bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Why track actual costs and resource usage on projects?
Authors: Clark Tom
Published: October 2009

The importance of tracking actual costs and resource usage in projects depends upon the project situation. For some projects, tracking actuals is unnecessary or is not worth the effort required. In other cases, however, tracking actual costs and resource usage is an essential aspect of the project control function. In such cases, a system must be put into place to support the tracking process, and the collection/recording of the potentially voluminous quantity of data requires strong organizational discipline. Why then is tracking actual costs and resource usage on a project ever worth the effort required to accomplish it?
Create centre of excellence (CoE) for better business
Authors: Tadwalkar Sunil V.
Published: October 2009

What is CoE? In todays world, the Centre of Excellence (CoE) applies to any organization who wants to create and use excellent state of art and showcase its technological, service and business oriented capabilities to the entire world in a competitive environment. CoE is the combined effect of emerging business model and technologies.
Out sourcing-off shoring
Authors: Tadwalkar Sunil V.
Published: October 2009

The equations of global economies are changing fast due to Industry consolidation, merging, acquisitions and on account of industries hunger for global hunt and race of scaling-up higher and higher there by creating stiff competition among their rivals. The business houses are deeply evolved in looking at techno commercially viable IT solutions to grow at faster speed, support the business effectively and provide competitive advantage by using the latest emerging technologies.
An Interview with Dr. Yi Pan of Georgia State University
Authors: Gehl John
Published: October 2009

Ubiquity is proud to publish this inspirational interview, which starts with a discussion of the creation of the computer science department at Georgia State University, and concludes with the heroic efforts an impoverished student from Tsinghua University in China overcame many obstacles to rise to a significant position at Georgia. The interviewee is Yi Pan, Chair and Professor of Georgia State University's computer science department, who provided us with these inspirational reflections on computer science, academic success, and true success. The interview was conducted by Ubiquity editor-in-chief John Gehl.
Time to get serious about the paperless office
Authors: Andersen Espen
Published: October 2009

Of all the sayings I dislike, the most vapid is one I have heard as long as I have been working with IT: We will have the paperless toilet before we have a paperless office. Normally uttered with a dry cackle and a finger pointed towards my office, which does not lack for paper.
Avoiding disaster when your hard drive fails
Authors: Barron Donna
Published: October 2009

No one really expects a disk crash, but they do happen, usually at the most unconvenient times. Having a quick and easy-to-restore backup can eliminate both the distress and expense of the prolonged downtime normally associated with a hard drive failure. When restoring from a drive failure, the best kind of backup to have is an image backup.
The rise and fall of a good programmer
Authors: Kumar Suthikshn
Published: October 2009

Of all the sayings I dislike, the most vapid is one I have heard as long as I have been working with IT: We will have the paperless toilet before we have a paperless office. Normally uttered with a dry cackle and a finger pointed towards my office, which does not lack for paper.
Knowledge mechanics and its temporal nature
Authors: Singh Ramesh , Jain Sharad
Published: October 2009

Wordnet defines knowledge as the psychological result of perception, learning and reasoning [1]. Like mechanics is the study of the way matter and force interact with each other, knowledge mechanics refers to the study of intermingling between the two facets of knowledge- tacit and explicit. Tacit knowledge is personal knowledge which is difficult to express and communicate. On the other hand explicit knowledge has been or can be articulated, codified and stored in certain media. The transformation of knowledge among these two facets has been the main topic of study among the researchers. This paper also explores the temporal nature of knowledge i.e. how time relates to knowledge and the factors involved in the natural decay of knowledge.
How to use presentation slides to best effect
Authors: Yaffe Philip
Published: October 2009

How often have you attended a presentation where great attention apparently went into designing the slides - and apparently none into how they were used? Or the speaker played with the slides as if to entertain rather than edify?
On degree sequence
Authors: Naskar Saptarshi , Basuli Krishnendu , Sarma Samar Sen , Dey Kashi Nath
Published: October 2009

I ndi got her BS in Computer Science from Cal Poly and began her master's at Colorado State. She then worked as a software engineer, later managing Web applications that focused on the user. Her concepts in mental models derive from attempting to bridge the developer-user gap. Her expertise ranges from structuring crossfunctional teams, to managing participant recruiting, and conducting user interviews, thereby creating effective tools for exchanging results.
Mental Models
Authors: Young Indi
Published: October 2009

I ndi got her BS in Computer Science from Cal Poly and began her master's at Colorado State. She then worked as a software engineer, later managing Web applications that focused on the user. Her concepts in mental models derive from attempting to bridge the developer-user gap. Her expertise ranges from structuring crossfunctional teams, to managing participant recruiting, and conducting user interviews, thereby creating effective tools for exchanging results.
A prototype design for DRM based credit card transaction in E-commerce
Authors: Banerjee Sanjay , Karforma Sunil
Published: October 2009

