bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Did somebody say virtual colonoscopy?
Authors: Essex David
Published: April 2009

Doctors are saving lives with virtual, 3D exams that are less invasive than a conventional optical colonoscopy.
Time to reboot
Authors: Violino Bob
Published: April 2009

A diverse, international group of more than 200 attendees met at the Rebooting Computing Summit to address the problems confronting computer science.
ViewpointResearch evaluation for computer science
Authors: Meyer Bertrand , Choppy Christine , Staunstrup Jørgen , van Leeuwen Jan
Published: April 2009

Reassessing the assessment criteria and techniques traditionally used in evaluating computer science research effectiveness.
Purpose-built languages
Authors: Shapiro Mike
Published: April 2009

The ecosystem of purpose-built languages is a key part of systems development.
ORM in dynamic languages
Authors: Richardson Chris
Published: April 2009

Dynamic languages offer a taste of object-relational mapping that eases application code.
Database and information-retrieval methods for knowledge discovery
Authors: Weikum Gerhard , Kasneci Gjergji , Ramanath Maya , Suchanek Fabian
Published: April 2009

Comprehensive knowledge bases would tap the Web's deepest information sources and relationships to address questions beyond today's keyword-based search engines.
Relative fitness modeling
Authors: Mesnier Michael P. , Wachs Matthew , Sambasivan Raja R. , Zheng Alice X. , Ganger Gregory R.
Published: April 2009

Relative fitness is a new approach to modeling the performance of storage devices (e.g., disks and RAID arrays). In contrast to a conventional model, which predicts the performance of an application's I/O on a given device, a relative fitness model predicts performance
differences
between devices. The result is significantly more accurate predictions.
Integrating NAND flash devices onto servers
Authors: Roberts David , Kgil Taeho , Mudge Trevor
Published: April 2009

Flash is a widely used storage device in portable mobile devices such as smart phones, digital cameras, and MP3 players. It provides high density and low power, properties that are appealing for other computing domains. In this paper, we examine its use in the server domain. Wear-out has the potential to limit the use of Flash in this domain. To seriously consider Flash in the server domain, architectural support must exist to address this lack of reliability. This paper first provides a survey of current and potential Flash usage models in a data center. We then advocate using Flash as an extended system memory usage model---OS managed disk cache---and describe the necessary architectural changes. Specifically we propose two key changes. The first improves performance and reliability by splitting Flash-based disk caches into separate read and write regions. The second improves reliability by employing a programmable Flash memory controller. It changes the error code strength (number of correctable bits) and the number of bits that a memory cell can store (cell density) in response to the demands of the application.
Distributed localization for anisotropic sensor networks
Authors: Lim Hyuk , Hou Jennifer C.
Published: April 2009

In this article, we address the issue of localization in anisotropic sensor networks. Anisotropic networks differ from isotropic networks in that they possess properties that vary according to the direction of measurement. Anisotropic characteristics result from various factors such as the geographic shape of the region (nonconvex region), different node densities, irregular radio patterns, and anisotropic terrain conditions. In order to characterize anisotropic features, we devise a linear mapping method that projects one embedding space built upon proximity measures into geographic distance space by using the truncated singular value decomposition (SVD) pseudo-inverse technique. This transformation retains as much topological information as possible and reduces the effect of measurement noise on the estimates of geographic distances. We show via simulation that the proposed localization method outperforms DV-hop, DV-distance, and MDS-MAP, and makes robust and accurate estimates of sensor locations in both isotropic and anisotropic sensor networks.
Segmenting a sensor field
Authors: Zhu Xianjin , Sarkar Rik , Gao Jie
Published: April 2009

The diversity of the deployment settings of sensor networks is naturally inherited from the diversity of geographical features of the embedded environment, and greatly influences network design. Many sensor network protocols in the literature implicitly assume that sensor nodes are deployed inside a simple geometric region, without considering possible obstacles and holes in the deployment environment. When the real deployment setting deviates from that, we often observe degraded performance. Thus, it is highly desirable to have a generic approach to handle sensor fields with complex shapes. In this article, we propose a segmentation algorithm that partitions an irregular sensor field into nicely shaped pieces such that algorithms and protocols that assume a nice sensor field can be applied inside each piece. Across the segments, problem dependent structures specify how the segments and data collected in these segments are integrated. Our segmentation algorithm does not require any extra knowledge (e.g., sensor locations) and only uses network connectivity information. This unified spatial-partitioning approach makes the protocol design become flexible and independent of deployment specifics. Existing protocols are still reusable with segmentation, and the development of new topology-adaptive protocols becomes much easier. We verified the correctness of the algorithm on various topologies and evaluated the performance improvements by integrating shape segmentation with several fundamental problems in network design.
Energy-efficient multihop reprogramming for sensor networks
Authors: Kulkarni Sandeep , Wang Limin
Published: April 2009

