bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
All Aboard OpenDocument!
Authors: Fowler Dennis
Published: February 2006

In the early 19th century, there were no standards governing the spacing of railroad tracks. The width of four feet, eight-and-one-half inches was first used on the Stockton-to-Darlington steam railway in 1837 by English engineer George Stephenson, probably because that was the width of horse-drawn tram tracks, which were derived from the width of English cart axles, which, allegedly, fit the ruts left by the wheels of Roman chariots drawn by two horses.
Mouse calls
Authors: Schindler Esther
Published: February 2006

There may not be a remote chance that the doctor you need is within driving distance, but you may be able to get medical expertise remotely.
Approximate majorization and fair online load balancing
Authors: Goel Ashish , Meyerson Adam , Plotkin Serge
Published: February 2006

This article relates the notion of fairness in online routing and load balancing to
vector majorization
as developed by Hardy et al. [1929]. We define α
-supermajorization
as an approximate form of vector majorization, and show that this definition generalizes and strengthens the prefix measure proposed by Kleinberg et al. [2001] as well as the popular notion of
max-min fairness
.The article revisits the problem of online load-balancing for unrelated 1-∞ machines from the viewpoint of fairness. We prove that a greedy approach is
O
(log
n
)-supermajorized by all other allocations, where
n
is the number of jobs. This means the greedy approach is globally
O
(log
n
)-
fair
. This may be contrasted with polynomial lower bounds presented by Goel et al. [2001] for fair online routing.We also define a machine-centric view of fairness using the related concept of
submajorization
. We prove that the greedy online algorithm is globally
O
(log
m
)-
balanced
, where
m
is the number of machines.
The greedy algorithm for the minimum common string partition problem
Authors: Chrobak Marek , Kolman Petr , Sgall Jiří
Published: February 2006

In the Minimum Common String Partition problem (MCSP), we are given two strings on input, and we wish to partition them into the same collection of substrings, minimizing the number of the substrings in the partition. This problem is NP-hard, even for a special case, denoted 2-MCSP, where each letter occurs at most twice in each input string. We study a greedy algorithm for MCSP that at each step extracts a longest common substring from the given strings. We show that the approximation ratio of this algorithm is between Ω(
n
0.43
) and
O
(
n
0.69
). In the case of 2-MCSP, we show that the approximation ratio is equal to 3. For 4-MCSP, we give a lower bound of Ω(log
n
).
From the chair
Authors: Sipior Janice C. , Lending Diane , Amoroso Donald L. , Shayo Conrad , Vowels Susan
Published: February 2006

A warm invitation is extended to you and your invited guests to attend "
The Fifth Annual ACM-SIGMIS Reception
," to be held as an ACM-SIGMIS event prior to the International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS2005) in Las Vegas, NV USA, December 11 - 14, 2005. Light refreshments will be served.

Where:
International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS2005) Las Vegas, NV USA, The Venetian Hotel, Casanova Room 606

When:
5:30 to 7:00 pm, Saturday, December 10, 2005

Who:
All ACM-SIGMIS members and their invited guests are welcome

The SIGMIS CPR'06 Conference will be held April 13-15, 2006 in Claremont, CA USA. The theme of this year's conference is "Forty Four Years of Computer Personnel Research: Achievements, Challenges and the Future." Please plan to attend. More information can be found at: http://www.acm.org/sigmis/conferences.htmlPlease consider hosting a future SIGMIS CPR (Computer Personnel Research) Conference. We are currently accepting Calls For Proposals for the SIGMIS CPR'08 Conference. Let's make the SIGMIS CPR Conference a continuing success! If you are interested, please email me (janice.sipior@villanova.edu) to briefly provide insight about your interest, potential locations, potential conference committee members, potential themes if you have any, and any other relevant information.
Complexities in IS sourcing
Authors: Marcolin Barbara L. , Ross Alain
Published: February 2006

Growth in IS outsourcing spurred research in the area that spans many perspectives but contains contradictory findings. Inconsistent findings raise confusion and doubt, leaving managers uncertain about IS sourcing directions and researchers unclear about theoretical perspectives relevant to IS sourcing.We argue that the concept of equifinality accounts for much of this confusion. Equifinality suggests that, in the struggle to match conflicting functional demands with structural options, many equally viable alternatives may exist. For IS sourcing, this means that different sourcing choices can be leveraged producing similar IS capabilities. Thus, embracing equifinality requires that we understand more fully the complexities in the IS function and in the range of sourcing options available. We argue, as well, that the existence of multiple paths raises the importance of implementation and execution issues.Illustrating the complexities of the IS function, we outline several IS function elements, including IT resources, IS activities and IS strategy. An IS-Business Partnering framework is then presented demonstrating the multiplicity of partnering options, situating sourcing as one aspect. We conclude with several company illustrations showing these multiplicities for successful company outcomes.For IS sourcing researchers, equifinality holds important implications. No longer can we afford to view the IS function as a homogeneous entity nor can we limit our scope to a narrow range of sourcing and partnering options. More than one path exists to achieve a particular outcome. Hence, the pursuit in IS sourcing research can no longer be for one good answer but for a few good answers.
Information systems outsourcing relationship factors
Authors: Goles Tim , Chin Wynne W.
Published: February 2006

