bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
What are clock distribution networks?
Authors: Friedman Eby G.
Published: January 2007

In a synchronous digital system, the clock signal is used to define a time reference for the movement of data within that system. Since this function is vital to the operation of a synchronous system, much attention has been given to the characteristics of these clock signals and the networks used in their distribution. Clock signals are often regarded as simple control signals; however, these signals have some very special characteristics and attributes.Clock signals are typically loaded with the greatest fanout, travel over the greatest distances, and operate at the highest speeds of any signal, either control or data, with in the entire synchronous system. Since the data signals are provided with a temporal reference by the clock signals, the clock waveforms must be particularly clean and sharp. Furthermore, these clock signals are particularly affected by technology scaling, in that long global interconnect lines become signicantly more resistive as line dimensions are decreased. This increased line resistance is one of the primary reasons for the increasing significance of clock distribution on synchronous performance. Finally, the control of any differences and uncertainty in the arrival times of the clock signals can severely limit the maximum performance of the entire system and create catastrophic race conditions in which an incorrect data signal may latch within a register.Most synchronous digital systems consist of cascaded banks of sequential registers with combinatorial logic between each set of registers. The functional requirements of the digital system are satisfied by the logic stages. The global performance and local timing requirements are satisfied by the careful insertion of pipeline registers into equally spaced time windows to satisfy critical worst case timing constraints. The proper design of the clock distribution network ensures that these critical timing requirements are satisfied and that no race conditions exist.The delay components that make up a general synchronous system are composed of the following three individual subsystems: the memory storage elements, the logic elements, and the clocking circuitry and distribution network. Interrelationships among these three subsystems of a synchronous digital system are critical to achieving maximum levels of performance and reliability.Novel structures are currently under development to ameliorate these issues and provide effective solutions. Important area of research include resonant clocking techniques, on-chip optical interconnect, and local synchronization methodologies.The literature in this field exists in a variety of journals and conference proceedings. Examples include the IEEE Transactions of Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) Systems, IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems, the IEEE/ACM Design Automation Conference, and a host of related computer, circuits, and CAD conferences. Survey and review articles exist that summarize many of the primary results while providing background and perspective.
Introduction to the special issue on link mining
Authors: Getoor Lise , Diehl Christopher P.
Published: January 2007

An emerging challenge for data mining is the problem of mining richly structured datasets, where the objects are linked in some way. Many real-world datasets describe a variety of entity types linked via multiple types of relations. These links provide additional context that can be helpful for many data mining tasks. Yet multi-relational data violates the traditional assumption of independent, identically distributed data instances that provides the basis for many statistical machine learning algorithms. Therefore, new approaches are needed that can exploit the dependencies across the attribute and link structure.
Link mining
Authors: Getoor Lise , Diehl Christopher P.
Published: January 2007

Many datasets of interest today are best described as a linked collection of interrelated objects. These may represent homogeneous networks, in which there is a single-object type and link type, or richer, heterogeneous networks, in which there may be multiple object and link types (and possibly other semantic information). Examples of homogeneous networks include single mode social networks, such as people connected by friendship links, or the WWW, a collection of linked web pages. Examples of heterogeneous networks include those in medical domains describing patients, diseases, treatments and contacts, or in bibliographic domains describing publications, authors, and venues.
Link mining
refers to data mining techniques that explicitly consider these links when building predictive or descriptive models of the linked data. Commonly addressed link mining tasks include object ranking, group detection, collective classification, link prediction and subgraph discovery. While network analysis has been studied in depth in particular areas such as social network analysis, hypertext mining, and web analysis, only recently has there been a cross-fertilization of ideas among these different communities. This is an exciting, rapidly expanding area. In this article, we review some of the common emerging themes.
KDD CUP-2005 report
Authors: Li Ying , Zheng Zijian , Dai Honghua (Kathy)
Published: January 2007

The KDD-Cup 2005 Competition was held in conjunction with the Eleventh ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining. The task of the KDD-Cup 2005 competition was to classify 800,000 internet user search queries into 67 predefined categories. This task is easy to understand, but the lack of straightforward training set, subjective user intents of queries, poor information in short queries, and high noise level make the task very challenge.In this paper, we summarize the competition task, the evaluation method, and the results of the competition. Here we only highlight some key techniques used in submitted solutions. The technical details of the solutions from the three award winning teams are available in their papers separately in this issue of SIGKDD Explorations. At the end, we also share the results of a survey conducted with this year's Cup participants. To facilitate research in this area, the task description, data, answer set, and related information of this KDD-Cup are published at the KDD-Cup 2005 web site: http://www.acm.org/sigs/sigkdd/kdd2005/kddcup.html.
KDD-2005 workshop report
Authors: Adibi Jafar , Pantel Patrick , Grobelnik Marko , Mladenic Dunja
Published: January 2007

