pinecone/core-2020-05-10-deduplication huggingface dataset:
Resource Analysis: From Sequential to Concurrent and Distributed Programs

Resource analysis aims at automatically inferring upper/lower bounds on the worst/best-case cost of executing programs. Ideally, a resource analyzer should be parametric on the cost model, i.e., the type of cost that the user wants infer (e.g., number of steps, amount of memory allocated, amount of data transmitted, etc.). The inferred upper bounds have important applications in the fields of program optimization, verification and certification. In this talk, we will review the basic techniques used in resource analysis of sequential programs and the new extensions needed to handle concurrent and distributed systems
Semantics-Preserving Simplification of Real-World Firewall Rule Sets

The security provided by a firewall for a computer network almost completely
depends on the rules it enforces. For over a decade, it has been a well-known
and unsolved problem that the quality of many firewall rule sets is
insufficient. Therefore, there are many tools to analyze them. However, we
found that none of the available tools could handle typical, real-world
iptables rulesets. This is due to the complex chain model used by iptables, but
also to the vast amount of possible match conditions that occur in real-world
firewalls, many of which are not understood by academic and open source tools.
  In this paper, we provide algorithms to transform firewall rulesets. We
reduce the execution model to a simple list model and use ternary logic to
abstract over all unknown match conditions. These transformations enable
existing tools to understand real-world firewall rules, which we demonstrate on
four decently-sized rulesets. %After preparation with our algorithms, tools
could understand them. Using the Isabelle theorem prover, we formally show that
all our algorithms preserve the firewall's filtering behavior.Comment: In 20th International Symposium on Formal Methods, June 201
Property-Driven Fence Insertion using Reorder Bounded Model Checking

Modern architectures provide weaker memory consistency guarantees than
sequential consistency. These weaker guarantees allow programs to exhibit
behaviours where the program statements appear to have executed out of program
order. Fortunately, modern architectures provide memory barriers (fences) to
enforce the program order between a pair of statements if needed. Due to the
intricate semantics of weak memory models, the placement of fences is
challenging even for experienced programmers. Too few fences lead to bugs
whereas overuse of fences results in performance degradation. This motivates
automated placement of fences. Tools that restore sequential consistency in the
program may insert more fences than necessary for the program to be correct.
Therefore, we propose a property-driven technique that introduces
"reorder-bounded exploration" to identify the smallest number of program
locations for fence placement. We implemented our technique on top of CBMC;
however, in principle, our technique is generic enough to be used with any
model checker. Our experimental results show that our technique is faster and
solves more instances of relevant benchmarks as compared to earlier approaches.Comment: 18 pages, 3 figures, 4 algorithms. Version change reason : new set of
  results and publication ready version of FM 201
Sampled Weighted Min-Hashing for Large-Scale Topic Mining

We present Sampled Weighted Min-Hashing (SWMH), a randomized approach to
automatically mine topics from large-scale corpora. SWMH generates multiple
random partitions of the corpus vocabulary based on term co-occurrence and
agglomerates highly overlapping inter-partition cells to produce the mined
topics. While other approaches define a topic as a probabilistic distribution
over a vocabulary, SWMH topics are ordered subsets of such vocabulary.
Interestingly, the topics mined by SWMH underlie themes from the corpus at
different levels of granularity. We extensively evaluate the meaningfulness of
the mined topics both qualitatively and quantitatively on the NIPS (1.7 K
documents), 20 Newsgroups (20 K), Reuters (800 K) and Wikipedia (4 M) corpora.
Additionally, we compare the quality of SWMH with Online LDA topics for
document representation in classification.Comment: 10 pages, Proceedings of the Mexican Conference on Pattern
  Recognition 201
Requirements for IT Governance in Organizations Experiencing Decentralization

International audienceDecentralization of organizations and subsequent change of their management and operation styles require changes in organization's processes and heavily involve IT. Enterprise Architecture (EA) frameworks fit to primarily centralized organizational structures, and as such have shortcomings when used in decentralized organizations. We illustrate this idea on the example of one organization in the Higher Education sector that faces decentralization of its structure and has to adapt to it. Overcoming these challenges requires some new principles to be introduced and incorporated into the EA knowledge. In particular for IT governance, in this study we argue that peer-to-peer principles can offer more suitable governance over current EA frameworks as they are able to better align with decentralized components of an organizational structure
Parallelisation and application of AD3 as a method for solving large scale combinatorial auctions