Outsourcing is now a commonly accepted means of meeting organizational IS needs. One facet of recent outsourcing research has begun to concentrate on the relationship between customers and their service providers. However, this line of research is hampered by a lack of consistent conceptual focus, and a corresponding inconsistent treatment of constructs associated with the relationship. This paper uses Relational Exchange Theory as a conceptual basis for identifying the individual constructs that comprise a relationship. It then develops and tests a set of items to measure those constructs, using structural equation modeling and survey data collected from U.S. outsourcing customers.
A longitudinal study of information system threat categories
Authors: Im Ghi Paul , Baskerville Richard L.
Published: February 2006

Taxonomies of information security threats usually distinguish between accidental and intentional sources of system risk. Security reports have paid a great deal of attention in recent years to the growing problem of hacking and intentional abuse. The prevalence of these reports suggests that hacking has become a more severe problem in relation to other security threats, such as human error. In this paper, we report on research that addresses this question: "How have changes over time in the frequency of hacking and other intentional forms of security threats affected the validity of information systems risk management taxonomies?" We replicate a simple study of the proportions of categories of security threats that was originally completed in 1993. Comparing the results from the replicated study with the results from the original study, we find that the proportions of threat categories have, in contradiction with the popular perception, remained relatively stable over the past decade. These results indicate that human error remains a significant and poorly recognized issue for information systems security. We propose and validate an elaborated taxonomy of information security threats that provides additional insight into human error as a significant source of security risk.
Scheduling and memory requirements analysis with AADL
Authors: Singhoff F. , Legrand J. , Nana L. , Marcé L.
Published: February 2006

This article describes an Ada set of packages which allows designers to perform resource requirements analysis of AADL specifications. This set of Ada packages is part of Cheddar, an Ada framework that we are developing at the University of Brest [22].The framework provides tools to check if AADL threads will meet their deadline at execution time. Some new AADL properties are proposed to model and analyze dependent AADL thread sets. It also provides some tools to perform memory requirements analysis on AADL specifications.
Modeling SPARK systems with UML
Authors: Sautejeau Xavier
Published: February 2006

In this paper, we will consider two aspects of UML in order to assess how well suited it is for modeling SPARK systems. The first aspect is the ability to represent SPARK in UML from a theoretical perspective. The second aspect is more from a hands-on perspective and evaluates what makes a UML CASE-tool more suitable for modeling SPARK systems than another.
Using ASIS to generate C++ bindings
Authors: Ausden Howard , Nyberg Karl
Published: February 2006

In this paper, we describe an approach to automatically creating C++ bindings to Ada libraries utilizing capabilities of the Ada Semantic Interface Specification (ASIS). We discuss language mapping issues and provide examples of usage of ASIS features during the implementation of a binding tool.
The implementation of ada 2005 synchronized interfaces in the GNAT compiler
Authors: Miranda Javier , Schonberg Edmond , Kirtchev Hristian
Published: February 2006

One of the most important object-oriented features of the new revision of the Ada Programming Language is the introduction of Abstract Interfaces to provide a form of multiple inheritance. Ada 2005 Abstract Interface Types are akin to Java interfaces, and as such support inheritance of specification rather than inheritance of implementation. Ada 2005 interfaces apply as well to tasks and protected types, and provide a classification mechanism for concurrent programming that goes considerably beyond the capabilities of Java.This paper summarizes the implementation in the GNAT compiler of the various kinds of interfaces that relate to concurrent programming in Ada 2005 [1]. The implementation is efficient, and involves mostly modifications to the compiler front-end, with virtually minimal impact on run-time structures, beyond those that are in place to support regular interfaces. However, the implementation of interface operations as triggers in selective waits and asynchronous transfers of control proved to be surprisingly delicate and requires additional predefined primitive operations.
Temporal skeletons for verifying time
Authors: Naeser Gustaf , Lundqvist Kristina , Asplund Lars
Published: February 2006

This paper presents an intermediate notation used in a framework for verification of real-time properties. The framework aims at overcoming the need for the framework user to have significant knowledge of the verification specific detail that formal verification at some level is bound to impose on a model. In order to accomplish this, model extraction from source code of an initial formal model, a timing skeleton, is made automatically. The model refinement needed to transform the temporal skeleton into a model that can be verified is not done immediately. This allows postponement of the abstraction and specialisation needed for the verification which further improves the readability of the skeleton. The purpose of the timing skeleton is that it easily can be validated to represent the source code it was created from. The timing skeleton is then automatically refined with verification detail, and then hidden for the user, transformed into the notation of a verification tool. This transformation is hidden from the user. In order to reduce the complexity of the application model the framework uses a formally verified run-time kernel with a clear separation from the application. The kernel supports preemption, dynamic priorities and multiple processors.
The affordable application of formal methods to software engineering
Authors: Davis James F.
Published: February 2006