In this paper we provide a summary of the workshop on Link Discovery: Issues, Approaches and Applications (LinkKDD-2005) held in conjunction with ACM SIGKDD 2005, on August 21
st
in Chicago, Illinois, USA. We report in detail about the research issues addressed in the talks at the workshop.
WebKDD 2005
Authors: Nasraoui Olfa , Zaïane Osmar R. , Spiliopoulou Myra , Mobasher Bamshad , Masand Brij , YU Philip S.
Published: January 2007

In this report, we summarize the contents and outcomes of the recent WebKDD 2005 workshop on Web Mining and Web Usage Analysis that was held in conjunction with the 11th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD 2005), August 21-24, 2005, in Chicago, Illinois. The theme of this workshop was
"Taming Evolving, Expanding and Multi-faceted Web Clickstreams".
We also reflect on possible new directions in Web mining research as reflected by the discussions and the talks during the workshop.
A 4G generic ANWIRE system and service integration architecture
Authors: Ganchev Ivan , O'Droma Máirtín S. , Siebert Matthias , Bader Faouzi , Chaouchi Hakima , Armuelles Ivan , Demeure Isabelle , McEvoy Fintan
Published: January 2007

This paper proposes a 4G 'Generic ANWIRE system and service Integration Architecture' (GAIA). The relationship between the different GAIA domains is explained and interaction between their functional entities is shown in order to explore various GAIA properties. An overview of the relevant topics related to the GAIA architecture and its respective elements is given. A well-based summary on system integration efforts of previous projects is provided as a basis for deriving of various requirements for GAIA. New two-phase business model to accommodate the 4G development is proposed and justified. Finally, a new reference communication model of a future 4G wireless system is proposed and GAIA interdomain signalling issues are discussed.
Two-way admission control and resource allocation for quality of service support in location-aided mobile ad hoc networks
Authors: Sivavakeesarer S. , Pavlou G.
Published: January 2007

This paper proposes a new QoS-aware medium access control (MAC) protocol in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). This takes the unique challenges of MANETs into consideration, and works in conjunction with the location-based forwarding strategy. This novel protocol is based on the legacy IEEE 802.11, and thus can be relatively easily integrated into existing systems. It is adaptive and network-aware depending on the type and intensity of traffic, and relative mobility patterns of nodes. In addition, it makes use of the point-coordination-function (PCF) of IEEE 802.11 in a distributed fashion for the first time in multihop MANETs. Our strategy enables two-way admission control for improved performance, whereby the forwarder-node selection algorithm allows previous hop nodes to perform implicit admission control using locally available information, while a selected forwarder-node performs explicit admission control depending on its current load. Analytical results confirm the performance improvement of our strategy.
Convergence, steady state, and global gains of agent-based coalition formation in e-markets
Authors: Sim Kwang Mong , Wang Yuanshi , Wu Hong
Published: January 2007

In this paper, we present a rigorous analysis of an agent-based coalition formation mechanism in emarkets proposed by Lerman and Shehory. While the agent-based coalition formation shows good performance through simulations, our analysis provides guidelines for agent designers to simplify the system design. We show that the coalition formations with different initial distributions converge to a unique steady state. The steady state, which represents both the final coalition distribution and the global utility gain, is proven to be determined by buyer agents' local strategies. The global utility gain is shown to increase as the number of buyer agents increases. In a system of uniform-attachment-uniform-detachment rates, the global utility gain is proven to increase as the detachment rate decreases.
Strategic trading agents via market modelling
Authors: Zhang Dongmo , Zhao Kanghua , Liang Chia-Ming , Huq Gonelur Begum , Huang Tze-Haw
Published: January 2007

This paper presents some key strategies applied in jackaroo agent. Most of the strategies are rooted in theoretical modelling and statistic analysis of TAC-03 SCM game. We model the product market with a variation of Cournot game and specify the component market by constant-supply model. We outline the basic theory and algorithms dealing with component procuring, product pricing, production scheduling and price forecasting.
Markets are dead, long live markets
Authors: Lai Kevin
Published: January 2007

Researchers have long proposed using economic approaches to resource allocation in computer systems. However, few of these proposals became operational, let alone commercial. Questions persist about the economic approach regarding its assumptions, value, applicability, and relevance to system design. The goal of this paper is to answer these questions. We find that market-based resource allocation is useful, and more importantly, that mechanism design and system design should be integrated to produce systems that are both economically and computationally efficient.
Drawing crowds and bit welfare
Authors: Adar Eytan
Published: January 2007