Reprogramming of sensor networks is an important and challenging problem, as it is often necessary to reprogram the sensors in place. In this article, we propose MNP, a multihop reprogramming service designed for sensor networks. One of the problems in reprogramming is the issue of message collision. To reduce the problem of collision, we propose a sender selection algorithm that attempts to guarantee that in a given neighborhood there is at most one source transmitting the program at a time. Furthermore, our sender selection is greedy in that it tries to select the sender that is expected to have the most impact. We use pipelining to enable fast data propagation. MNP is energy efficient because it reduces the active radio time of a sensor node by putting the node into “sleep” state when its neighbors are transmitting a segment that is not of interest. We call this type of sleep contention sleep. To further reduce the energy consumption, we add noreq sleep, where sensor node goes to sleep if none of its neighbors is interested in receiving the segment it is advertising. We also introduce an optional init sleep to reduce the energy consumption in the initial phase of reprogramming. Finally, we investigate the performance of MNP in different network settings.
Algorithm 894
Authors: Koikari Souji
Published: April 2009

FORTRAN 95 software is provided for computing the matrix values of φ-functions required in exponential integrators. The subroutines in the library accept as their argument a full, diagonal, or upper quasitriangular matrix with real or complex entries in one of four precisions. Two different algorithms are implemented, one is the scaling and squaring method, and the other is a modified block Schur--Parlett algorithm. In the latter algorithm, a recursive three-by-three blocking is applied to the argument based on an estimate of the sep-inverse function. The estimation of the sep-inverse function is carried out by Hager--Higham estimator implemented as the subroutine xLACON in LAPACK. Our modifications to the block Schur--Parlett algorithm are described together with the results of numerical experiments.
Umbrella file system
Authors: Garrison John A. , Reddy A. L. Narasimha
Published: April 2009

With the advent of and recent developments in Flash storage, device characteristic diversity is becoming both more prevalent and more distinct. In this article, we describe the Umbrella File System (UmbrellaFS), a stackable file system designed to provide flexibility in matching diversity of file access characteristics to diversity of device characteristics through a user or system administrator specified policy. We present the design and results from a prototype implementation of UmbrellaFS on both Linux 2.4 and 2.6. The results show that UmbrellaFS has little overhead for most file system operations while providing an ability better to utilize the differences in Flash and traditional hard drives. With appropriate use of rules, we have shown improvements of up to 44% in certain situations.
Guest Editors’ Introduction to Security in Reconfigurable Systems Design
Authors: Schaumont Patrick R. , Jones Alex K. , Trimberger Steve
Published: April 2009

This special issue on Security in Reconfigurable Systems Design reports on recent research results in the design and implementation of trustworthy reconfigurable systems. Five articles cover topics including power-efficient implementation of public-key cryptography, side-channel analysis of electromagnetic radiation, side-channel resistant design, design of robust unclonable functions on an FPGA, and Trojan detection in an FPGA bitstream.
Elliptic Curve Cryptography on FPGA for Low-Power Applications
Authors: Keller Maurice , Byrne Andrew , Marnane William P.
Published: April 2009

Elliptic curve cryptography has generated a lot of research interest due to its ability to provide greater security per bit compared to public key systems such as RSA. The designer of an elliptic curve hardware accelerator is faced with many choices at design time, each of which can impact the performance of the accelerator in different ways. There are many examples in the literature of how these design choices can effect the area and/or speed of an elliptic curve hardware accelerator. The effect of design choices on power and energy consumption in elliptic curve hardware has been less well studied. This article studies the effect of design choices on the power and energy consumption of an FPGA-based reconfigurable elliptic curve hardware accelerator. A reconfigurable processor has been used for different system parameters and the power and energy consumption measured. The power and energy results are presented and compared.
Isolated WDDL
Authors: McEvoy Robert P. , Murphy Colin C. , Marnane William P. , Tunstall Michael
Published: April 2009

Security protocols are frequently accelerated by implementing the underlying cryptographic functions in reconfigurable hardware. However, unprotected hardware implementations are susceptible to side-channel attacks, and Differential Power Analysis (DPA) has been shown to be especially powerful. In this work, we evaluate and compare the effectiveness of common hiding countermeasures against DPA in FPGA-based designs, using the Whirlpool hash function as a case study. In particular, we develop a new design flow called Isolated WDDL (IWDDL). In contrast with previous works, IWDDL isolates the direct and complementary circuit paths, and also provides DPA resistance in the Hamming distance power model. The analysis is supported using actual implementation results.
Electromagnetic Radiations of FPGAs
Authors: Sauvage Laurent , Guilley Sylvain , Mathieu Yves
Published: April 2009

Since the first announcement of a Side Channel Analysis (SCA) about ten years ago, considerable research has been devoted to studying these attacks on Application Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs), such as smart cards or TPMs. In this article, we compare power-line attacks with ElectroMagnetic (EM) attacks, specifically targeting Field Programmable Gate Array devices (FPGAs), as they are becoming widely used for sensitive applications involving cryptography.