The purpose of this research paper is to examine (1) why formal methods are required for software systems today; (2) the Praxis High Integrity Systems' Correctness-by-Construction methodology; and (3) an affordable application of a formal methods methodology to software engineering. The cultivated research for this paper included literature reviews of documents found across the Internet and in publications as well as reviews of conference proceedings including the 2004 High Confidence Software and Systems Conference and the 2004 Special Interest Group on Ada Conference. This research realized that (1) our reliance on software systems for national, business and personal critical processes outweighs the trust we have in our systems; (2) there is a growing demand for the ability to trust our software systems; (3) methodologies such as Praxis' Correctness-by-Construction are readily available and can provide this needed level of trust; (4) tools such as Praxis' SparkAda when appropriately applied can be an affordable approach to applying formal methods to a software system development process; (5) software users have a responsibility to demand correctness; and finally, (6) software engineers have the responsibility to provide this correctness. Further research is necessary to determine what other methodologies and tools are available to provide affordable approaches to applying formal methods to software engineering. In conclusion, formal methods provide an unprecedented ability to build trust in the correctness of a system or component. Through the development of methodologies such as Praxis' Correctness by Construction and tools such as SparkAda, it is becoming ever more cost advantageous to implement formal methods within the software engineering lifecycle. As the criticality of our IT systems continues to steadily increase, so must our trust that these systems will perform as expected. Software system clients, such as government, businesses and all other IT users, must demand that their IT systems be delivered with a proven level of correctness or trust commensurate to the criticality of the function they perform.
Orchestrating shots for the national ignition racility
Authors: Mathisen David G. , Carey Robert W.
Published: February 2006

The National Ignition Facility (NIF), currently under construction at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, is a stadium-sized facility containing a 192-beam, 1.8 Megajoule, 500-Terawatt, ultra-violet laser system together with a 10-meter diameter target chamber with room for nearly 100 experimental diagnostics. When completed, NIF will be the world's largest and most energetic laser experimental system, providing an international center to study inertial confinement fusion and physics of matter at extreme densities and pressures. The NIF is operated by the Integrated Computer Control System (ICCS), which is a layered architecture of over 700 lower-level front-end processors attached to nearly 60,000 control points and coordinated by higher-level supervisory subsystems in the main control room. An Ada95 based shot automation framework has been developed and deployed during the past year to orchestrate and automate shots performed at the NIF using the ICCS. Ada95 provides language features that have enabled the construction of a complex, highly distributed control application. The Ada tasking model and protected types provide multi-threaded behaviors and synchronization mechanisms required by the ICCS. The Shot Automation framework is designed to automate 4-hour shot sequences including derivation of shot goals from an experiment definition, set up of the laser and diagnostics, automatic alignment of laser beams, and a countdown to charge and fire the lasers. A typical sequence consists of one or more preparatory verification shots leading to an amplified system shot that is followed by post-shot analysis and archiving. The framework provides for flexible model-based workflow execution with work divided into data driven packets called "macro steps". The Shot Director program is the top-level orchestrating component of the shot automation framework, which manages the state machine that defines the structure of the shot sequence. Collaboration Supervisors translate shot lifecycle state commands from the Shot Director into sequences of "macro steps" that are distributed to subsystem shot supervisors while maintaining the order of macro steps for each subsystem and supporting collaboration between different macro steps. Each macro step has phases for database-driven verification and a scripted execution. This provides a highly flexible framework for performing a variety of NIF shot types. Database tables define the order of work and dependencies (workflow) of macro steps to be performed for a shot. A graphical model editor facilitates the definition and viewing of an execution model. A Change Manager tool enables "de-participation" of individual devices, of entire laser segments (beams, quads, or bundles of beams) or of individual diagnostics. This software has been successfully deployed to the NIF facility and is currently being used to support NIF laser commissioning shots and the build-out of additional laser bundles. The software will also be used to automate future target and experimental shot campaigns.
Socially Acceptable Behavior
Authors: O'Hanlon Charlene
Published: February 2006

While perusing the ?popular? section of the social bookmarking site del.icio.us recently, I was struck by the myriad off-the-wall sites that users are bookmarking. Indeed, one of the most popular sites (311 bookmarks!) was titled, ?Vanishing Point: How to disappear in America without a trace.?
Fighting Spam with Reputation Systems
Authors: Prakash Vipul Ved , O'Donnell Adam
Published: February 2006