In E-Commerce credit cards gained popularity as a sophisticated payment mechanism. With the increase in credit card use on web, credit card fraud has gone up dramatically. Which cause customer's inconvenience and for merchant, loss of customers. To combat credit card fraud and to regain the customer's trust an attempt is made here to design a trust based payment system, in which the customer does not need to disclose his/her credit card number during the transaction, and hence they can feel safe. In this newly proposed system on behalf of the customer the bank or the issuer of the credit card is involved to perform the transaction. This is basically done by generating a single use 'token' by the bank which includes information about the customer, merchant, product, payment amount, date of issue and date of expiry etc. and thereafter wrapped as a DRM package. Among various advantages, one is that only the intended user and the specified application software can open the DRM package using special key. The application, thereafter, will take care of the rights imposed on the 'token' and expires itself after the single use. We have tried an attempt to use UML to design the model of such system, which is the recent trend of software engineering practice.
New technique for fixing an Ethernet IPv6 address using the fedoracore operating system
Authors: Aaroud A. , Jamali A. , Najib N.
Published: October 2009

During the course to deploy Ipv6, we found several critical implementation and operational issues which distract user and possibly prevent wide deployment of Ipv6. Among the problems we noticed stateless IP autoconfiguration, which provides for each nodes connected to the network an IP address. However, two nodes may have the same address, and a network conflict appears. In this case a manual IP address, which depends on restarting Network Interface Card, is required. In this paper, we present a technique that, independently of rebooting NIC, maintain the IP address fix. Validation is done by using Fedoracore Operating System.
Elliptic curve cryptography
Authors: Kapoor Vivek , Abraham Vivek Sonny , Singh Ramesh
Published: October 2009

This paper describes the Elliptic Curve Cryptography algorithm and its suitability for smart cards.
Four short reviews of current software engineering books of interest
Authors: Gagliano Ross
Published: October 2009

Associate Editor Ross Gagliano offers four Short Reviews of current Software Engineering books of interest.
Preface by Arun Tripathi to Jeff Malpas' 'The Non-Autonomy of the Virtual'
Authors: Tripathi Arun
Published: October 2009

Australian philosopher Jeff Malpas, author of Place and Experience, argues in his Ubiquity paper The non-autonomy of the virtual: philosophical reflections on contemporary virtuality that the virtual is not autonomous with respect to the everyday, but is rather embedded within it, and an extension of it. Within philosophy, Professor Malpas is perhaps best known as one of a small number of philosophers who work across the analytic-continental divide, publishing one of the first books that drew attention to convergences in the thinking of the key twentieth century American philosopher Donald Davidson and the phenomenological and hermeneutic traditions, as exemplified in the work of Heidegger and Gadamer.
Critical Theory
Authors: Friesen Norm
Published: October 2009

Critical theory designates a philosophy and a research methodology that focuses on the interrelated issues of technology, politics and social change. Despite its emphasis on technology, critical theory arguably remains underutilized in areas of practical research that lie at the confluence of social, political and technological concerns, such as the study of the use of the usability of information and communication technologies (ICTs) or of their use in educational institutions. This paper addresses this situation by first describing the methodology of ideology critique. This critical methodology operates comparatively, by "measuring" consensual truths against actual social conditions. In doing so, it frequently shows these truisms to have the quality of mystifications or "myths," claims possessing a "false clarity" and that are misleading in developing and justifying research plans and priorities. Focusing on the specific example of e-learning (or the use of ICTs in education), this paper shows how critical theory can be used to "de-mystify" three particular truths or myths. These are claims that 1) we live in a "knowledge economy," 2) that users enjoy ubiquitous, "anywhere anytime" access, and 3) that social and institutional change is motivated by a number of fixed "laws" of progress in computer technology. These claims are shown to simplify or obscure a complex social reality that is constituted by different and conflicting forms of knowledge, and these claims are shown to work to the benefit of interests that are hegemonic and conservative in nature.
CMOS RF Down-Conversion Mixer Design for Low-Power Wireless Communications
Authors: Faitah K. , El Oualkadi A. , Ouahman A. Ait
Published: October 2009

This paper aims to study the design of a low-power single-balanced mixer for downconversion in wireless RF receivers. The proposed circuit is designed to work at a radiofrequency of 1.9GHz using CMOS 0.18 µm technology. The obtained results show a conversion gain equal to 7 dB and low power consumption of 3.86mW at 1.8.V supply voltage. The single side band noise figure performance was founded to be 8.dB. These results show a good potential of this CMOS mixer and justify its use for low-power wireless communications.
An Interview with Richard A. Demillo
Authors: Ubiquity staff
Published: October 2009