Auctions, and combinatorial auctions (CAs), have been successfully employed to solve coordination problems in a wide range of application domains. However, the scale of CAs that can be optimally solved is small because of the complexity of the winner determination problem (WDP), namely of finding the bids that maximise the auctioneer’s revenue. A way of approximating the solution of a WDP is to solve its linear programming relaxation. The recently proposed Alternate Direction Dual Decomposition algorithm (AD3) has been shown to ef- ficiently solve large-scale LP relaxations. Hence, in this paper we show how to encode the WDP so that it can be approximated by means of AD3. Moreover, we present PAR-AD3, the first parallel implementation of AD3. PAR-AD3 shows to be up to 12.4 times faster than CPLEX in a single-thread execution, and up to 23 times faster than parallel CPLEX in an 8-core architecture. Therefore PAR- AD3 becomes the algorithm of choice to solve large-scale WDP LP relaxations for hard instances. Furthermore, PAR-AD3 has potential when considering large- scale coordination problems that must be solved as optimisation problems.Research supported by MICINN projects TIN2011-28689-C02-01, TIN2013-45732-C4-4-P and TIN2012-38876-C02-01Peer reviewe
Open Transactions on Shared Memory

Transactional memory has arisen as a good way for solving many of the issues
of lock-based programming. However, most implementations admit isolated
transactions only, which are not adequate when we have to coordinate
communicating processes. To this end, in this paper we present OCTM, an
Haskell-like language with open transactions over shared transactional memory:
processes can join transactions at runtime just by accessing to shared
variables. Thus a transaction can co-operate with the environment through
shared variables, but if it is rolled-back, also all its effects on the
environment are retracted. For proving the expressive power of TCCS we give an
implementation of TCCS, a CCS-like calculus with open transactions
A Labelled Semantics for Soft Concurrent Constraint Programming

Part 3: ConstraintsInternational audienceWe present a labelled semantics for Soft Concurrent Constraint Programming (SCCP), a language where concurrent agents may synchronize on a shared store by either posting or checking the satisfaction of (soft) constraints. SCCP generalizes the classical formalism by parametrising the constraint system over an order-enriched monoid: the monoid operator is not required to be idempotent, thus adding the same information several times may change the store. The novel operational rules are shown to offer a sound and complete co-inductive technique to prove the original equivalence over the unlabelled semantic
Privacy-Preserving Energy-Reading for Smart Meter

Smart Meters belong to the Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) and allow customers to monitor locally and remotely the current usage of energy. Providers query Smart Meters for billing purpose or to establish the amount of energy needed by houses. However, reading details sent from smart meters to the energy provider can be used to violate customers? privacy. In this paper, our contribution is two-fold: first, we present an architecture to turn traditional energy meters into Smart Meters, and then we illustrate a privacy-preserving solution, which uses Secure Two-party Computation, to preserve customers? privacy during energy-readings. In particular, we deployed a Smart Meter built upon an existing energy meter available in Italy. Then, we collected and analysed an energy trace of two months, and we tag customers hourly/daily/monthly habits by observing their consumes. Finally, we provide the feasibility of our solution to protect customers? privacy
Using Sensory Substitution of Median Sensory Deficits in the Traumatized Hand to Develop an Innovative Home-Based Hand Rehabilitation System

International audiencePost-traumatic median nerve sensitive deficits are frequent. They are a source of permanent handicap that dramatically decreases the level of autonomy and the quality of life of persons suffering from these deficits. Surgical repair is possible, but the results are not always functionally useful. Therefore, prosthetic approaches do represent an alternative solution that needs to be explored. Along these lines, this paper describes an innovative home-based hand rehabilitation system device that exploits sensory substitution of median sensory deficits in the traumatized hand. It is composed of a glove bearing smart textile pressure sensors and a wristband providing vibratory biofeedback to the user. The goal of this sensory-substitution system is to provide for patients an effective method to compensate the lack of sensitivity of the finger pads and to recover a functional hand use. This innovative system is intended to be employed for assessment, training and rehabilitation exercises at home
Multi-layer Architecture For Storing Visual Data Based on WCF and
  Microsoft SQL Server Database