Spam is everywhere, clogging the inboxes of e-mail users worldwide. Not only is it an annoyance, it erodes the productivity gains afforded by the advent of information technology. Workers plowing through hours of legitimate e-mail every day also must contend with removing a significant amount of illegitimate e-mail. Automated spam filters have dramatically reduced the amount of spam seen by the end users who employ them, but the amount of training required rivals the amount of time needed simply to delete the spam without the assistance of a filter.
Threads without the Pain
Authors: Gustafsson Andreas
Published: February 2006

Much of today’s software deals with multiple concurrent tasks. Web browsers support multiple concurrent HTTP connections, graphical user interfaces deal with multiple windows and input devices, and Web and DNS servers handle concurrent connections or transactions from large numbers of clients. The number of concurrent tasks that needs to be handled increases while software grows more complex. Structuring concurrent software in a way that meets the increasing scalability requirements while remaining simple, structured, and safe enough to allow mortal programmers to construct ever-more complex systems is a major engineering challenge.
Review of “The Linux enterprise cluster by Karl Kopper”, No Starch Press, 2005, $49.95 ISBN: 1593270364
Authors: Jenkins G. K.
Published: February 2006

Review of "The Linux enterprise cluster by Karl Kopper", No Starch Press, 2005, $49.95 ISBN: 1593270364
Calendar
Authors: O'Hanlon Charlene
Published: February 2006

Software Test and Performance Conference
Countersniper system for urban warfare
Authors: Lédeczi Ákos , Nádas András , Völgyesi Péter , Balogh György , Kusy Branislav , Sallai János , Pap Gábor , Dóra Sebestyén , Molnár Károly , Maróti Miklós , Simon Gyula
Published: February 2006

An ad-hoc wireless sensor network-based system is presented that detects and accurately locates shooters even in urban environments. The localization accuracy of the system in open terrain is competitive with that of existing centralized countersniper systems. However, the presented sensor network-based solution surpasses the traditional approach because it can mitigate acoustic multipath effects prevalent in urban areas and it can also resolve multiple simultaneous shots. These unique characteristics of the system are made possible by employing novel sensor fusion techniques that utilize the spatial and temporal diversity of multiple detections. In this article, in addition to the overall system architecture, the middleware services and the unique sensor fusion algorithms are described. An analysis of the experimental data gathered during field trials at US military facilities is also presented.
On the upper bound of α-lifetime for large sensor networks
Authors: Zhang Honghai , Hou Jennifer C.
Published: February 2006

In this article, we explore the fundamental limits of sensor network lifetime that all algorithms can possibly achieve. Specifically, under the assumptions that nodes are deployed as a Poisson point process with density λ in a square region with side length ℓ and each sensor can cover a unit-area disk, we first derive the necessary and sufficient condition of the node density in order to maintain complete
k
-coverage with probability approaching 1. With this result, we obtain that if λ = log ℓ
2
+ (
k
+ 2)loglog ℓ
2
+
c
(ℓ),
c
(ℓ) → −∞, as ℓ → + ∞, the sensor network lifetime (for maintaining complete coverage) is upper bounded by
kT
with probability approaching 1 as ℓ → + ∞, where
T
is the lifetime of a single sensor. Second, we derive, given a fixed node density in a finite (but reasonably large) region, the upper bounds of lifetime when only α-portion of the region is covered at any time. We also carry out several sets of experiments to validate the derived theoretical results. Numerical results indicate that the derived upper bounds apply not only to networks of large sizes and homogeneous nodal distributions but also to small size networks with clustering nodal distributions.
Towards effective strategies for monolingual and bilingual information retrieval
Authors: Qu Yan , Hull David A. , Grefenstette Gregory , Evans David A. , Ishikawa Motoko , Nara Setsuko , Ueda Toshiya , Noda Daisuke , Arita Kousaku , Funakoshi Yuki , Matsuda Hiroshi
Published: February 2006

At the NTCIR-4 workshop, Justsystem Corporation (JSC) and Clairvoyance Corporation (CC) collaborated in the cross-language retrieval task (CLIR). Our goal was to evaluate the performance and robustness of our recently developed commercial-grade CLIR systems for English and Asian languages. The main contribution of this article is the investigation of different strategies, their interactions in both monolingual and bilingual retrieval tasks, and their respective contributions to operational retrieval systems in the context of NTCIR-4. We report results of Japanese and English monolingual retrieval and results of Japanese-to-English bilingual retrieval. In monolingual retrieval analysis, we examine two special properties of the NTCIR experimental design (two levels of relevance and identical queries in multiple languages) and explore how they interact with strategies of our retrieval system, including pseudo-relevance feedback, multi-word term down-weighting, and term weight merging strategies. Our analysis shows that the choice of language (English or Japanese) does not have a significant impact on retrieval performance. Query expansion is slightly more effective with
relaxed
judgments than with
rigid
judgments. For better retrieval performance, weights of multi-word terms should be lowered. In the bilingual retrieval analysis, we aim to identify robust strategies that are effective when used alone and when used in combination with other strategies. We examine cross-lingual specific strategies such as translation disambiguation and translation structuring, as well as general strategies such as pseudo-relevance feedback and multi-word term down-weighting. For shorter title topics, pseudo-relevance feedback is a major performance enhancer, but translation structuring affects retrieval performance negatively when used alone or in combination with other strategies. All experimented strategies improve retrieval performance for the longer description topics, with pseudo-relevance feedback and translation structuring as the major contributors.
Rich results from poor resources
Authors: Kwok Kui Lam , Choi Sora , Dinstl Norbert
Published: February 2006

