for his landmark work on the theory of relativity. The basic idea behind the theory of relativity is that since space and time are relative concepts rather than absolute accordingly physical measurements are also relative not absolute, and that is how the principle of length contraction and time dilation were discovered. Somewhat similar phenomenon is observed in the software engineering measurements of various attributes of the software products, software processes and software projects. For example, the value of LOC metric because of no standard definition of line of source code differs from language to language. Similarly Halstead's software science metrics differs depending upon what implementation language is used. In this paper an investigation is made into such aspects of software engineering metrics and their overall impact on the software development activities.
Testing polymorphism in object oriented systems for improving software quality
Authors: Saini Dinesh Kumar
Published: April 2009

With object-oriented approaches, testing should center on objects, classes, generic classes and super classes, inheritance and polymorphism, instead of subprograms. In object-oriented software test, the feature of inheritance and polymorphism produces the new obstacle during dynamic testing. Polymorphism becomes a problem in dealing with object-oriented software testing. In this paper various issues and problems that are associated with testing polymorphic behavior of objects in object oriented systems is discussed. I propose a testers perspective method to assess the polymorphism in design stage. This way it also provides useful information for developer to probe into the fault that is hidden from test in early stage. Thus it will help in improving the quality of object oriented software.
Performance evaluation for object oriented software systems
Authors: Saxena Vipin , Arora Deepak
Published: April 2009

Distributed computing has become an integral part of large and complex computation used in large organizations. It not only hides the complexities of processing from its user but it also delivers high-level security, reliability and availability. In this regard, software and hardware competence must be considered as a performance parameter for any distributed computer system. For maximum throughput, the software running on any hardware architecture should be capable enough to utilize the available resources at its highest efficiency. The main objective of this paper is to measure the performance of processors for different object-oriented software system frameworks. The authors have chosen two types of object oriented software system frameworks: C#, based on Microsoft .NET Framework and Visual C++, based on Microsoft Foundation Classes. For processing needs, two processors: Pentium D and Core 2 Duo are considered, each having multiple execution cores in it. Before evaluating the performance of these processors, a UML model is presented for the process execution in a distributed computing scenario. Along with UML class and sequence diagram, a comparative study between performances of aforesaid software system is also reported.
Performance of function point analysis through UML modeling
Authors: Saxena Vipin , Shrivastava Manish
Published: April 2009

In software development, estimation of software size is one of the major activities. Various types of metrics are available for computation of software size. It is necessary to check the performance of each metric. Lines of code, objects and function point analysis are widely used for measurements of software size, cost and schedule of development. The Function Point (FP) Analysis is one of the most promising techniques for measuring the functionality delivered by a system. Mostly, this method is used with traditional software development practices but can also be applied for object-oriented software development. The present paper deals with judging of the performance of function point analysis for the object-oriented software systems by the use of well know Unified Modeling Language (UML). A case study of Web-based Document Management System is reported for FP analysis through UML class diagram.
Use of genetic algorithm in generation of feasible test data
Authors: Srivastava Praveen Ranjan , Gupta Priyanka , Arrawatia Yogita , Yadav Suman
Published: April 2009

In recent years researchers have applied the concept of Genetic Algorithm in generation of test data for effective software testing. Several attempts have been made to develop a system to generate test data automatically. The existing such systems do not guarantee to generate test data in only feasible paths. This paper proposes a method to generate feasible test data, using Genetic Algorithm.
Report on the 4th international ERCIM workshop on software evolution and evolvability (Evol '08)
Authors: Wermelinger Michel , Wernick Paul , Bryce Ciarán
Published: April 2009

The 4th International ERCIM Workshop on Software Evolution and Evolvability (Evol '08) took place on 15-16 September 2008 in L'Aquila, co-located with the 23rd IEEE/ACM Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE). The workshop focused on research and practice related to the long-term evolution of software products. For the first time two separate events, devoted to practical and more abstract aspects of this area, combined into a single workshop which in its first iteration demonstrated the synergy hoped for from this combination.
Towards using architectural knowledge
Authors: Avgeriou Paris , Lago Patricia , Kruchten Philippe
Published: April 2009

The third workshop on Sharing and Reusing Architectural Knowledge (SHARK) was held jointly with ICSE 2008 in Leipzig, Germany. It featured two keynote talks, thirteen research position statements and three working groups that discussed on focused topics. This report presents the themes of the workshop, summarizes the results of the discussions held, and suggests some topics for future research.
Risks to the public
Authors: Neumann Peter G.
Published: April 2009