We show experimentally that ElectroMagnetic Analysis (EMA) is always faster than the historical Differential Power Analysis (DPA) in retrieving keys of symmetric ciphers. In addition, these analyses prove to be very convenient to conduct, as they are totally non-invasive.

Research reports indicate that EMA can be conducted globally, typically with macroscopic home-made coils circling the device under attack, with fair results. However, as accurate professional EM antennas are now becoming more accessible, it has become commonplace to carry out EM analyses locally.

Cartography has been carried out by optical means on circuits realized with technology greater than 250 nanometers. Nonetheless, for deep submicron technologies, the feature size of devices that are spied upon is too small to be visible with photographic techniques. In addition, the presence of the 6+ metallization layers obviously prevents a direct observation of the layout. Therefore, EM imaging is emerging as a relevant means to discover the underlying device structure.

In this article, we present the first images of deep-submicron FPGAs. The resolution is not as accurate as photographic pictures: we notably compare the layout of toy design examples placed at the four corners of the FPGAs with the EM images we collected. We observe that EM imaging has the advantage of revealing active regions, which can be useful in locating a particular processor (visible while active---invisible when inactive).

In the context of EM attacks, we stress that the exact localization of the cryptographic target is not necessary: the coarse resolution we obtain is sufficient. We note that the EM imaging does not reveal the exact layout of the FPGA, but instead directly guides the attacker towards the areas which are leaking the most. We achieve attacks with an accurate sensor, both far from (namely on a SMC capacitor on the board) and close to (namely directly over the FPGA) the encryption co-processor. As compared to the previously published attacks, we report a successful attack on a DES module in fewer than 6,300 measurements, which is currently the best cracking performance against this encryption algorithm implemented in FPGAs.
Retrospective-approximation algorithms for the multidimensional stochastic root-finding problem
Authors: Pasupathy Raghu , Schmeiser Bruce W.
Published: April 2009

The stochastic root-finding problem (SRFP) is that of solving a nonlinear system of equations using only a simulation that provides estimates of the functions at requested points. Equivalently, SRFPs seek locations where an unknown vector function attains a given target using only a simulation capable of providing estimates of the function. SRFPs find application in a wide variety of physical settings.

We develop a family of retrospective-approximation (RA) algorithms called Bounding RA that efficiently solves a certain class of multidimensional SRFPs. During each iteration, Bounding RA generates and solves a sample-path problem by identifying a polytope of stipulated diameter, with an image that bounds the given target to within stipulated tolerance. Across iterations, the stipulations become increasingly stringent, resulting in a sequence of shrinking polytopes that approach the correct solution.

Efficiency results from: (i) the RA structure, (ii) the idea of using bounding polytopes to exploit problem structure, and (iii) careful step-size and direction choice during algorithm evolution. Bounding RA has good finite-time performance that is robust with respect to the location of the initial solution, and algorithm parameter values. Empirical tests suggest that Bounding RA outperforms Simultaneous Perturbation Stochastic Approximation (SPSA), which is arguably the best-known algorithm for solving SRFPs.
Probabilistic cost-effectiveness comparison of screening strategies for colorectal cancer
Authors: Tafazzoli Ali , Roberts Stephen , Klein Robert , Ness Reid , Dittus Robert
Published: April 2009

A stochastic discrete-event simulation model of the natural history of Colorectal Cancer (CRC) is augmented with screening technology representations to create a base for simulating various screening strategies for CRC. The CRC screening strategies recommended by the American Gastroenterological Association (AGA) and the newest screening strategies for which clinical efficacy has been established are simulated. In addition to verification steps, validation of screening is pursued by comparison with the Minnesota Colon Cancer Control Study. The model accumulates discounted costs and quality-adjusted life-years. The natural variability in the modeled random variables for natural history is conditioned using a probabilistic sensitivity analysis through a two-stage sampling process that adds other random variables representing parametric uncertainty. The analysis of the screening alternatives in a low-risk population explores both deterministic and stochastic dominance to eliminate some screening alternatives. Net benefit analysis, based on willingness to pay for quality-adjusted life-years, is used to compare the most cost-effective strategies through acceptability curves and to make a screening recommendation. Methodologically, this work demonstrates how variability from the natural variation in the development, screening, and treatment of a disease can be combined with the variation in parameter uncertainty. Furthermore, a net benefit analysis that characterizes cost-effectiveness alternatives can explicitly depend on variation from all sources producing a probabilistic cost-effectiveness analysis of decision alternatives.
Optimal parameter trajectory estimation in parameterized SDEs
Authors: Bhatnagar Shalabh , Karmeshu  , Mishra Vivek Kumar
Published: April 2009