In this paper we present a novel architecture for storing visual data.
Effective storing, browsing and searching collections of images is one of the
most important challenges of computer science. The design of architecture for
storing such data requires a set of tools and frameworks such as SQL database
management systems and service-oriented frameworks. The proposed solution is
based on a multi-layer architecture, which allows to replace any component
without recompilation of other components. The approach contains five
components, i.e. Model, Base Engine, Concrete Engine, CBIR service and
Presentation. They were based on two well-known design patterns: Dependency
Injection and Inverse of Control. For experimental purposes we implemented the
SURF local interest point detector as a feature extractor and $K$-means
clustering as indexer. The presented architecture is intended for content-based
retrieval systems simulation purposes as well as for real-world CBIR tasks.Comment: Accepted for the 14th International Conference on Artificial
  Intelligence and Soft Computing, ICAISC, June 14-18, 2015, Zakopane, Polan
HELP : The Herschel Extragalactic Legacy Project & The Coming of Age of
  Multi-Wavelength Astrophysics

How did galaxies form and evolve? This is one of the most challenging
questions in astronomy today. Answering it requires a careful combination of
observational and theoretical work to reliably determine the observed
properties of cosmic bodies over large portions of the distant Universe on the
one hand, and accurately model the physical processes driving their evolution
on the other. Most importantly, it requires bringing together disparate
multi-wavelength and multi-resolution spectro-photometric datasets in an
homogeneous and well-characterized manner so that they are suitable for a
rigorous statistical analysis. The Herschel Extragalactic Legacy Project (HELP)
funded by the EC FP7 SPACE program aims to achieve this goal by combining the
expertise of optical, infrared and radio astronomers to provide a
multi-wavelength database for the distant Universe as an accessible value-added
resource for the astronomical community. It will do so by bringing together
multi-wavelength datasets covering the 1000 deg$^2$ mapped by Herschel
extragalactic surveys in an homogeneous and well-characterized manner, creating
a joint lasting legacy from several ambitious sky surveys.Comment: Refereed Proceeding of the "The Universe of Digital Sky Surveys"
  conference held at the INAF - Observatory of Capodimonte, Naples, on
  25th-28th November 2014, to be published in Astrophysics and Space Science
  Proceedings, edited by Longo, Napolitano, Marconi, Paolillo, Iodic
The environment of barred galaxies revisited

We present a study of the environment of barred galaxies using galaxies drawn
from the SDSS. We use several different statistics to quantify the environment:
the projected two-point cross-correlation function, the background-subtracted
number count of neighbor galaxies, the overdensity of the local environment,
the membership of our galaxies to galaxy groups to segregate central and
satellite systems, and for central galaxies we estimate the stellar to halo
mass ratio (M$_{\mathrm{*}}/$M$_{\mathrm{h}}$) . When we split our sample into
early- and late-type galaxies, we see a weak but significant trend for
early-type galaxies with a bar to be more strongly clustered on scales from a
few 100 kpc to 1 Mpc when compared to unbarred early-type galaxies. This
indicates that the presence of a bar in early-type galaxies depends on the
location within their host dark matter halos. This is confirmed by the group
catalog in the sense that for early-types, the fraction of central galaxies is
smaller if they have a bar. For late-type galaxies, we find fewer neighbors
within $\sim50$ kpc around the barred galaxies when compared to unbarred
galaxies from the control sample, suggesting that tidal forces from close
companions suppress the formation/growth of bars. For central late-type
galaxies, bars are more common on galaxies with high
M$_{\mathrm{*}}/$M$_{\mathrm{h}}$ values, as expected from early theoretical
works which showed that systems with massive dark matter halos are more stable
against bar instabilities. Finally, we find no obvious correlation between
overdensity and the bars in our sample, showing that galactic bars are not
obviously linked to the large-scale structure of the universe.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures, Refereed Proceeding of the "The Universe of
  Digital Sky Surveys" conference held at the INAF - Observatory of
  Capodimonte, Naples, on 25th-28th november 2014, to be published on
  Astrophysics and Space Science Proceedings, edited by Longo, Napolitano,
  Marconi, Paolillo, Iodic
Using gamma regression for photometric redshifts of survey galaxies