Tit-for-tat style file sharing systems such as BitTorrent have proven to be remarkably effective in dealing with highly popular content. By explicitly addressing free-riding behavior, a "greedy" tit-for-tat approach encourages sharing and succeeds in providing a higher quality of service. However, in situations where a file is not as popular, or the rate of demand is not high, it is frequently difficult to obtain the file in a timely manner. In this paper we demonstrate how additionally greedy behavior on the part of some peers can counterintuitively address this problem. In particular we discuss two possible techniques by which peers, with complete file copies, strategically reduce their effort while improving total network performance by various metrics.
Conference report
Authors: Shneidman Jeffrey
Published: January 2007

This report summarizes events and activities at the Sixth Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Conference on Electronic Commerce (EC'05) held June 5-8 2005 in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. The program featured thirty-one talks, four tutorials, and two invited talks by Ehud Kalai and Jennifer Rexford.
M
2
RC
Authors: Morcos Hany , Matta Ibrahim , Bestavros Azer
Published: January 2007

Routing protocols in wireless sensor networks (WSN) face two main challenges: first, the challenging environments in which WSN's are deployed negatively affect the quality of the routing process. Therefore, routing protocols for WSN's should recognize and react to node failures and packet losses. Second, sensor nodes are battery-powered, which makes power a scarce resource. Routing protocols should optimize power consumption to prolong the lifetime of the WSN. In this paper, we present a new adaptive routing protocol for WSN's, we call it M
2
RC. M
2
RC has two phases: mesh establishment phase and data forwarding phase. In the first phase, M
2
RC establishes the routing state to enable multipath data forwarding. In the second phase, M
2
RC forwards data packets from the source to the sink. Targeting hop-by-hop reliability, an M
2
RC forwarding node waits for an acknowledgement (ACK) that its packets were correctly received at the next neighbor. Based on this feedback, an M
2
RC node applies multiplicative-increase/additive-decrease (MIAD) to control the number of neighbors targeted by its packet broadcast. We simulated M
2
RC in the ns-2 simulator [4] and compared it to GRAB [1], Max-power, and Min-power routing schemes. Our simulations show that M
2
RC achieves the highest throughput with at least 10-30% less consumed power per delivered report in scenarios where a certain numberof nodes unexpectedly fail.-
An intra-task DVS algorithm exploiting path probabilities for real-time systems
Authors: Kumar G. Sudha Anil , Manimaran G.
Published: January 2007

In this paper, we present a novel intra-task Dynamic Voltage Scheduling (DVS) algorithm based on the knowledge of frequently executed paths in the control flow graph for real time systems. The basic idea is to construct a common path composing all the frequently executed paths (hot-paths) and perform DVS scheduling based on this common path, rather than the most probable path. We compare the performance of the proposed algorithm with an existing algorithm. The preliminary results show that the proposed algorithm performs better than the existing algorithm.
Fully associative cache partitioning with don't care bits for real-time applications
Authors: Chousein Ali , Mahapatra Rabi N.
Published: January 2007

The usage of cache memories in time-critical applications has been limited as caches introduce unpredictable execution behavior. Cache partitioning techniques have been developed to reduce the impact of unpredictability owing to context switch effects. However, partitioning reduces the cache size available for each task resulting in capacity related cache misses. This paper introduces a fully associative cache architecture for multi-tasking applications where effective partition sizes are increased by tag compression in the cache. The proposed scheme uses a few don't care cells in its least significant bits of the tag to aggregate multiple tag entries into a single entry. The experimental results indicate that the proposed scheme is context switch resilient when eight different real-time benchmarks use the cache concurrently. Further, this cache architecture requires less time and less energy to perform tag table search compared to contemporary fully associative caches of the same size.
De-layered grid storage server
Authors: Shrikumar H.
Published: January 2007

Networks have become faster and disks have become fatter at a pace that, despite Moore's law, CPU developments have simply not been been able to keep up with. We present a Grid Storage Server which is capable of scaling up to meet the "terabit-terabyte" demands of very large scale grid computation applications with large data sets.The Grid Storage Server is implemented almost completely in silicon, whether FPGA or ASIC; the fast-path of this server does not use a CPU or von Neumann style (instruction/data) machine. Instead, multiple layers of a protocol stack are compiled into a hardware engine that processes all layers concurrently on-chip. This "serverless" design allows it to scale up to match "terabit" network speeds and "terabyte" disk capacities enabling large scale grid applications.At a price-point a small percent of that of a server-based design, the Grid Server incorporates a standards compliant high-performance TCP stack that can saturate 40Gbps using a single or multiple TCP connections. The current design directly attaches to a storage array of 48TB capacity. The storage array is organized with a fault-tolerant RAID for performance and reliability; the RAID configuration is adaptive and can be tuned to conflicting application needs. As a bonus, because the control-plane in the silicon-based TCP engine has very low jitter, the protocol engine has mechanisms for nanosecond precision clock synchronisation across very large distances, thus, for the first time, enabling transcontinental real-time and temporal grid computation and database applications.
Embedded system education
Authors: Sangiovanni-Vincentelli Alberto Luigi , Pinto Alessandro
Published: January 2007