We consider the problem of estimating the optimal parameter trajectory over a finite time interval in a parameterized stochastic differential equation (SDE), and propose a simulation-based algorithm for this purpose. Towards this end, we consider a discretization of the SDE over finite time instants and reformulate the problem as one of finding an optimal parameter at each of these instants. A stochastic approximation algorithm based on the smoothed functional technique is adapted to this setting for finding the optimal parameter trajectory. A proof of convergence of the algorithm is presented and results of numerical experiments over two different settings are shown. The algorithm is seen to exhibit good performance. We also present extensions of our framework to the case of finding optimal parameterized feedback policies for controlled SDE and present numerical results in this scenario as well.
A dependence graph-based representation for test coverage analysis of object-oriented programs
Authors: Najumudheen ESF , Mall Rajib , Samanta Debasis
Published: April 2009

Test coverage analysis is used to determine the extent to which different features of interest are exercised by a given test suite. For object-oriented programs, it involves determining the extent to which features such as inheritance, polymorphism, dynamic binding, etc. are exercised. As object-oriented coverage analysis using only source code or object code is difficult and inefficient, the source code is converted to a suitable intermediate representation for subsequent analysis. We propose a dependence graph-based representation for object-oriented programs, named Call-based Object-Oriented System Dependence Graph (COSDG). COSDG captures the important object-oriented features, provides details of method visibility in a derived class, and differentiates various calling contexts with different type of method call edges: simple, inherited, and polymorphic. We also propose an algorithm to construct COSDG incrementally. Though COSDG has been developed primarily to aid test coverage analysis, it can be used in a variety of other software engineering applications also.
Reusability assessment for software components
Authors: Sharma Arun , Grover P. S. , Kumar Rajesh
Published: April 2009

Software reuse has been used as a tool to reduce the development cost and time of the software. Nowadays, in fact, majority of software systems are being developed from an assembly of existing reusable components. In order to assess the reuse of components effectively, it is necessary to measure the reusability of these components. Paper proposes Artificial Neural Network based approach to assess the reusability of software component. This work will help developers to select the best component in terms of its reusability, which will improve the maintainability of the overall system.
Cause effect graph to decision table generation
Authors: Srivastava Praveen Ranjan , Patel Parshad , Chatrola Siddharth
Published: April 2009

Cause-Effect Graphing (CEG) is used to identify test cases from a given specification to validate its corresponding implementation. This paper gives detail about this technique of software testing. It also shows how the CEG technique can be used to test that software fulfill requirement specification or not. This paper surveys how CEG converted into decision table. The aim of this paper is to overcome existing algorithm's shortcomings and generate all possible test cases.
WSDM 2009 conference review
Authors: Kröll Mark
Published: April 2009

The 2
nd
ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining was held in the Catalan capital Barcelona, Spain, from February 9
th
to 12
th
and chances are good that many will follow. The venue was located on the 3
rd
floor of the 'Imagina Building' which hosts Yahoo! Research Barcelona as well. The majority of the people knew each other well and some of them just dropped by to meet friends and to say hello. The atmosphere throughout the conference was a pleasant one fostered by the circumstances that had led to the creation of the WSDM conference series in the first place: to bring together a small community of people with the specific focus on the topics 'Web Search' and 'Data Mining', topics not being entirely covered by other major conferences in this combination. The number of attendees totaled 225 including workshop participants. The conference featured 29 full papers (acceptance rate of ~16%) which had to pass a rigorous, two-stage review process. This year the session themes were Web Search, Classification & Clustering, Web Mining, User Interaction, Web Ranking and Graph Mining & Web Content.
Interview with George P. Landow
Authors: Atzenbeck Claus
Published: April 2009