Richard A. DeMillo is the Dean of Georgia Tech's College of Computing. He previously was Hewlett-Packard's chief technology officer and served as director of the Georgia Tech Information Security Center. Under DeMillo's leadership, Georgia Tech's College of Computing has replaced the core curriculum for undergraduates with an ambitious and innovative Threads program, as he explains in this interview with Ubiquity's editor-in-chief John Gehl.
Technological Transformation of Human Experience
Authors: Tripathi Arun Kumar
Published: October 2009

This article was inspired by Don Ihde's work on the experience of technology in human-machine relations. (See Don Ihde. "The Experience of Technology," Cultural Hermeneutics, Vol. 2, 1974, pp. 267-279.)
Wot do U think? (What Do You Think?)
Authors: Thirunarayanan M. O.
Published: October 2009

(NOTE TO READERS: Out of sheer curiosity I used a website that allowed me to translate text from English to the language used by those who send and receive text messages. The second part of this article contains a copy of the entire text that was thus translated.)
Mirrorware
Authors: Schrage Michael
Published: October 2009

As we use and design computing systems, Michael Schrage asks us to reflect on what these systems reveal of ourselves and not just what they reveal to others. We may find many surprises about design and privacy. In 1892, the newspapers published a series of editorials of leading thinkers about what the world would be like in 1992. (See Dave Walter, TODAY THEN, Am Geographical Union, 1992.) Collectively, they were almost 100 percent wrong. Their reflections revealed more about how they saw themselves than about the future. This is exactly what Michael Schrage is warning us about.
Presidential Politics and Internet Issues in the 2000 Election
Authors: Isenberg Doug
Published: October 2009

As with the US election of 2000, the US election of 2008 features two slates and four new faces running for the top offices. While many of the issues concerning the electorate are different in 2008 than in 2000, remarkably some issues are the same. We thought you might be amused at Doug Isenberg's resurrected reflections on the 2000 election. You can see what has changed and what has not.
Information, DNA, and Change Through the Prism of a Great City
Authors: Stuckey John
Published: October 2009

After retiring from a career in academic/IT management at Carnegie-Mellon, Northeastern, and Washington and Lee Universities, John Stuckey is serving as Acting Chief Technology Officer at the American University in Cairo. This is the third of his reports to Ubiquity from Egypt.
An Interview with Randy Pausch
Authors: Gehl John
Published: October 2009

Before he became ill, Randy Pausch spoke with Ubiquity Editor John Gehl in 2005. The declining enrollments in computer science were already very much on his mind. At that time, they were down 23 percent. Pausch called this a "huge problem". He noted that, even for those committed to teaching programming from the outset, kids programming in Alice were far more engaged than those trying to find Fibonacci numbers. The enrollments have since declined another 25 percent and the problem is even "huger" than before. Randy's ideas about what turns kids on are even more important today. --Peter Denning, Editor
Long Live the .250 Hitter
Authors: Strange Elena R.
Published: October 2009

The dearth of women in computing is very much on everyone's mind. Elena Strange offers a new perspective on this. She observes that the solid, utility hitters (and players) are the backbone of every baseball team. In playing on her computing teams she has no aspirations for MVP awards and strives for personal excellence in the things she does. She asks her male colleagues to value her as a .250 hitter without holding her to the standard of a .314 hitter. This simple change could open the gates to a flood of women in computing. Elena holds Grace Hopper as the equivalent of the legendary .314 hitter in computing. Hopper told her friends that she was never aspiring to be a legendary leader, but only to do the best possible job with the tasks that were before her. Be personally excellent and interact with people from your heart, said Hopper, and all the rest will take care of itself. You can see in Elena's story the seeds that Grace Hopper planted.
ACM Europe
Authors: Hall Wendy
Published: October 2009

Increasing ACM's relevance and influence as a membership organization in the global computing community has been a top priority from the outset of my presidency.
In the Virtual Extension
Authors: CACM Staff
Published: October 2009

Communications'
Virtual Extension brings more quality articles to ACM members. These articles are now available in the ACM Digital Library.
Shaping the future
Authors: Geller Tom
Published: October 2009

To create shape-shifting robotic ensembles, researchers need to teach micro-machines to work together.
Historical reflectionsComputing in the depression era
Authors: Campbell-Kelly Martin
Published: October 2009

Insights from difficult times in the computer industry.
Kode ViciousKode reviews 101
Authors: Neville-Neil George V.
Published: October 2009

A review of code review do's and don'ts.
Automated support for managing feature requests in open forums
Authors: Cleland-Huang Jane , Dumitru Horatiu , Duan Chuan , Castro-Herrera Carlos
Published: October 2009

The result is stable, focused, dynamic discussion threads that avoid redundant ideas and engage thousands of stakeholders.
Q&AThe networker
Authors: Hoffmann Leah
Published: October 2009

Jon Kleinberg talks about algorithms, information flow, and the connections between Web search and social networks.
The Fallacy of Premature Optimization
Authors: Hyde Randall
Published: October 2009