Edited by Peter G. Neumann (Risks Forum Moderator and Chairman of the ACM Committee on Computers and Public Policy), plus personal contributions by others, as indicated. Opinions expressed are individual rather than organizational, and all of the usual disclaimers apply. We address problems relating to software, hardware, people, and other circumstances relevant to computer systems. To economize on space, we include pointers to items in the online Risks Forum: (R i j) denotes RISKS vol i number j. Cited RISKS items generally identify contributors and sources, together with URLs. Official RISKS archives are available at www.risks.org (which redirects to Newcastle and gets you nice html formatting and a search engine courtesy of Lindsay Marshall; http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/i.j.html gets you (R i j)) and at ftp://www.sri.com/risks.
Eight conference on software engineering research and practice in Sweden (SERPS'08)
Authors: Torkar Richard , Gorschek Tony , Feldt Robert
Published: April 2009

The eight conference on software engineering research and practice in Sweden (SERPS'08) was held in Karlskrona, Sweden, on the 4th-5th of Nov. 2008. The aim with SERPS'08 is to bring researchers and industry practitioners together to discuss software engineering issues, problems, solutions and experiences, not necessarily from a Swedish perspective. During the conference a number of research and industry papers were presented and questions in connection to the presentations were discussed. This paper is a report on the discussions that took place, pointing towards needs and challenges as well as areas of interest in both academia and industry.
WikiSym
Authors: Cleaver Martin
Published: April 2009

This Wednesday 25th February marks just 8 months till WikiSym 2009. Planning is underway! We alternate the conference between being located in Europe and the Americas. This year we're in fabulous Florida, Orlando to be exact, and right next to Disney World. Co-located with OOPSLA, with WikiSym starting Sunday 25th Oct 2009, and running till Tuesday; OOPSLA spans Weds to Friday. While our membership bases have become very different (OOPSLA is purely a technology conference, but WikiSym's growth means it constitutes typically only 1/3 technologists), our organizations' history means we have become good at supporting one other.
EuroITV2009 conference focuses on networked television
Authors: Geerts David
Published: April 2009

EuroITV2009 is a forum for professionals not only from Europe, but from all over the world who are interested in, work with and do research on all aspects of interactive television. The conference will be held in the lively university town of Leuven, Belgium on 3, 4 and 5 June 2009. This annual conference features state-of-the-art academic as well as practitioner's work on different aspects of interactive television, e.g. IPTV, mobile TV, digital content production, entertainment computing, usability and user experience evaluation, changes in technical requirements and infrastructure and future technologies. EuroITV2009 is the seventh edition of the EuroITV conference series, which started in 2003 and has since been growing steadily. The conference has been held twice in Brighton (UK), and subsequently in Aalborg (Denmark), Athens (Greece), Amsterdam (The Netherlands) and Salzburg (Austria). More than 200 practitioners and academics attended EuroITV2008 in Salzburg. In 2009, we expect up to 300 participants to attend the conference in Leuven, Belgium. More information about the conference can be found at http://www.euroitv2009.org/.
Memory-level parallelism aware fetch policies for simultaneous multithreading processors
Authors: Eyerman Stijn , Eeckhout Lieven
Published: April 2009

A thread executing on a simultaneous multithreading (SMT) processor that experiences a long-latency load will eventually stall while holding execution resources. Existing long-latency load aware SMT fetch policies limit the amount of resources allocated by a stalled thread by identifying long-latency loads and preventing the thread from fetching more instructions—and in some implementations, instructions beyond the long-latency load are flushed to release allocated resources.

This article proposes an SMT fetch policy that takes into account the available memory-level parallelism (MLP) in a thread. The key idea proposed in this article is that in case of an isolated long-latency load (i.e., there is no MLP), the thread should be prevented from allocating additional resources. However, in case multiple independent long-latency loads overlap (i.e., there is MLP), the thread should allocate as many resources as needed in order to fully expose the available MLP. MLP-aware fetch policies achieve better performance for MLP-intensive threads on SMT processors, leading to higher overall system throughput and shorter average turnaround time than previously proposed fetch policies.
Where is social informatics?
Authors: Halavais Alexander
Published: April 2009