Embedded systems are emerging as an essential component of modern electronic products. Embedded system design problems are posing challenges that involve entirely new skills for engineers. These skills are related to the combination of traditionally disjoint engineering disciplines. There is a shared concern that today's educational systems are not providing the appropriate foundations for embedded systems. We believe a new education paradigm is needed.We will argue this point using the example of an emerging curriculum on embedded systems at the University of California at Berkeley. This curriculum is the result of a distillation process of more than ten years of intense research work. We will present the considerations that are driving the curriculum development and we review our undergraduate and graduate program. In particular, we describe in detail a graduate class (EECS249: Design of Embedded Systems: Modeling, Validation and Synthesis) that has been taught for six years. A common feature of our education agenda is the search for fundamentals of embedded system science rather than embedded system design techniques, an approach that today is rather unique.
A comparison of bidding strategies for simultaneous auctions
Authors: Candale Teddy , Sen Sandip
Published: January 2007

Bidding for multiple items or bundles on online auctions raise challenging problems. We assume that an agent has a valuation function that returns its valuation for an arbitrary bundle. In the real world all or most of the items of interest to an agent is not present in a single combinatorial auction. We focus on bidding for multiple items in a set of auctions, each of which sell only a single unit of a particular item. Hence an agent has to bid in multiple auctions to obtain item bundles. While an optimal bidding strategy is known when bidding in sequential auctions, only suboptimal strategies are available when bidding for items sold in auctions running simultaneously. We investigate a hill-climbing bidding strategy, which is optimal given an infinite number of restarts, to decide on an agent's bid for simultaneous auctions. We provide a comparison of this algorithm with existing ones, both in terms of utilities generated and computation time, along with a discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of these strategies.
A Sudoku program in Fortran 95
Authors: Metcalf Michael
Published: January 2007

A remarkable craze swept though many countries in the year 2005. Already known and popular in Japan, sudoku was introduced into the UK and thence into other European countries and the USA. Its rules are simple. Given a 9 x 9 grid with some numbers already in place, the solver has to fill in the missing values such that, in each row, each column and each 3 x 3 box, the digits 1 to 9 appear once and once only. The starting digits in this example are arranged symmetrically, which is merely a matter of taste. However, it is widely accepted that a properly formed puzzle has a unique solution and that it can thus be solved, without having to make any guesses, by pure logic.An excellent source of further details is the Wikipedia article at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudoku
Interoperability with C in Fortran 2003
Authors: Donev Aleksander
Published: January 2007

One of the major new features in the Fortran 2003 is features for interoperability with C © Interop). The intrinsic module ISO_C_BINDING provides:• constants, mostly type parameters, C_NULL_CHAR, C_NULL_PTR, and others,• types, and in particular, TYPE(C_PTR) and TYPE(C_FUNPTR),• procedures, such as C_LOC, C_FUNLOC, C_F_POINTER, C_F_PROCPOINTER and C_ASSOCIATED.A Fortran interface can be specified for a C function with external linkage and used to invoke such a function. The interface has the characteristic BIND(C) label, and must also satisfy some additional restrictions.C Interop can be used to portably use multi-language codes in Fortran. Since most languages interoperate with C, the feature can actually be used to interoperate with other programming languages as well. C Interop can also be used to give access to Fortran programmers to the many standard libraries with widely-used and implemented C interfaces. This includes lower-level tasks such as interfacing with the OS on UNIX-based systems, or using special libraries like OpenGL.For simple API's, developing Fortran interfaces is practically trivial once one gets some experience. For more complicated API's whose full functionality/power is not needed, such as for example TCP/IP sockets or shared-memory segments on UNIX systems, it is often easier to develop a condensed C API/library that does the actual work, and is simpler to interface to from Fortran. However, for libraries like OpenGL, one should provide a full Fortran interface so that the whole API can be accessed. Doing this manually is not easy and is also error-prone due to the size of the OpenGL/GLU/GLUT interfaces. For certain libraries like MPI, a special Fortran interface may be defined for the purposes of efficiency, portability, ease-of-use, or to accommodate for language semantic differences.In this first paper, we will show how to develop a Fortran interface for a simple C API/library. In a second paper, we consider automating the process so that large and more complex API's, and in particular, OpenGL, can be handled. The source codes can be obtained at http://atom.princeton.edu/donev/F2x.Along the way, we identify some problems with the design of C Interop in Fortran 2003.
A capsule view of data security for the data processing manager
Authors: Squires Burton
Published: January 2007