Moore's Law makes it seem as if resource limitations are always a minor consideration. If there will be twice as much memory for the same price in 18 months, why bother to squeeze a factor of 2 from an application's memory requirements? If the CPU will be twice as fast by then, why bother to shave some running time from a program? In other words, why bother to optimize programs? Isn't it better to just get them running and let Moore's Law take us off the hook when resources are constrained? Randall Hyde argues that optimization is important even when memory and processor double regularly. Trying to do the optimization too early can be a futile time-waster.
Is Design the Preeminent Protagonist in User Experience?
Authors: Tobias Phillip , Spiegel Daniel S.
Published: October 2009

We are gradually learning that "user experience" is a critical factor in customer satisfaction and loyalty. A positive experience means a happy customer who returns again. Designers of software systems and web services have been digging deeply into how they might generate a positive user experience. They are moving beyond anecdotes about excellent examples of user experiences and are developing design principles. Phillip Tobias gives us a fascinating account of the emerging design principles that will generate satisfied and loyal users.
A-Port Networks
Authors: Pellauer Michael , Vijayaraghavan Muralidaran , Adler Michael , Arvind  , Emer Joel
Published: October 2009

Computer architects need to run cycle-accurate performance models of processors orders of magnitude faster. We discuss why the speedup on traditional multicores is limited, and why FPGAs represent a good vehicle to achieve a dramatic performance improvement over software models. This article introduces A-Port Networks, a simulation scheme designed to expose the fine-grained parallelism inherent in performance models and efficiently exploit them using FPGAs.
Packing Techniques for Virtex-5 FPGAs
Authors: Ahmed Taneem , Kundarewich Paul D. , Anderson Jason H.
Published: October 2009

Packing is a key step in the FPGA tool flow that straddles the boundaries between synthesis, technology mapping and placement. Packing strongly influences circuit speed, density, and power, and in this article, we consider packing in the commercial FPGA context and examine the area and performance trade-offs associated with packing in a state-of-the-art FPGA---the Xilinx
®
Virtex
TM
-5 FPGA. In addition to look-up-table (LUT)-based logic blocks, modern FPGAs also contain large IP blocks. We discuss packing techniques for both types of blocks. Virtex-5 logic blocks contain dual-output 6-input LUTs. Such LUTs can implement any single logic function of up to 6 inputs, or any two logic functions requiring no more than 5 distinct inputs. The second LUT output has reduced speed, and therefore, must be used judiciously. We present techniques for dual-output LUT packing that lead to improved area-efficiency, with minimal performance degradation. We then describe packing techniques for large IP blocks, namely, block RAMs and DSPs. We pack circuits into the large blocks in a way that leverages the unique block RAM and DSP layout/architecture in Virtex-5, achieving significantly improved design performance.
Robust Real-Time Super-Resolution on FPGA and an Application to Video Enhancement
Authors: Angelopoulou Maria E. , Bouganis Christos-Savvas , Cheung Peter Y. K. , Constantinides George A.
Published: October 2009

The high density image sensors of state-of-the-art imaging systems provide outputs with high spatial resolution, but require long exposure times. This limits their applicability, due to the motion blur effect. Recent technological advances have lead to adaptive image sensors that can combine several pixels together in real time to form a larger pixel. Larger pixels require shorter exposure times and produce high-frame-rate samples with reduced motion blur. This work proposes combining an FPGA with an adaptive image sensor to produce an output of high resolution both in space and time. The FPGA is responsible for the spatial resolution enhancement of the high-frame-rate samples using super-resolution (SR) techniques in real time. To achieve it, this article proposes utilizing the Iterative Back Projection (IBP) SR algorithm. The original IBP method is modified to account for the presence of noise, leading to an algorithm more robust to noise. An FPGA implementation of this algorithm is presented. The proposed architecture can serve as a general purpose real-time resolution enhancement system, and its performance is evaluated under various noise levels.
An Application Development Framework for ARISE Reconfigurable Processors
Authors: Vassiliadis Nikolaos , Theodoridis George , Nikolaidis Spiridon
Published: October 2009

Coupling reconfigurable hardware accelerators with processors is an effective way to meet the performance and flexibility required to cope with modern embedded applications. The ARISE framework provides a systematic approach to extend a processor once. It will thereafter support the coupling of arbitrary hardware accelerators. The accelerators can be coupled as coprocessors or functional units of the processor’s datapath, and therefore exploited as a hybrid, which includes both loose and tight computational models. This article presents a complete framework for developing applications on such hybrid reconfigurable ARISE machines. The framework integrates the automatic identification of custom instructions and the semiautomatic/profiling-driven identification of coprocessors supporting the hybrid computational model. Moreover, it supports a modular design approach where the software and the hardware modules are developed independently and later ported into any ARISE machine with reconfigurable technology. To evaluate efficiency, a set of benchmarks is implemented on an ARISE evaluation machine utilizing the proposed framework. In addition, the ARISE machine is compared against a well-established processor paradigm that utilizes reconfigurable accelerators following only the typical coprocessor approach. Experimental results prove that the framework can be used to exploit the hybrid computational model and achieve significant performance improvements over the typical coprocessor acceleration approach. Moreover, results demonstrate how the framework can be used to trade off performance, silicon area, and application development time.
From Silicon to Science
Authors: Underwood Keith D. , Hemmert K. Scott , Ulmer Craig D.
Published: October 2009