George P. Landow is Professor of English and the History of Art, Brown University and Founder, Editor-in-chief, and Webmaster of
The Victorian Web
. His books on hypertext and digital culture include
Hypermedia and Literary Studies
(MIT, 1991), and
The Digital Word: Text-Based Computing in the Humanities
(MIT, 1993) both of which he edited with Paul Delany, and
Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology
(Hopkins UP, 1992), which has appeared in various European and Asian languages and as
Hypertext in Hypertext
(Hopkins UP, 1994), a greatly expanded electronic version with original texts by Derrida, reviews, student interventions, and works by other authors. In 1997, he published a much-expanded, completely revised version as
Hypertext 2.0
, and
Hypertext 3.0: New Media
and
Critical Theory in an Era of Globalization
appeared in January 2006. He has also edited
Hyper/Text/Theory
. (Hopkins UP, 1994). More information can be found at http://www.victorianweb.org/cv/gplbio.html.
“Social cohesion analysis of networks: a novel method for identifying cohesive subgroups in social hypertext” by Alvin Chin, with Jessica Rubart as coordinator
Authors: Chin Alvin
Published: April 2009

Alvin Chin is a Member of Research Staff at Nokia Research Center (NRC), Beijing, working in the Mobile Social Networking group. Alvin recently completed his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Toronto where he worked under Professor Mark Chignell. His PhD thesis was entitled "Social Cohesion Analysis of Networks: A Novel Method for Identifying Cohesive Subgroups in Social Hypertext" where he created a framework for automatically identifying influential members in subgroups from online social networks. At NRC Beijing, Alvin's research involves creating novel solutions that use the cell phone and context to participate and integrate with other users and online social networks, and enabling an intuitive user experience for social networking. He graduated with a Bachelors degree in Computer Engineering and a Masters degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Waterloo. He has worked 2.5 years full time in industry researching emerging technologies in the wireless and pervasive computing area, especially Bluetooth and 802.11. His current research interests include social networking, computer-supported collaborative work, context-aware computing, and pervasive computing. Alvin is an active user of social networking and Web 2.0 technologies. He can be contacted at alvin.chin@nokia.com, and blogs frequently at http://www.alvinychin.com/blog.
Up and coming SIGWEB supported conferences
Authors: Deshpande Yogesh
Published: April 2009

SIGWEB supports several specialized conferences, short courses, and workshops, as well as the Annual Hypertext Conference. SIGWEB sponsored conferences focus on timely topics in applied and computational hypertext and Web disciplines and provide a place for members and the entire applied Hypermedia and Web community to exchange ideas and to meet with and expand their network of colleagues. In this article, we provide a brief overview of SIGWEB sponsored conferences, in addition to events that are in cooperation with SIGWEB.
Practical exhaustive optimization phase order exploration and evaluation
Authors: Kulkarni Prasad A. , Whalley David B. , Tyson Gary S. , Davidson Jack W.
Published: April 2009

Choosing the most appropriate optimization phase ordering has been a long-standing problem in compiler optimizations. Exhaustive evaluation of all possible orderings of optimization phases for each function is generally dismissed as infeasible for production-quality compilers targeting accepted benchmarks. In this article, we show that it is possible to exhaustively evaluate the optimization phase order space for each function in a reasonable amount of time for most of the functions in our benchmark suite. To achieve this goal, we used various techniques to significantly prune the optimization phase order search space so that it can be inexpensively enumerated in most cases and reduce the number of program simulations required to evaluate program performance for each distinct phase ordering. The techniques described are applicable to other compilers in which it is desirable to find the best phase ordering for most functions in a reasonable amount of time. We also describe some interesting properties of the optimization phase order space, which will prove useful for further studies of related problems in compilers.
A SIMD optimization framework for retargetable compilers
Authors: Hohenauer Manuel , Engel Felix , Leupers Rainer , Ascheid Gerd , Meyr Heinrich
Published: April 2009

Retargetable C compilers are currently widely used to quickly obtain compiler support for new embedded processors and to perform early processor architecture exploration. A partially inherent problem of the retargetable compilation approach, though, is the limited code quality as compared to hand-written compilers or assembly code due to the lack of dedicated optimizations techniques. This problem can be circumvented by designing flexible, retargetable code optimization techniques that apply to a certain range of target architectures. This article focuses on target machines with SIMD instruction support, a common feature in embedded processors for multimedia applications. However, SIMD optimization is known to be a difficult task since SIMD architectures are largely nonuniform, support only a limited set of data types and impose several memory alignment constraints. Additionally, such techniques require complicated loop transformations, which are tailored to the SIMD architecture in order to exhibit the necessary amount of parallelism in the code. Thus, integrating the SIMD optimization
and
the required loop transformations together in a single retargeting formalism is an ambitious challenge. In this article, we present an efficient and quickly retargetable SIMD code optimization framework that is integrated into an industrial retargetable C compiler. Experimental results for different processors demonstrate that the proposed technique applies to real-life target machines and that it produces code quality improvements close to the theoretical limit.
Energy- and area-efficient architectures through application clustering and architectural heterogeneity
Authors: Strozek Lukasz , Brooks David
Published: April 2009