Here are presented proposed definitions for privacy, security, and integrity as they relate to data security. Following these definitions is a discussion of some aspects of data security a data processing manager may wish to consider.
Checklist for computer system conversion
Authors: Estell Robert G.
Published: January 2007

Why do you want to convert?When do you expect the new system to become productive?How long do you expect the new system to last?Do you expect to save money with the new system?Do you expect increased reliability on the new system?Do you expect greater thruput (or shorter turnaround) on the new system?Do you expect to acquire more sophisticated tools on the new system? (If so, to fulfill what needs?)Do you expect to support new applications with the new system? (If so, what? How long?)
A job flow time regression model
Authors: Chen Cedric S. , Koot Ronald S.
Published: January 2007

The flow time of a job is the total time it spends in the computer system--from the time it is recognized to the time it is purged. The mean flow time is used to measure the service capability of a data processing shop because, the smaller the mean flow time, the more jobs that can be processed within a period of time. Since the progress of program development in a batch environment depends on the number of shots each programmer can have, a system management objective is to identify the factors which are essential to the flow time and ensure that the system is running optimally at all times.
Evaluate your computer installation
Authors: Ramsgard William C.
Published: January 2007

This article concerns the evaluation of your electronic data processing department -- its people, its procedures, its problems and its potential. Is your computer installation any good? Let's see if we can answer that question.
The rich king and the magic pert chart
Authors: Keith Christopher
Published: January 2007

We would like to think, as we are citizens of the most modern age, that we are free at last of the kind of foolish superstition which so infected previous times. We would like to feel, not simply that we have freed ourselves of past myths in particular (discarding such obvious implausibilities as witches and wizards and goblins), but that we have moved beyond mythology and superstition in general.
How do you act?
Authors: Gerber Thomas L.
Published: January 2007

As a manager of a computer installation, what do your actions say to your subordinates? A manager can know what good management is all about, but might not put this knowledge into practice. Actions can contradict both beliefs and statements.
Vicious circles
Authors: Atkins Richard , Becker Douglas
Published: January 2007

Picture, if you will, a husband and wife bedding down in the evening with a dual control electric blanket. Each one is able to control the heat individually without affecting the other. As it turns out this particular evening, the electric blanket was on upside down. Everything would have been fine if they both liked the same temperature, but the husband liked it cool and the wife liked it a bit warm. No problem. The wife turns up the heat a bit. His side gets warmer. Too warm, he thinks. He turns his control down. She is too cool, so she turns her control up. This process continues until he his burning and she is freezing. Fortunately, it does not take them very long to figure out the problem and find the solution.
Policy on computer-related activities
Authors: Higgins D. S.
Published: January 2007

The purpose of this policy is to establish the rules necessary to adequately plan, coordinate, and control computer-related activities throughout the company in order to achieve the optimum cost benefit possible and to achieve adequate data security.
Let's communicate
Authors: Gerber T. L.
Published: January 2007

Person-to-person communication in data processing seems to increase in importance every year. There is an annual crop of statements by authors and data processing notables about how poorly data processing people communicate with users. There is plenty of blame handed out, but not much specific advice. Here is some advice. Glossaries help; so does training.
A simple APL-Excel interface
Authors: Saigusa Kyosuke
Published: January 2007

IBM has actively developed and released many innovative features for Workstation APL2 V2 ever since it was announced in 2002. They include interfaces to other languages and applications in the Microsoft Windows environment. I have tested some of them within the limitations of my knowledge of the subjects, to see if we can put them into practical use.
Tips and tricks
Authors: Askoolum Ajay
Published: January 2007

In this article, I raise ten APL problems; each problem has a simple
one line
solution which does
not
involve the creation of any intermediate variable. The objective in solving such problems, for novices and experts alike, is to acquire new APL skills; if you can solve the problem without struggle, find an alternative to the first solution. In short, the solution to the problems should be an idiom: these idioms may be compiled into a Vector idiom dictionary.
A boundless compression algorithm in APL2
Authors: Alfonseca Manuel
Published: January 2007

Compression algorithms are very useful for a variety of applications. Originally, their main use was what their name suggests, reducing the size of computer files without losing any information. It was interesting to see that they were equally useful for all types of files, such as text, bit maps, many types of images, sound, scientific experimental data, computer code (source and object code), combined data (text and images, for instance), and so on, and so forth. Only when the files have been coded with an imbedded compression algorithm (as happens in some image formats, such as JPEG, or in sound renditions in MP3) the additional compression by generalized algorithms is negligible.
Performance impact of multihop handovers in an IP-based multihop radio access network
Authors: Hofmann Philipp , Bettstetter Christian , Prehofer Christian
Published: January 2007