The term "social informatics," at least among those who work in one or more of the various fields it helps to unite, unavoidably elicits its originator and greatest advocate, Rob Kling. Kling coined the term in order to help describe a perspective in which information technologies were studied within their social contexts. It was also used to describe a new interdiscipline, one that drew computer science and the social sciences closer together, and that recognized a literature at this nexus as an emergent, cohesive whole. Kling answered the question "What is social informatics?" explicitly not only in widely read articles on the topic, but in public talks and private conversations. As the idea of social informatics has become more widely known, another question follows it: where is social informatics? Has it made an imprint on scholarly institutions?
Observed relationships between size measures of the internet
Authors: Carpenter Brian E.
Published: April 2009

This paper reports some observations on the relationships between three measures of the size of the Internet over more than ten years. The size of the BGP4 routing table, the number of active BGP4 Autonomous Systems, and a lower bound on the total size of the Internet, appear to have fairly simple relationships despite the Internet's growth by two orders of magnitude. In particular, it is observed that the size of the BGP4 system appears to have grown approximately in proportion to the square root of the lower-bound size of the globally addressable Internet. A simple model that partially explains this square law is described. It is not suggested that this observation and model have predictive value, since they cannot predict qualitative changes in the Internet topology. However, they do offer a new way to understand and monitor the scaling of the BGP4 system.
Comments on selecting ephemeral ports
Authors: Allman Mark
Published: April 2009

Careless selection of the ephemeral port number portion of a transport protocol's connection identifier has been shown to potentially degrade security by opening the connection up to injection attacks from "blind" or "off path" attackers--or, attackers that cannot directly observe the connection. This short paper empirically explores a number of algorithms for choosing the ephemeral port number that attempt to obscure the choice from such attackers and hence make mounting these blind attacks more difficult.
Flow processing and the rise of commodity network hardware
Authors: Greenhalgh Adam , Huici Felipe , Hoerdt Mickael , Papadimitriou Panagiotis , Handley Mark , Mathy Laurent
Published: April 2009

The Internet has seen a proliferation of specialized middlebox devices that carry out crucial network functionality such as load balancing, packet inspection and intrusion detection. Recent advances in CPU power, memory, buses and network connectivity have turned commodity PC hardware into a powerful network platform. Furthermore, commodity switch technologies have recently emerged offering the possibility to control the switching of flows in a fine-grained manner. Exploiting these new technologies, we present a new class of network architectures which enables flow processing and forwarding at unprecedented flexibility and low cost.
Reheating cold topics (in networking)
Authors: Crowcroft Jon
Published: April 2009

It has been proposed that research in certain areas is to be avoided when those areas have gone cold. While previous work concentrated on detecting the temperature of a research topic, this work addresses the question of changing the temperature of said topics. We make suggestions for a set of techniques to re-heat a topic that has gone cold. In contrast to other researchers who propose uncertain approaches involving creativity, @lateral thinking and imagination, we concern ourselves with deterministic approaches that are guaranteed to yield results1.
You must be joking...
Authors: Faloutsos Michalis
Published: April 2009

They say that music and mathematics are intertwined. I am not sure this is true, but I always wanted to use the word intertwined. The point is that my call for poetry received a overwhelmingly enthusiastic response from at least five people. My mailbox was literally flooded (I have a small mailbox). This article is a tribute to the poetry of science, or, as I like to call it, the Poetry of Science. You will be amazed.
SystemT
Authors: Krishnamurthy Rajasekar , Li Yunyao , Raghavan Sriram , Reiss Frederick , Vaithyanathan Shivakumar , Zhu Huaiyu
Published: April 2009

As applications within and outside the enterprise encounter increasing volumes of unstructured data, there has been renewed interest in the area of information extraction (IE) -- the discipline concerned with extracting structured information from unstructured text. Classical IE techniques developed by the NLP community were based on cascading grammars and regular expressions. However, due to the inherent limitations of grammarbased extraction, these techniques are unable to: (i) scale to large data sets, and (ii) support the expressivity requirements of complex information tasks. At the IBM Almaden Research Center, we are developing SystemT, an IE system that addresses these limitations by adopting an algebraic approach. By leveraging well-understood database concepts such as declarative queries and costbased optimization, SystemT enables scalable execution of complex information extraction tasks. In this paper, we motivate the SystemT approach to information extraction. We describe our extraction algebra and demonstrate the effectiveness of our optimization techniques in providing orders of magnitude reduction in the running time of complex extraction tasks.