Customizing architectures for particular applications is a promising approach to yield highly energy-efficient designs for embedded systems. This work explores the benefits of architectural customization for a class of embedded architectures typically used in energy- and area-constrained application domains, such as sensor nodes and multimedia processing. We implement a process flow that performs an automatic synthesis and evaluation of the different architectures based on runtime profiles of applications and determines an efficient architecture, with consideration for both energy and area constraints. An expressive architectural model, used by our engine, is introduced that takes advantage of efficient opcode allocation, several memory addressing modes, and operand types. By profiling embedded benchmarks from a variety of sensor and multimedia applications, we show that the energy savings resulting from various architectural optimizations relative to the base architectures (e.g., MIPS and MSP430) are significant and can reach 50%, depending on the application. We then identify the set of architectures that achieves near-optimal savings for a group of applications. Finally, we propose the use of heterogeneous ISA processors implementing those architectures as a solution to capitalize on energy savings provided by application customization while executing a range of applications efficiently.
Navigating computer science research through waves of privacy concerns
Authors: Sweeney Latanya
Published: April 2009

Computer Science research and practice are raising growing privacy concerns among the public and government. Computer technology's increasing ability to capture, organize, interpret and share data about individuals raises questions about what privacy practices computer science researchers should adopt, if any. These issues are already very real in ongoing research projects in the School of Computer Science (SCS) at Carnegie Mellon University, from mining databases of individual transactions, to studying how people use the web, to mounting cameras in lounges, to building hallway robots that capture data about passers by, to building intelligent workstation assistants that learn user habits. This article introduces the nature of privacy concerns related to computer science research and explains potential benefits and risks (especially of abuse and misuse). Traditional methods for providing privacy assurances in research, such as Institutional Review Boards (IRBs), are examined, and innovative new approaches, such as privacy technology, are introduced.
Finding lists of people on the web
Authors: Sweeney Latanya
Published: April 2009

Among the vast amounts of personal information published on the World Wide Web ("Web") and indexed by search engines are lists of names of people. Examples include employees at companies, students enrolled in universities, officers in the military, law enforcement personnel, members of social organizations, and lists of acquaintances. Knowing who works where, attends what, or affiliates with whom provides strategic knowledge to competitors, marketers, and government surveillance efforts. However, finding online rosters of people does not lend itself to keyword lookup on search engines because the keywords tend to be common expressions such as "employees" or "students." A typical search often retrieves hundreds of Web pages requiring many hours of human inspection to locate a page containing a list of names. As a result, people may falsely believe online rosters provide more privacy than they do. This paper presents RosterFinder, a simple algorithm for locating Web pages that consist predominately of a list of names. The specific names are not known beforehand. RosterFinder works by identifying rosters from candidate Web pages based on the ratio of distinct known names to distinct words appearing in the page. Accurate classification by RosterFinder depends on the set of names used. Results are reported on real Web pages using: (1) dictionary lookup employing a limited set of known names; and, (2) dictionary lookup on utilizing an extensive set of known names. Privacy implications are discussed using the example of FERPA and online student rosters.
Proactive attacker localization in wireless LAN
Authors: Han Chuan , Zhan Siyu , Yang Yaling
Published: April 2009

This paper addresses the open problem of locating an attacker that intentionally hides or falsies its position using advanced radio technologies. A novel attacker localization mechanism, called Access Point Coordinated Localization (APCL), is proposed for IEEE 802.11 networks. APCL actively forces the attacker to reveal its position information by combining access point (AP) coordination with the traditional range-free localization. The optimal AP coordination process is calculated by modeling it as a finite horizon discrete Markov decision process, which is efficiently solved by an approximation algorithm. The performance advantages are veried through extensive simulations.
Perspectives on router buffer sizing
Authors: Vishwanath Arun , Sivaraman Vijay , Thottan Marina
Published: April 2009

The past few years have witnessed a lot of debate on how large Internet router buffers should be. The widely believed rule-of-thumb used by router manufacturers today mandates a buffer size equal to the delay-bandwidth product. This rule was first challenged by researchers in 2004 who argued that if there are a large number of long-lived TCP connections flowing through a router, then the buffer size needed is equal to the delay-bandwidth product divided by the square root of the number of long-lived TCP flows. The publication of this result has since reinvigorated interest in the buffer sizing problem with numerous other papers exploring this topic in further detail - ranging from papers questioning the applicability of this result to proposing alternate schemes to developing new congestion control algorithms, etc.