This paper presents and evaluates an IPv6-based protocol for the interconnection of ad hoc networks to the Internet. Its main novel feature is the support for different types of multihop handovers between two access routers. This topic represents an essential functionality of multihop radio access networks, but it has not been investigated so far in the context of a testbed. We measure and analyze the performance of different handover schemes in a testbed with IEEE 802.11b and ad hoc routing. We find that a proactive access router discovery scheme yields the lowest handover rate in our setup. Furthermore, it is advantageous to introduce optimizing multihop handovers, which gives mobile devices the opportunity to choose a new, better suited access router in case the hop distance to its current access router increases. Although this additional handover type increases the total number of handovers, it improves the system behavior in terms of handover delay and packet delivery fraction.
Subjective symptoms and mobile phones
Authors: Lin James C.
Published: January 2007

Several months ago, the summary from a workshop on Electromagnetic Hypersensitivity was made available on the World Health Organizations EMF Project website [12]. In addition to the World Health Organization, the meeting had the cosponsored of the European Commission Coordinated Action EMF-NET, the European Cooperation in the Field of Scientific and Technical Research (COST 281), and the Ministry of Health of the Czech Republic. The report concluded that electromagnetic hypersensitivity is characterized by a variety of nonspecific symptoms that differ from individual to individual. The symptoms are certainly real and can vary widely in their severity. For some individuals the symptoms can change their lifestyle. Moreover, it had suggested that there also are some indications that these symptoms may be due to preexisting psychiatric conditions as well as stress reactions as a result of worrying about believed electromagnetic health effects, rather than the electromagnetic exposure itself.
Guest editor's foreword
Authors: Riska Alma , Riedel Erik
Published: January 2007

In recent years storage systems have evolved dramatically as a result of both social and technical advances. Storage systems and storage devices are found in almost any computing installation from large centralized and distributed enterprise systems to a variety of mobile consumer electronic devices. Such a wide deployment of storage has created a need to re-evaluate basic solutions in storage systems design and implementation. As part of this ongoing process of technology evolution, it is critical to find a framework to identify, understand, and evaluate a range of issues. The reliability, availability, scalability, performance, and power consumption characteristics of storage systems must be considered in a variety of traditional and emerging computing environments.
Achieving completion time guarantees in an opportunistic data migration scheme
Authors: Zhang Jianyong , Sarkar Prasenjit , Sivasubramaniam Anand
Published: January 2007

Today's data centers are in a constant state of evolution because of equipment refreshes and the move to tiered storage. Data migration is a very important activity in this environment as data moves from one storage device to another without disrupting access from applications. This paper presents the design, implementation, and evaluation of a migration scheme that provides completion time guarantees for a migration task and also minimizes its impact on foreground applications. This scheme is based on an opportunistic data migration scheme that consider migration as background activities. To make sure that a migration task obeys a completion time constraint, an adaptive rate control mechanism is presented. The scheme uses various statistical techniques to estimate system capacities, and utilize these estimates to regulate foreground activities. Trace-driven experimental evaluation shows that our migration scheme is able to ensure that the migration task completes in time while minimizing the impact on foreground application activity.
Semantically-smart disk systems
Authors: Arpaci-Dusseau Andrea C. , Arpaci-Dusseau Remzi H. , Bairavasundaram Lakshmi N. , Denehy Timothy E. , Popovici Florentina I. , Prabhakaran Vijayan , Sivathanu Muthian
Published: January 2007

In this paper we describe research that has been on-going within our group for the past four years on
semantically-smart disk systems
. A semantically-smart system goes beyond typical block-based storage systems by extracting higher-level information from the stream of traffic to disk; doing so enables new and interesting pieces of functionality to be implemented within low-level storage systems. We first describe the development of our efforts over the past four years, highlighting the key technologies needed to build semantically-smart systems as well as the main weaknesses of our approach. We then discuss future directions in the design and implementation of smarter storage systems.
Extension of expansion base algorithm for multivariate analytic factorization including the case of singular leading coefficient
Authors: Iwami Maki
Published: January 2007

The expansion base algorithm, which was devised by Abhyankar, Kuo and McCallum is very efficient for analytic factorization of bivariate polynomials. The author had extended it to more than two variables but it was only for polynomials with non-vanishing leading coefficient at the expansion point. We improve it to be able to apply to polynomials including the case of vanishing leading coefficient, that is, singular leading coefficient, which comes to a specific problem only for more than two variables.
Apollonius circle conflict
Authors: Tzoumas George M. , Emiris Ioannis Z.
Published: January 2007

What does a
query ellipse
do (outside, intersects or tangent) with respect to the
Apollonius circle
of the three black ellipses?
The complex network of EC authors
Authors: Cotta Carlos , Merelo Juan-Julián
Published: January 2007