We report on Korean monolingual, Chinese-Korean English-as-pivot bilingual, and Chinese-English bilingual CLIR experiments using MT software augmented with Web-based entity-oriented translation as resources in the NTCIR-4 environment. Simple stemming is helpful in improving bigram indexing for Korean retrieval. For word indexing, keeping nouns only is preferable. Web-based translation reduces untranslated terms left over after MT and substantially improves CLIR results. Translation concatenation is found to consistently improve CLIR effectiveness, while combining a retrieval list from bigram and word indexing is also helpful. A method to disambiguate multiple MT outputs using a log likelihood ratio threshold was tested. Depending on the nature of the title or description queries, bigram only or a retrieval combination, or relaxed or rigid evaluations, direct bilingual CLIR returned an average precision of 71--79% (English-Korean) and 76--84% (Chinese-English) of the corresponding Korean-Korean and English-English monolingual results. Using English as a pivot in Chinese-Korean CLIR provides about 55--65% the effectiveness that Korean alone does. Entity/terminology translation at the pivot language stage accounts for a large portion of this deficiency. A topic with comparatively worse Chinese-English bilingual result does not necessarily mean that it will continue to under-perform (after further transitive Korean translation) at the Korean retrieval level.
The RASE (Rapid, Accurate Simulation Environment) for chip multiprocessors
Authors: Davis John D. , Fu Cong , Laudon James
Published: February 2006

We present RASE, a full system high performance simulation methodology for simulating complex server applications and server class chip multiprocessors enabled with fine-grain multithreading (CMTs). RASE combines application knowledge, operating system information, and data access patterns with an instruction stream from a highly-tuned, scalable steady-state benchmark [5] [22] to generate multiple representative instruction streams that can be mapped to a variety of CMT configurations. We use execution-driven simulation to generate instruction streams for
M
processors and store them as instruction trace files (several billion instructions per processor) that can be post-processed and augmented for larger than
M
processor system simulation. We use SPEC JBB2000, TPC-C, and an XML server benchmark to compare the performance estimates of RASE to a reference prototype CMT system. By varying M, we find that our trace-driven simulation methodology predicts within 5% of the instructions per cycle (IPC) of the reference hardware for the applications. Without post-processing the traces, in the best cases, the performance prediction accuracy degrades to 20-40% of the real IPC for instruction traces that require a high replication factor.
Exploring the cache design space for large scale CMPs
Authors: Hsu Lisa , Iyer Ravi , Makineni Srihari , Reinhardt Steve , Newell Donald
Published: February 2006

With the advent of dual-core chips in the marketplace, small-scale CMP (chip multiprocessor) architectures are becoming commonplace. We expect a continuing trend of increasing the number of cores on a die to maximize the performance/power efficiency of a single chip. We believe an era of large-scale CMPs (LCMPs) with several tens to hundreds of cores is on the way, but as of now architects have little understanding of how best to build a cache hierarchy given such a large number of cores/threads to support. With this in mind, our initial goals are to prune the cache design space for LCMPs by characterizing basic server workload behavior in such an environment.In this paper, we describe the range of methodologies that we are developing to overcome the challenges of exploring the cache design space for LCMP platforms. We then focus on employing a trace-driven approach to characterizing one key server workload (OLTP) in both a homogeneous and a heterogeneous workload environment. We study the effect of increasing threads (from 1 to 128) on a three-level cache hierarchy with emphasis on second and third level caches. We study the effect of varying sizes at these cache levels and show the effects of threads contending for cache space, the effects of prefetching instruction addresses, and the effects of inclusion. We make initial observations and conclusions about the factors on which LCMP cache hierarchy design decisions should be based and discuss future work.
Fast synchronization for chip multiprocessors
Authors: Sampson Jack , González Rubén , Collard Jean-Francois , Jouppi Norman P. , Schlansker Mike
Published: February 2006

This paper presents a novel mechanism for barrier synchronization on chip multi-processors (CMPs). By forcing the invalidation of selected I-cache lines, this mechanism starves threads and thus forces their execution to stop. Threads are let free when all have entered the barrier.We evaluated this mechanism using SMTSim and report much better (and most importantly, more flat) performance than lock-based barriers supported by existing microprocessors.
Notes from HPPAC 2005
Authors: Rountree Barry , Springer Robert , Lowenthal David K. , Freeh Vincent W.
Published: February 2006