This paper provides a synopsis of the recently proposed buffer sizing strategies and broadly classifies them according to their desired objective: link utilisation, and per-flow performance. We discuss the pros and cons of these different approaches. These prior works study buffer sizing purely in the context of TCP. Subsequently, we present arguments that take into account both real-time and TCP traffic. We also report on the performance studies of various high-speed TCP variants and experimental results for networks with limited buffers. We conclude this paper by outlining some interesting avenues for further research.
Dagstuhl perspectives workshop on end-to-end protocols for the future internet
Authors: Arkko Jari , Briscoe Bob , Eggert Lars , Feldmann Anja , Handley Mark
Published: April 2009

This article summarises the presentations and discussions during a workshop on end-to-end protocols for the future Internet in June 2008. The aim of the workshop was to establish a dialogue at the interface between two otherwise fairly distinct communities working on future Internet protocols: those developing internetworking functions and those developing end-to-end transport protocols. The discussion established near-consensus on some of the open issues, such as the preferred placement of traffic engineering functionality, whereas other questions remained controversial. New research agenda items were also identified.
Building query optimizers for information extraction
Authors: Jain Alpa , Ipeirotis Panagiotis , Gravano Luis
Published: April 2009

Text documents often embed data that is structured in nature. This structured data is increasingly exposed using
information extraction systems
, which generate structured relations from documents, introducing an opportunity to process expressive, structured queries over text databases. This paper discusses our SQoUT1 project, which focuses on
processing structured queries over relations extracted from text databases
. We show how, in our extraction-based scenario, query processing can be decomposed into a sequence of basic steps: retrieving relevant text documents, extracting relations from the documents, and joining extracted relations for queries involving multiple relations. Each of these steps presents different alternatives and together they form a rich space of possible query execution strategies. We identify
execution efficiency
and
output quality
as the two critical properties of a query execution, and argue that an optimization approach needs to consider both properties. To this end, we take into account the userspecified requirements for execution efficiency and output quality, and choose an execution strategy for each query based on a principled, cost-based comparison of the alternative execution strategies.
Webpage understanding
Authors: Nie Zaiqing , Wen Ji-Rong , Ma Wei-Ying
Published: April 2009

In this paper we introduce the webpage understanding problem which consists of three subtasks: webpage segmentation, webpage structure labeling, and webpage text segmentation and labeling. The problem is motivated by the search applications we have been working on including Microsoft Academic Search, Windows Live Product Search and Renlifang Entity Relationship Search. We believe that integrated webpage understanding will be an important direction for future research in Web mining.
How NOT to review a paper
Authors: Cormode Graham
Published: April 2009

There are several useful guides available for how to review a paper in Computer Science [10, 6, 12, 7, 2]. These are soberly presented, carefully reasoned and sensibly argued. As a result, they are not much fun. So, as a contrast, this note is a checklist of how not to review a paper. It details techniques that are unethical, unfair, or just plain nasty. Since in Computer Science we often present arguments about how an adversary would approach a particular problem, this note describes the adversary's strategy.
Towards a user-friendly semantic formalism for natural language generation
Authors: Thomas Craig
Published: April 2009

Computational semantics has become an interesting and important branch of computational linguistics. Born from the fusion of formal semantics and computer science, it is concerned with the automated processing of meaning associated with natural language expressions [2]. Systems of semantic representation, hereafter referred to as semantic formalisms, exist to describe meaning underlying natural language expressions. To date, several formalisms have been defined by researchers from a number of diverse disciplines including philosophy, logic, psychology and linguistics. These formalisms have a number of different applications in the realm of computer science. For example, in machine translation a sentence could be parsed and translated into a series of semantic expressions, which could then be used to generate an utterance with the same meaning in a different language [14]. This paper presents two existing formalisms and examines their user-friendliness. Additionally, a new form of semantic representation is proposed with wide coverage and user-friendliness suitable for a computational linguist.
The Impacts of Wal-Mart: The Rise and Consequences of the World's Dominant Retailer
Authors: Gereffi Gary , Christian Michelle
Published: April 2009

Wal-Mart has been both praised and pilloried as a template for twenty-first century capitalism. Therein lies the challenge in analyzing the world's largest retailer. We examine the sociological impact of Wal-Mart in terms of four themes: its business model and organizational structure, the dual impact of Wal-Mart's labor relations in terms of its own stores and working conditions in its global supply chain, the genesis and effectiveness of community mobilizations against Wal-Mart, and how Wal-Mart's growth is linked to the emergence of buyer-driven commodity chains in the global economy. Wal-Mart underscores the value of a public sociology agenda that embraces three research criteria: the incorporation of new media and audiences, the need to go global with our research, and the ability to work for change from within.
Socioeconomic Attainments of Asian Americans
Authors: Sakamoto Arthur , Goyette Kimberly A. , Kim ChangHwan
Published: April 2009