The study of all kind of complex networks has undergone an accelerated expansion in the last few years, after the introduction of models for scale-free/power-law [2] and small-world [12] networks, which, in turn, has induced the study of many different phenomena under this new light. Co-authorship patterns are one of them. Nodes in co-authorship networks are paper authors, joined by edges if they have written at least one paper together. Even as most papers are written by a few authors staying at the same institution, science is a global business nowadays, and lots of papers are co-authored by scientists continents apart from each other. There are several interesting facts that can be computed on these co-authorship networks: first, what kind of macroscopic values they yield, and second, which are the most outstanding
actors
(authors) and edges (co-authorships) within this network. An understanding of the structure of the network and what makes some nodes stand out goes beyond mere curiosity to give us some insight on the deep workings of science, what makes an author popular, or some co-authors preferred over others.
Report on the 7
th
ACM International Workshop on Web Information and Data Management (WIDM 2005)
Authors: Bonifati Angela , Lee Dongwon
Published: January 2007

The 7th ACM International Workshop on Web Information and Data Management (WIDM 2005) was held at the Hilton Bremen Hotel in Bremen (Germany), on November 5, 2005, in conjunction with the 14th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM 2005). The main objective of the workshop was to bring together researchers, industrial practitioners, and developers to discuss how Web information can be extracted, stored, analyzed, and processed to provide useful knowledge to the end users for various advanced database and Web applications. WIDM 2005 was sponsored by ACM SIGIR and by GI (Gesellshaft für Informatik) and was in cooperation with ACM SIGMOD.
Market basket recommendations for the HP SMB store
Authors: Singh Pramod , Thomas A Charles , Sepulveda Ariel
Published: January 2007

The Analytics team at Hewlett-Packard recently executed a manually-driven cross-sell/up-sell pilot in the Small and Medium Business online store and call center. The pilot, for which management dictated a 1 month development timeframe, utilized sales transaction, product configuration, and product availability data. Leveraging Market Basket analysis techniques among a small subset of available product SKUs, the pilot yielded a ROI of more than $300K/month and more importantly, gave birth to greater opportunities to further showcase the power of analytics and data driven decision-making at HP.
Operator education for specialization
Authors: Sharkey Allen I.
Published: January 2007

When discussing the type of education plan to follow for any operation, it is necessary to determine the type of Computing Center we are dealing with. This paper will discuss one type of Computing Center; namely, a multi-shift operation running Development Programming work. It is felt that this type of environment will lend itself best to a specialized education plan. The reasons being the availability of manpower and the educational nature of Development work.
Overview of performance measurement techniques
Authors: Daly Diana
Published: January 2007

Daly:
Good Morning. Surprisingly many important decisions regarding expensive computer equipment and manpower are still made today with little more than guesswork. Systems evaluations and comparisons, efficiency measurements of programs and proficiency judgments of programmers are often handled with the very manual--paper and pencil methods that computers are purchased or rented to avoid. Computer capabilities have broadened and as multiprogramming, multiprocessing and remote computing have become a reality, the situation gets worse and worse.
Planning a computer system facility in an intercomputer network
Authors: Wessler Barry
Published: January 2007

Wessler:
In this talk a computer network is defined to be a set of autonomous, independent computer systems, interconnected so as to permit interactive resource sharing between any pair of systems. An overview of the need for a computer network, the requirements of a computer communication system, a description of the properties of the communication system chosen, and the potential uses of such a network will be described later.
Installation management abstracts
Authors: Kolasa Susan
Published: January 2007

The following magazines are being searched in the preparation of these abstracts:Communications of the ACMComputer DecisionsComputers and AutomationData Processing MagazineDatamationInnovationModern DataSoftware Age
Heuristics for the deterministic bidding problem
Authors: Greenwald Amy , Naroditskiy Victor
Published: January 2007

We study a suite of heuristics that were designed for bidding in the simultaneous auctions that characterize the Trading Agent Competition (TAC) Travel Game. At a high-level, the design of many successful TAC agents can be summarized as: (i) predict: build a model of the auctions' clearing prices, and (ii) optimize: solve for an (approximately) optimal set of bids, given this model. We focus on the optimization piece of this design.
Whizbang!
Authors: Sykes Roy A.
Published: January 2007

Originally, APL had only one set function,
membership
(
L∈R
). Defined as [EQUATION], it simply flagged whether each element of its left argument was found anywhere in its right argument. With the introduction of nested arrays, the definition was refined to [EQUATION] so that nested items could be be searched as well as simple elements. Users immediately noticed the ∪ and ∩ keys on the APL keyboard and wondered why they were not implemented as set union and intersection. Several implementations did include them, but APL2 implemented only
without
(
L
~
R
).
Observations at the J user conference
Authors: Reiter Clifford A. , Jones William R.
Published: January 2007