Power-aware computing has become popular over the last several years. Most research concerns saving energy in server or mobile systems. However, power-aware mechanisms recently have gained traction in the high-performance computing community.
A general framework to build new CPUs by mapping abstract machine code to instruction level parallel execution hardware
Authors: Wang H. C. , Yuen C. K.
Published: February 2006

Abstract machines bridge the gap between a programming language and real machines. This paper proposes a general purpose tagged execution framework that may be used to construct a CPU. The CPU may accept code written in any (abstract or real) machine instruction set, and produce tagged machine code after data conflicts are resolved. This requires the construction of a tagging unit, which emulates the sequential execution of the program using tags rather than actual values. The tagged instructions are then sent to an execution engine that maps tags to values as they become available and sends ready-to-execute instructions to arithmetic units. The process of mapping tag to value may be performed using the Tomasulo scheme, or a register scheme with the result of instructions going to registers specified by their destination tags, and waiting instructions receiving operands from registers specified by their source tags.The tagged execution framework is suitable for any instruction architecture from RISC machines to stack machines. We will illustrate with an example of a Java ILP processor using a VLIW execution engine. Some related implementing issues are discussed.
Internet Nuggets
Authors: Thorson Mark
Published: February 2006

This column consists of selected traffic from the comp.arch newsgroup, a forum for discussion of computer architecture on the Internet---an international computer network.
Neo-tribes
Authors: Johnson Grace J. , Ambrose Paul J.
Published: February 2006

Online communities deserve better than their current treatment---where they are largely relegated to the fringes of health care.
Ethnocomputing: ICT in cultural and social context
Authors: Tedre Matti , Sutinen Erkki , Kähkönen Esko , Kommers Piet
Published: February 2006

Although culture has recently been recognized as one factor in interface design, CS and engineering are generally thought to be culturally neutral. The approach presented here recognizes society and culture in computational concepts and applications.
The network of life
Authors: Shannon Meg McGinity
Published: February 2006

Service providers must work together to ensure a fail-safe communication system.
The first 10 years of the ECCC digital library
Authors: Meinel Christoph , Klotz Volker
Published: February 2006

Developing a balance between author control and traditional scientific publication practices in a global digital library.
Introduction
Authors: Teevan Jaime , Jones William , Bederson Benjamin B.
Published: February 2006

Cheap and fast search and storage technologies help bring order to our messy personal information environments, freeing us to make the most of our information collections.
Personal health information management
Authors: Pratt Wanda , Unruh Kenton , Civan Andrea , Skeels Meredith M.
Published: February 2006

Integrating personal health information helps people manage their lives and actively participate in their own health care.
Keeping encountered information
Authors: Marshall Catherine C. , Jones William
Published: February 2006

Utility, serendipity, and the pleasure of encountering what we save relies on more than search alone when using PIM tools.
Email in personal information management
Authors: Whittaker Steve , Bellotti Victoria , Gwizdka Jacek
Published: February 2006

Email's conduit function means the inbox, folders, search, and sort are used to support core PIM functions of task management, personal archiving, and contact management.
From PIM to GIM
Authors: Erickson Thomas
Published: February 2006

Sharing personal information with networked groups and institutions raises questions about privacy and control best addressed through a new field of inquiry: group information management.
The 8 requirements of real-time stream processing
Authors: Stonebraker Michael , Çetintemel Uǧur , Zdonik Stan
Published: February 2006

Applications that require real-time processing of high-volume data steams are pushing the limits of traditional data processing infrastructures. These stream-based applications include market feed processing and electronic trading on Wall Street, network and infrastructure monitoring, fraud detection, and command and control in military environments. Furthermore, as the "sea change" caused by cheap micro-sensor technology takes hold, we expect to see everything of material significance on the planet get "sensor-tagged" and report its state or location in real time. This sensorization of the real world will lead to a "green field" of novel monitoring and control applications with high-volume and low-latency processing requirements.Recently, several technologies have emerged---including off-the-shelf stream processing engines---specifically to address the challenges of processing high-volume, real-time data without requiring the use of custom code. At the same time, some existing software technologies, such as main memory DBMSs and rule engines, are also being "repurposed" by marketing departments to address these applications.In this paper, we outline eight requirements that a system software should meet to excel at a variety of real-time stream processing applications. Our goal is to provide high-level guidance to information technologists so that they will know what to look for when evaluation alternative stream processing solutions. As such, this paper serves a purpose comparable to the requirements papers in relational DBMSs and on-line analytical processing. We also briefly review alternative system software technologies in the context of our requirements.The paper attempts to be vendor neutral, so no specific commercial products are mentioned.
Citation analysis of database publications
Authors: Rahm Erhard , Thor Andreas
Published: February 2006