The field of high performance computing (HPC) currently abounds with excitement about the potential of a broad class of things called
accelerators
. And, yet, few accelerator based systems are being deployed in general purpose HPC environments. Why is that? This article explores the challenges that accelerators face in the HPC world, with a specific focus on FPGA based systems. We begin with an overview of the characteristics and challenges of typical HPC systems and applications and discuss why FPGAs have the potential to have a significant impact. The bulk of the article is focused on twelve specific areas where FPGA researchers can make contributions to hasten the adoption of FPGAs in HPC environments.
Compiler-directed scratchpad memory management via graph coloring
Authors: Li Lian , Feng Hui , Xue Jingling
Published: October 2009

Scratchpad memory (SPM), a fast on-chip SRAM managed by software, is widely used in embedded systems. This article introduces a general-purpose compiler approach, called memory coloring, to assign static data aggregates, such as arrays and structs, in a program to an SPM. The novelty of this approach lies in partitioning the SPM into a pseudo--register file (with interchangeable and aliased registers), splitting the live ranges of data aggregates to create potential data transfer statements between SPM and off-chip memory, and finally, adapting an existing graph coloring algorithm for register allocation to assign the data aggregates to the pseudo--register file. Our experimental results using a set of 10 C benchmarks from MediaBench and MiBench show that our methodology is capable of managing SPMs efficiently and effectively for large embedded applications. In addition, our SPM allocator can obtain close to optimal solutions when evaluated and compared against an existing heuristics-based SPM allocator and an ILP-based SPM allocator.
Teaching Intel to love the television
Authors: Zafiroglu Alexandra , Bell Genevieve
Published: October 2009

Over the last decade, as Intel Corporation has successively sought to expand its business into consumer electronics adjacencies, it envisioned a spectrum of screens in homes that could serve as interchangeable front-ends to a relatively standard computational back-end. From this perspective, televisions, set top boxes, and other CE devices are fraternal twins to Intel's traditional competency, silicon solutions for the PC. In this video, the authors discuss how Intel's User Experience Group has steered the company to accept the television for what it truly is, a fundamentally different device, experience, and ecosystem than the PC. Drawing on ethnographic research data from 21 countries, collected over three years, they detail how teaching Intel to love the television has meant driving consumer-centric perspectives of the role, place, and meaning of television in global homes into Intel's Digital Home Group's strategy and platform roadmaps. This has meant abandoning the idea that “a screen is just a screen,” and that interactive, connected, and smart televisions will be PCs disguised to blend with living room aesthetics.
Live@Dublin > delayed@Tampere
Authors: Reponen Erika
Published: October 2009

Video has gone extremely mobile, even in real-time. Mobile phones with video capabilities and internet connection played significant roles in causing this outcome. In this video presentation I talk about a study called “Live@Dublin -- Mobile Phone Live Video Group Communication Experiment,” the results of which were presented for the first time at the EuroiTV 2008 Conference in Salzburg. The study was done to better understand the possibilities of live video in the area of everyday group communication. I discuss the Live@Dublin experiment in a video which I recorded in Tampere, Finland. By producing the video in a mobile context, with a portable video camera and via the “alone-at-night method”, I wanted to bring out the most important questions about mobile video communication, so that everyone could also fill in between the lines. There are many possibilities but also many challenges before mobile phone live video becomes really main stream. On the basis of our studies, I discuss roles in video communication and preferences for live or delayed video. I strongly believe that mobile phone live video will become an important communication method in the future because people always carry mobile phones with them and because their use enriches and enhances the context. Physical limitations of time and space are also diminishing in everyday interactions.
An Interview with David Alderson
Authors: Denning Peter
Published: October 2009

David Alderson has become a leading advocate for formulating the foundations of network science so that its predictions can be applied to real networks. He is an assistant professor in the Operations Research Department at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif., where he conducts research with military officer-students on the operation, attack, and defense of network infrastructure systems. Ubiquity interviewed him to find out what is going on.
Virtualizing the Datacenter Without Compromising Server Performance
Authors: Kamoun Faouzi
Published: October 2009