The Conference Attendees were graciously greeted and registered on Monday morning. Coffee and other goodies were available and the hundred plus attendees quickly fell into spirited conversation. In fact, there always seemed to be snacks or lunch and conversation outside the lecture rooms where Strand had software, books and T-shirts available and demonstration machines were set up. A table was covered with papers from the talks and from some non-presenters. The rooms in the Koffler Institute for Pharmacy Management were comfortable and each contained an overhead and computer demonstration equipment.
APL96 conference survey results
Authors: Holt Dick
Published: January 2007

This article summarizes a survey of APL96 Conference attenders in Lancaster, England. Its purpose is to help design better future conferences. Each survey question is quoted, and then followed by a summary of respondents' answers.
Data warehouse processing and query by mail
Authors: Gordon Ken
Published: January 2007

Much effort in I/S is currently going into creating "Data Warehouses." These are stores of data periodically extracted from older legacy applications, converted to common standards and made accessible for user analysis. The warehouse acts as a WORM (Write Once, Read Many times) storage. Where the extract and transfer is performed nightly, they provide access to what is termed "Near Operational" data and can be used to replace much of the existing reporting. In other cases they are used to store mostly historical data for analysis of trends, market impact, financial status and do on. While often implemented with a variety of different clean up tools, languages, data base products and query tools, this article describes an implementation done almost entirely with APL. It includes a query capability termed "Query by Mail" which enables anyone with access to E-Mail to send queries to the Warehouse and receive responses or extracts of data by return mail. The "query" includes customized analysis of field content to allow identification of fields and records containing invalid data. Built upon a proprietary inverted file system, it provides rapid response to user queries and little load on the server system.
Support vector machines in A+
Authors: Skomorokhov Alexander , Nakhabov Alexander
Published: January 2007

This paper considers the implementation of Support Vector Machines (SVM), the new extensive class of data analysis methods. SVM have a number of advantages as compared with standard data mining techniques like artificial neural networks, for example. In the paper this methodology is described in details and implemented in A+ programming language in the step-by-step fashion.
Visualizing integer length integer vectors with J and POV-Ray
Authors: Tirrell Jordan
Published: January 2007

Integer length integer vectors correspond to solutions of Diophantine equations where a sum of squares is a square. In two dimensions, this equation is
a
2
+
b
2
=
c
2
, and solutions in positive integers correspond to Pythagorean Triples (or integer length integer vectors <
a
,
b
> in
Z
2
). In three dimensions, this equation is
x
2
+
y
2
+
z
2
=
r
2
, and integer solutions correspond to integer length integer vectors <
x
,
y
,
z
> in
Z
3
. We investigate methods of visualizing twodimensional integer length integer vectors with J 5.04 [6], and then create three-dimensional generalizations with J and POV-Ray 3.6 [7]. This work has been motivated in part by the Perfect Cuboid and Perfect Parallelepiped problems, which are open problems regarding integer length integer vectors [3]. A discussion of these problems, as well as the parameterizations and algebraic structures of integer length integer vectors in
Z
2
and
Z
3
is available at [2].
Communicating with sound (panel session
Authors: Bly Sara A. , Frysinger Steven P. , Lunney David , Mansur Douglass L. , Mezrich Joseph J. , Morrison Robert C.
Published: January 2007

The
Communicating with Sound
panel for CHI '85 will focus on ways of expanding the user interface by using sound as a significant means of output. As a user's communication from the computer has progressed from large (and often smeary) printout to a teletypewriter and, finally, to the multi-window workstation displays of today, the emphasis has remained primarily on visual output. Although many user terminals and workstations have the capability of generating sound, that capability is rarely used for more than audio cues (indicating status such as an error condition or task completion) and simple musical tunes. Research shows that sounds convey meaningful information to users. With examples of such research, the panel members will demonstrate a variety of uses of sound output, discuss issues raised by the work, and suggest further directions. The intent of the panel is to stimulate thinking about expanding the user interface and to discuss areas for future research.

In the statements that follow, each panelist will describe his or her own work, including the data and audio dimensions used, the value of the research, remaining issues to be addressed, and suggestions for future research and application. A list of references is included for those who wish further reading.
Engineering for usability (panel session)
Authors: Wixon Dennis , Whiteside John
Published: January 2007

The focus here is on the lessons learned from the UDI project for building usability into the software development process. In the UDI project we attempted to engineer a usable system. That process involved:

defining an appropriate metric for measuring usability,

setting explicit levels of usability to be achieved

determining an appropriate methodology for building usability into the system,

delivering a seemingly functional system with an easily changed interface very early in the development cycle, and

recognizing the tentative nature of the initial design.

Using the UDI project as an example, each of the above principles will be discussed in detail.