According to the majority-minority paradigm, racial and ethnic minorities have lower socioeconomic characteristics than whites owing to discrimination. Asian Americans defy this conventional view, however, at least on average. Asian Americans tend to have higher mean levels of educational achievements, and several recent studies indicate approximate parity with whites in most arenas of the labor market for those Asian Americans who were schooled in the United States. Their favorable socioeconomic outcomes stand in contrast to the widespread discrimination and labor market disadvantages that Asian Americans encountered during the earlier part of the twentieth century. The improved opportunities for Asian Americans suggest increasingly successful interrelations with whites in the post–Civil Rights era, with its more multicultural ethos. Less encouragingly, the favorable average socioeconomic profile of Asian Americans in the post–Civil Rights era in part reflects the rising significance of class resources and associated inequalities. The latter trend is evident in the notable socioeconomic variability within the racial category of Asian Americans.
The Sociology of War and the Military
Authors: Kestnbaum Meyer
Published: April 2009

Recent work on war and the military has addressed two broad questions: Why do states and societies wage war as they do? And what difference does it make that war is, or has been, waged in that manner? Building on the Clausewitzian focus on relations among the state, the armed forces, and society, responses to these questions emphasize the need for the analyst to recognize that the state may not possess a monopoly of force, interstate and civil wars may intertwine, and meaning and valence may figure prominently in war and its consequences. Scholarship in this area tends to focus on three broad domains: mobilization into war, treatment of the enemy, and signification. Each has its own distinctive analytics and historical pattern of transformation and development. How these three domains intersect holds real promise for future work.
Political Sociology and Social Movements
Authors: Walder Andrew G.
Published: April 2009

Until the 1970s, the study of social movements was firmly within a diverse sociological tradition that explored the relationship between social structure and political behavior, and was preoccupied with explaining variation in the political orientation of movements: their ideologies, aims, motivations, or propensities for violence. Subsequently, a breakaway tradition redefined the central problem, radically narrowing the scope of interest to the process of mobilization—how social groups, whoever they are and whatever their aims, marshal resources, recruit adherents, and navigate political environments in order to grow and succeed. Critics would later insist that the construction of meaning, the formation of collective identities, and the stimulation and amplification of emotions play vital and neglected roles in mobilization, but these alternatives did not challenge the narrowed construction of the problem itself. The resulting subfield has largely abandoned the quest to explain variation in the political orientation of movements. Researchers in related fields—on revolution, unions, and ethnic mobilization—have retained an interest in explaining political orientation, although they often view it primarily as a by-product of mobilization. Reviving theories about the impact of social structure on movement political orientation will require integrating insights from research on related but widely scattered subjects.
New Directions in Life Course Research
Authors: Mayer Karl Ulrich
Published: April 2009

Life courses are studied in sociology and neighboring fields as developmental processes, as culturally and normatively constructed life stages and age roles, as biographical meanings, as aging processes, as outcomes of institutional regulation and policies, as demographic accounts, or as mere empirical connectivity across the life course. This review has two aims. One is to report on trends in life course research by focusing on empirical studies published since the year 2000. The other is to assess the overall development of the field. Major advances can be observed in four areas: national individual-level longitudinal databases, the impact of institutional contexts on life courses, life courses under conditions of societal ruptures, and health across the life course. In four other areas, advancements have been less pronounced: internal dynamics and causal linkages across life, the interaction of development and socially constructed life courses, theory development, and new methods. Overall, life course sociology still has far to go to reach its full potential.
Fuzzy Structural Analysis of a Tuned Mass Damper Subject to Random Vibration
Authors: Marano Giuseppe Carlo , Morrone Emiliano , Quaranta Giuseppe , Trentadue Francesco
Published: April 2009

The uncertainty is a typical feature of each
human activity since the greatest part of the information is always affected by a sure
level of scattering. Different methodologies which deal with the uncertainty of the real
problems exist. The principal aim of this paper is to present
an innovative hybrid approach which combines fuzzy and stochastic theories in
facing the structural analysis of a tuned mass damper subject to a dynamic random
load, modelled by a modulated filtered white noise. In this work the parameters
involved in the structural analysis will be considered uncertain and supposed fuzzy
sets to take into account the effects of lexical and informal uncertainties which
cannot be studied in a probabilistic way. The system analysis is conducted by
means of α‐level optimization technique.
Successively, a numerical example is presented to show the effectiveness of the
proposed procedure. Moreover, a sensitivity analysis is performed to expose the
variation of the structural response membership function considering different
input values. Finally, a comparison between the response nominal value and the
fuzzificated one is proposed to obtain a structural amplification factor.