Virtualization has become a hot topic. Cloud computing is the latest and most prominent application of this time-honored idea, which is almost as old as the computing field itself. The term "cloud" seems to have originated with someone's drawing of the Internet as a puffy cloud hiding many servers and connections. A user can receive a service from the cloud without ever knowing which machine (or machines) rendered the service, where it was located, or how many redundant copies of its data there are. One of the big concerns about the cloud is that it may assign many computational processes to one machine, thereby making that machine a bottleneck and giving poor response time. Faouzi Kamoun addresses this concern head on, and assures us that in most cases the virtualization used in the cloud and elsewhere improves performance. He also addresses a misconception made prominent in a Dilbert cartoon, when the boss said he wanted to virtualize the servers to save electricity.
Software architecture built from behavior models
Authors: Auguston Mikhail
Published: October 2009

This paper suggests an approach to formal software system architecture specification based on behavior models. The behavior of the system is defined as a set of events (event trace) with two basic relations: precedence and inclusion. The structure of event trace is specified using event grammars and other constraints organized into schemas. The schema framework is amenable to stepwise architecture refinement, reuse, composition, visualization, and application of automated tools for consistency checks. The concept of event attribute supports a continuous architecture refinement up to executable design and implementation models.
The need for transforming the COTS component quality evaluation standard mirage to reality
Authors: Kalaimagal Sivamuni , Srinivasan Rengaramanujam
Published: October 2009

Recently, there is a trend towards multi-tiered applications. In order to produce such systems effectively, software developers often use component based technologies to assemble software systems instead of developing the systems from scratch. This helps to reduce development costs and development time. However, this approach will work only if high quality components are selected for the system. Hence, it becomes necessary to evaluate the quality of COTs components and have a trusted COTS quality standard. However, it is not so easy to develop a quality standard for COTS components, thereby making it a mirage. This paper discusses why it is important to have a COTS quality standard, the difficulties involved in framing such a standard and how those issues can be resolved so that in the long run at least the foundation of such a standard can be laid. Finally, we also introduce our quality model Q'Facto 12 that has been proposed by us to evaluate COTS component quality and how this model overcomes some of the debated issues.
A discussion on design factors of client-server software testability
Authors: Mishra Deepti , Mishra Alok
Published: October 2009

We have well established methods for testing the software for centralized systems in which all the software components resides on a single computer. But client-server software systems are different from centralized software systems because in client-server systems, software components may be distributed among different machines. Therefore, testing client-server software cannot be planned from the perspective of traditional integrated testing activities. In this paper, we have presented some design factors that can affect the testing of client-server software systems. These factors should be taken into consideration during design as it can lead to better testability in client-server software systems.
Report on early aspects at ICSE 2009
Authors: Chitchyan Ruzanna , Pinto Monica , Khan Safoora Shakil
Published: October 2009

Early aspects are the crosscutting concerns that appear at the early stages of software development, i.e., in requirements and architecture design. But do these early aspects span the whole development lifecycle? How can they be traced forwards and back to other software work products? Is AO worth the effort in the first place? These and a number of other questions were discussed during the EA@ICSE workshop in 2009. The present report contains summaries of these discussions as well as a brief overview of the papers accepted for the 16th.
Captology and the friendly art of persuasion
Authors: Greiner Lynn
Published: October 2009

Click here to continue.
Who should run the internet?
Authors: Treese Win
Published: October 2009

The future of network innovation and user service hangs in the balance.
Smart infrastructure matches supply and demand
Authors: Weiss Aaron
Published: October 2009

How networks decentralize the power of human intelligence.
Targeting the digital infrastructure
Authors: Rowell Laurie
Published: October 2009

Most cybercrimes are crimes of opportunity perpetrated by armies of automated agents.
Handling occluders in transitions from panoramic images
Authors: Morvan Yann , O'Sullivan Carol
Published: October 2009

Panoramic images are very effective at conveying a visual sense of presence at very low cost and great ease of authoring. They are, however, limited in the navigation options they offer, unlike 3D representations. It is therefore desirable to provide pleasing transitions from one panorama to another, or from a panorama to a 3D model. We focus on motions where the viewers move toward an area of interest, and on the problem of dealing with occluders in their path. We discuss existing transition approaches, with emphasis on the additional information they require and on the constraints they place on the authoring process. We propose a compromise approach based on faking the parallax effect with occluder mattes. We conduct a user study to determine whether additional information does in fact increase the visual appeal of transitions. We observe that the creation of occluder mattes alone is only justified if the fake parallax effect can be synchronized with the camera motion (but not necessarily consistent with it), and if viewpoint discrepancies at occlusion boundaries are small. The faster the transition, the less perceptual value there is in creating mattes. Information on view alignment is always useful, as a dissolve effect is always preferred to fading to black and back.
On our duties as scientists
Authors: Goldreich Oded
Published: October 2009

Our primary duty as scientists is to contribute to the progress of science. By doing so, we best fulfill our duties to the society at large. Our primary duty is not fulfilled by merely doing research, but rather by communicating our findings to the relevant scientific community. The role of this community in the scientific process, entails some important (secondary) duties towards this community (e.g., evaluation of scientific work and education of future generations of researchers).