We analyze citation frequencies for two main database conferences (SIGMOD, VLDB) and three database journals (TODS, VLDB Journal, Sigmod Record) over 10 years. The citation data is obtained by integrating and cleaning data from DBLP and Google Scholar. Our analysis considers different comparative metrics per publication venue, in particular the total and average number of citations as well as the impact factor which has so far only been considered for journals. We also determine the most cited papers, authors, author institutions and their countries.
A citation-based system to assist prize awarding
Authors: Sidiropoulos Antonis , Manolopoulos Yannis
Published: February 2006

Citation analysis is performed to evaluate the impact of scientific collections (journals and conferences), publications and scholar authors. In this paper we investigate alternative methods to provide a generalized approach to rank scientific publications. We use the SCEAS system [12] as a base platform to introduce new methods that can be used for ranking scientific publications. Moreover, we tune our approach along the reasoning of the prizes
'VLDB 10 Year Award'
and
'SIGMOD Test of Time Award'
, which have been awarded in the course of the top two database conferences. Our approach can be used to objectively suggest the publications and the respective authors the are more likely to be awarded in the near future at these conferences.
In memoriam Alberto Oscar Mendelzon
Authors: Miller Renèe J.
Published: February 2006

Alberto Oscar Mendelzon passed away on June 16, 2005 after a two-year battle with cancer. This tribute to Alberto and his achievements is written in recognition of his great intellect and his generous friendship. Both have influenced and inspired many in the database research community.
Tips on giving a good demo
Authors: Fernández Mary
Published: February 2006

For the first time this year, a "Best Demonstrations" session was included in the SIGMOD program. The first two days of the program included 24 demonstrations, each of which was presented during two of six interactive demo sessions. During the first two days, panels of three judges visited each demo group, each of whom was allotted 15 minutes to present their system to the judges. The friendly competition made for very exciting and noisy demo sessions!
Data management research at Technische Universität Darmstadt
Authors: Buchmann A. , Cilia M.
Published: February 2006

The Databases and Distributed Systems Group at Technische Universität Darmstadt is devoted to research in the areas of data management middleware and reactive, event-based systems. Special emphasis is placed on handling the flow of data and events in a variety of environments: publish/subscribe mechanisms, information dissemination and integration, ubiquitous computing, peer-to-peer infrastructures, and a variety of sensor-based systems ranging from passive RFID infrastructures to active wireless sensor networks. A special concern is placed on non-functional aspects of the middleware, such as performance, scalability and security, where members of our group are involved in the definition of the SPEC family of benchmarks for J2EE (SPECjAppServer200x) and JMS.
Reminiscences on influential papers
Authors: Ross Kenneth A.
Published: February 2006

Unfortunately, this will be my last influential papers column. I've been editor for about five years now (how time flies!) and have enjoyed it immensely. I've always found it rewarding to step back and look at why we do the research we do, and this column makes a big contribution to the process of self-examination. Further, I feel that there's a strong need for ways to publicly and explicitly highlight "quality" in papers. Criticism is easy, and is the more common experience given the amount of reviewing (and being reviewed) we typically engage in. I look forward to seeing this column in future issues.
An interview with Vladimir Trifonov 2005 Danny Lewin best student paper award winner
Authors: Roughgarden Tim
Published: February 2006

The 2005 Danny Lewin Prize for the best student paper at STOC was awarded to Vladimir Trifonov, of the University of Texas at Austin, for his paper "An
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(log
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) Space Algorithm for Undirected st-Connectivity" [1]. Hal Gabow recently started the tradition of interviewing the Danny Lewin Prize winner and publishing the interview in SIGACT News. (An interview with the 2003 winner Tom Hayes can be found in the September 2003 issue.) I had the pleasure of (electronically) chatting with Vladimir about his work; a transcript of our conversation follows.
SIGACT news complexity theory column 49
Authors: Hemaspaandra Lane A.
Published: February 2006

Warmest thanks to Neil Immerman for this issue's column, which is on Progress in Descriptive Complexity. (As you can see in this column, Neil is the rare writer whose italic lines truly deserve the italics.) This issue should reach your hands shortly before winter intersession, and I'd highly recommend that, if you don't already own Neil's wonderful bookDescriptive Complexity([I] in this column's bibliography), you consider visiting your school's library and bringing it home for holidays.
Education forum
Authors: Ross Rocky
Published: February 2006

It's happened to all of us. The moment to log out just kind of sneaks up on us, not paying much heed to any timing of our own. One instant we are logged on, the next instant we're off.
Extending a scripting language for visual basic forms
Authors: Siegfried Robert M. , Diakoniarakis Denis , Franqueiro Kenneth G. , Jain Amol
Published: February 2006