Needless to say, this essay presents my own subjective opinions regarding the aforementioned issues. I also seize the opportunity to express some related and less related opinions.
SIGACT news complexity theory column 64
Authors: Hemaspaandra Lane A.
Published: October 2009

Autoreducibility and mitoticity express weak forms of redundancy of information that a set might possess. We describe many results known about these concepts. Mitoticity always implies autoreducibility, but the converse holds in some situations and fails in others. Among the results we describe are that NP-complete sets are many-one autoreducible and that every many-one autoreducible set is many-one mitotic. In particular, every infinite NPcomplete set splits by a set in P into two disjoint, infinite NP-complete set.
SystemAda
Authors: Mahani Negin , Mokri Parnian , Sedghi Mahshid , Navabi Zainalabedin
Published: October 2009

Recent research on system level design has produced a new level of abstraction for description of hardware that is referred to as Transaction Level Modeling, or TLM. TLM separates hardware into computation and communication units and describes each at a very abstract level. Another important property of electronic circuits, which is also modeled well in TLM, is concurrency of tasks and operations. Inherent concurrency of Ada, makes this language a good candidate for design and description of modern electronic systems. This paper* describes how to use.

Ada as a system description language like SystemC, and will use Ada compilers (such as Gnat) to evaluate systems described using Ada. We refer to the adaptation of Ada for system level description as SystemAda. This paper reviews Ada programming language requirements for modeling behavior of a digital system at transaction level, and considers possible approaches for extending Ada to meet these requirements.
Ada for the control of degradation of service
Authors: Levine Gertrude
Published: October 2009

This paper examines degradations of service in terms of constructs of the Ada programming language that are effective for their control and deployment. Several studies of the software lifecycle have focused on taxonomies of defects or errors. Categories of service degradations, however, have only recently been identified. A classification scheme for service degradations clarifies their relationship to defects and errors and their role in the prevention of failure. With the growth of hard real-time systems, wireless networks, and multimedia applications, a comprehensive understanding of service degradations and their usage has become ever more important.
Gem #52
Authors: Briot Emmanuel
Published: October 2009

Ada Gem #52 -- Programming languages are, at least in the mind of most programmers, divided into two categories: scripting languages and others. The dividing line is not always obvious, and generally has to do with the size of the application, whether the language is interpreted or compiled, and whether doing operations such as manipulating external processes is easy.

It's safe to say, though, that Ada is almost never classified as a scripting language. This Gem demonstrates a few of the packages that are part of the GNAT distribution and that provide helpful scripting features to accomplish tasks that would often be thought to be in the domain of languages specialized for scripting. Portability is of course a major advantage of choosing Ada!
Gem #54
Authors: Briot Emmanuel
Published: October 2009

In Gem #52, we saw various facilities that GNAT provides to make Ada a scripting language (sort of). We discussed GNAT.Command_Line, GNATCOLL.Mmap, GNAT.Regpat and GNAT.AWK. This Gem continues the discussion of scripting capabilities, and focuses on interaction with external processes.
Gem #57
Authors: Ochem Quentin
Published: October 2009

In the preceding Ada/Java interfacing Gem, we saw how to create calls from Ada to Java using ada2java and callbacks. We're now going to go one step further, and discuss a cross-language dispatching mechanism that supports extension of an Ada tagged type in Java, allowing the possibility of making dispatching calls equally well from either side.
Gem #58
Authors: Ochem Quentin
Published: October 2009

Ada and Java are two languages that rely heavily on exceptions. A large part of the Ada data model is based on the fact that data is checked at run time, and will raise various kinds of exceptions such as Constraint_Error when constraints are violated. Similarly, there are many cases where Java performs checks that can raise exceptions, among the most common being checks on casts and null dereferences. It is therefore extremely important to support exceptions that are properly propagated from one language to the other and even potentially caught/handled, without having to worry about the language of origin.
Gem #59
Authors: Charlet Arnaud
Published: October 2009

One of the delicate areas of Ada that is often unfamiliar to developers is how to intermix Ada code with other programming languages. While Ada provides very powerful and complete capabilities to interface with other compiled languages such as C, C++, and Fortran, writing the Ada glue code that enables a programmer to use complex and large APIs can be tedious and error-prone. In this Gem, we will explore a new tool provided by AdaCore to automate the interface generation of C header files through the compiler.
Gem #61
Authors: Miranda Javier , Charlet Arnaud
Published: October 2009

In the previous Gem about generating bindings from C++ headers, we mentioned, without going into details, how to interface with C++ constructors in Ada using the CPP_Constructor pragma.

In this Gem we present some common uses of C++ constructors in mixed-language programs in GNAT, and in the next Gem, we will show the use of some powerful Ada 2005 features in conjunction with C++ constructors.
Achieving cooperative spectrum sensing in wireless cognitive radio networks
Authors: Song Chengqi , Zhang Qian
Published: October 2009

Dynamic spectrum access has been studied to exploit instantaneous spectrum availability by opening licensed spectrum to secondary users. To achieve high spectrum efficiency, secondary unlicensed users need to continuously sense spectrum to detect the presence of primary licensed users. Cooperative spectrum sensing has been recognized as a powerful solution to improve spectrum sensing performance, which requires nearby wireless nodes to share sensing results with each other. However, information sharing is achieved through broadcasting in wireless networks, which can provide free-riding opportunity for selfish nodes. Selfish nodes can benefit from receiving the sensing results from its neighbors by free without sharing. Therefore, appropriate strategies are essential to enforce and sustain the cooperation among neighboring nodes. In this paper we model cooperative spectrum sensing as an N-player horizontal infinite game, and study varies strategies for it. In wireless networks, the frequently occurred collisions make the cooperation enforcement problem quite challenging as it is hard to tell whether the information lost is due to nodes' selfishness or wireless collision. In this paper, we prove that Grim Trigger strategy, a classical strategy to stimulate cooperation in an infinite game, can result in poor performance due to random errors. We then propose a strategy basing on Carrot-and-Stick strategy, which can recover cooperation among multiple players from deviation. We prove that if nodes are sufficiently far-sight, or equivalently the entire system runs sufficiently long, the Nash Equilibrium of the proposed strategy for spectrum sensing game is still mutual cooperation, even under collision situation. We also prove that the proposed strategy is robust to collisions and colluding cheat.
Fitness landscape analysis for resource allocation in multiuser OFDM based cognitive radio systems
Authors: Huang Dong , Shen Zhiqi , Miao Chunyan , Leung Cyri
Published: October 2009

Cognitive Radio (CR) is a promising technique for improving the spectrum efficiency in future wireless communication networks. In this paper, dynamic resource allocation in a Multiuser Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (MU-OFDM) based CR system is investigated. Dynamic resource allocation in MU-OFDM CR systems is a computationally complex combinatorial optimization problem. Memetic algorithms (MAs), which are hybrid evolutionary algorithms with local searches, have been shown to outperform traditional algorithms for many combinatorial optimization problems. However, the performance of MAs is highly dependent on the choice of the local search and evolutionary operators. This choice should be based on the characteristics of the problem at hand. Fitness landscape is an important technique for analyzing the behavior of combinatorial optimization problems. Based on fitness landscape analysis, appropriate local search and evolutionary operators are selected for the proposed MA. Simulation results show that the proposed memetic algorithm provides better performance than existing algorithms.
Development of a case-based reasoning cognitive engine for IEEE 802.22 WRAN applications
Authors: He An , Gaeddert Joseph , Bae Kyung Kyoon , Newman Timothy R. , Reed Jeffrey H. , Morales Lizdabel , Park Chang-Hyun
Published: October 2009

On Nov. 4 2008, the Federal Communications Commission adopted rules for unlicensed use of television white spaces. The IEEE 802.22 Wireless Regional Area Networks (WRAN) standard is the first IEEE standard utilizing cognitive radio (CR) technology to exploit the television white space. A decision engine that is able to respond to the changes in the radio environment is necessary to efficiently exploit underutilized spectrum resources and avoid interfering with the licensed systems (e.g., TV services). This paper discusses the development of a case-based reasoning cognitive engine (CBR-CE) for the IEEE 802.22 WRAN applications. The performance of the CBR-CE is evaluated under various radio scenarios and compared to that of several multi objective search based algorithms, including the hill climbing search (HCS) and the genetic algorithm (GA). The simulation results show that the developed CBR-CE can achieve comparable utility with faster adaptation than the search based cognitive engines after appropriate training / learning. The learning process of the CBR is also simulated and discussed.
Centralized modeling of the communication space for spectral awareness in cognitive radio networks
Authors: Elsner Jens P. , Koerner Christian , Jondral Friedrich K.
Published: October 2009

The communication space is five dimensional: its degrees of freedom are frequency, time and space. The use of the electromagnetic spectrum depends on these parameters. With future applications such as opportunistic overlay access or distributed spectrum monitoring in mind, it is important to estimate the state of the communication space on the basis of incomplete or imprecise information. A promising approach are technology centric Cognitive Radio networks. In these networks, nodes cooperate to infer information on spectral occupancy. This conceptual paper proposes a novel approach for centralized modeling of the communication space with emphasis on spatial dependencies through the use of a regression model. The modeling approach is verified with practical measurements.