A prototype scripting language was introduced in 2002 to assist the blind in creating forms for Visual Basic programs in a much simpler fashion; currently, creating these forms are particularly difficult for the blind and visually impaired. The language is expanded to include the Visual Basic objects that were omitted from the original grammar for the scripting language. A second prototype of the compiler for the scripting language is now available online. An example and a formal grammar are included.
Importance of software component characterization for better software reusability
Authors: Gill Nasib S.
Published: February 2006

Component-based software development (CBSD) is the process of assembling existing software components in an application such that they interact to satisfy a predefined functionality. This approach can potentially be used to reduce software development costs, assemble systems rapidly, and reduce the maintenance overhead. One of the key challenges faced by software developers is to make component-based development (CBD) an efficient and effective approach. Since components are to be reused across various products and product-families, components must be characterized and tested properly. The present paper is a survey paper and firstly, it discusses CBD and related issues that help improving software reuse. Testing of third party components is a very difficult task in the absence a properly characterized software component. Besides improving software reusability, component characterization also provides better understanding of architecture, better retrieval, better usage and better cataloguing. This paper mainly discusses the essence of proper component characterization that ultimately helps the developers in software reuse, which is highly desirable in component-based software development. Further, paper also discusses other benefits of component characterization that are most essential in component-based development.
Establishing recommendation trust relationships for internetwares
Authors: Wang Yuan , Xu Feng , Lü Jian
Published: February 2006

Internetware is a kind of significant emerging software systems built upon the coordination of autonomous, heterogeneous, and distributed software entities in the Internet. For the openness and dynamism of Internetwares, there are no central controllers existing to choose reliable software entities for them. Recently some distributed systems apply recommendation as the evidence to choose reliable entities, which may be a new approach suitable for internetwares. However, how to establish the recommendation trust relationships (RTR) among entities in the Internet dynamically is a very hard problem. This paper proposes an approach based on the relevant experiences to establish RTR among software entities dynamically during the runtime of internetwares. The main work includes: (1) providing a general approach to quantify trust and a description for experiences; (2) presenting an approach to evaluate recommendations based on the idea of hypothesis testing in statistics; (3) evolving the RTR based on the evaluations by considering history information and information quantity of interactions. It will be a beneficial contribution to the reliability and evolution of internetwares. A simulation is conducted to verify the rationality and validity of the approach at the end of the paper.
Practical aspects of DSS design for commodities transportation during special events
Authors: Zacharias Manousaridis , Mehdi Sagheb-Tehrani , Christos Mamaloukas
Published: February 2006

Transport firms that daily pickup or deliver commodities encounter a plethora of problems relating to their Vehicle Routing and Scheduling (VRS) activities. To make decisions about Routing and Scheduling during special events is even more complicated process. During the Athens Olympic Games 2004 in Athens, the Vehicle Routing and Scheduling problem was very keen. Actually, the commodities transportation had to be done within strictly defined time-periods and under many security and traffic restrictions [2], [8]. "Xenios" is a specific DSS that was developed to assist the daily VRS activities of Greek transport firms during special events. This system incorporated essential functions of GIS, database systems and model management techniques to support overall routing, scheduling and decision-making processes for VRS problems encountered during the Athens 2004 Olympic Games (ATHENS 2004).Our work aimed at the successful setting up of DSS "Xenios" so that it could cover a wide range of variations of the VRS problem, especially problems with hard time-windows in the route generation [15], [17].The first step in the development of any specific DSS is the identification of the applying problem dimensions [3], [7], [10]. In order to make easier the development procedure, we tried to classify the most significant VRS problem dimensions that have common characteristics in groups. According to our consideration, this work could accelerate and ease the development of the specific DSS.
Surfing the net for software engineering notes
Authors: Doernhoefer Mark
Published: February 2006

The September issue of IEEE Spectrum was dedicated to a special report on failed software development projects. Led by the cover story on the FBI Virtual Case File, also known as Trilogy, the magazine contained several case studies on software projects that blew up during development or shortly after release. Readers of Peter Neumann's RISKS column or books by Yourdon, Glass, and others know that software development failures are noting new.
An empirical framework for comparing effectiveness of testing and property-based formal analysis
Authors: Bradbury Jeremy S. , Cordy James R. , Dingel Juergen
Published: February 2006

Today, many formal analysis tools are not only used to provide certainty but are also used to debug software systems - a role that has traditional been reserved for testing tools. We are interested in exploring the complementary relationship as well as tradeoffs between testing and formal analysis with respect to debugging and more specifically bug detection. In this paper we present an approach to the assessment of testing and formal analysis tools using metrics to measure the quantity and efficiency of each technique at finding bugs. We also present an assessment framework that has been constructed to allow for symmetrical comparison and evaluation of tests versus properties. We are currently beginning to conduct experiments and this paper presents a discussion of possible outcomes of our proposed empirical study.