Machine learning techniques offer a plethora of opportunities in tackling big
data within the astronomical community. We present the set of Generalized
Linear Models as a fast alternative for determining photometric redshifts of
galaxies, a set of tools not commonly applied within astronomy, despite being
widely used in other professions. With this technique, we achieve catastrophic
outlier rates of the order of ~1%, that can be achieved in a matter of seconds
on large datasets of size ~1,000,000. To make these techniques easily
accessible to the astronomical community, we developed a set of libraries and
tools that are publicly available.Comment: Refereed Proceeding of "The Universe of Digital Sky Surveys"
  conference held at the INAF - Observatory of Capodimonte, Naples, on
  25th-28th November 2014, to be published in the Astrophysics and Space
  Science Proceedings, edited by Longo, Napolitano, Marconi, Paolillo, Iodice,
  6 pages, and 1 figur
The Nature of Faint Blue Stars in the PHL and Ton Catalogues based on
  Digital Sky Surveys

We determined accurate positions for 3000 of the "faint blue stars" in the
PHL (Palomar-Haro-Luyten) and Ton/TonS catalogues. These were published from
1957 to 1962, and, aimed at finding new white dwarfs, provide approximate
positions for about 10750 blue stellar objects. Some of these "stars" had
become known as quasars, a type of objects unheard-of before 1963. We derived
subarcsec positions from a comparison of published finding charts with images
from the first-epoch Digitized Sky Survey. Numerous objects are now well known,
but unfortunately neither their PHL or Ton numbers, nor their discoverers, are
recognized in current databases. A comparison with modern radio, IR, UV and
X-ray surveys leads us to suggest that the fraction of extragalactic objects in
the PHL and Ton catalogues is at least 15 per cent. However, because we failed
to locate the original PHL plates or finding charts, it may be impossible to
correctly identify the remaining 7726 PHL objects.Comment: 3 pages, no figures, to appear in the proceedings of The Universe of
  Digital Sky Surveys, Naples, Italy, Nov 25-28, 2014; Astrophysics and Space
  Science, eds. N.R. Napolitano et a
Singular Spectrum Analysis for astronomical time series: constructing a
  parsimonious hypothesis test

We present a data-adaptive spectral method - Monte Carlo Singular Spectrum
Analysis (MC-SSA) - and its modification to tackle astrophysical problems.
Through numerical simulations we show the ability of the MC-SSA in dealing with
$1/f^{\beta}$ power-law noise affected by photon counting statistics. Such
noise process is simulated by a first-order autoregressive, AR(1) process
corrupted by intrinsic Poisson noise. In doing so, we statistically estimate a
basic stochastic variation of the source and the corresponding fluctuations due
to the quantum nature of light. In addition, MC-SSA test retains its
effectiveness even when a significant percentage of the signal falls below a
certain level of detection, e.g., caused by the instrument sensitivity. The
parsimonious approach presented here may be broadly applied, from the search
for extrasolar planets to the extraction of low-intensity coherent phenomena
probably hidden in high energy transients.Comment: Refereed Proceeding of the "The Universe of Digital Sky Surveys"
  conference held at the INAF - Observatory of Capodimonte, Naples, on
  25th-28th november 2014, to be published on Astrophysics and Space Science
  Proceedings, edited by Longo, Napolitano, Marconi, Paolillo, Iodic
The environment of radio sources in the VLA-COSMOS Survey field

This work studies the correlation among environmental density and radio AGN
presence up to $z = 2$. Using data from the photometric COSMOS survey and its
radio 1.4 GHz follow-up (VLA-COSMOS), a sample of radio AGNs has been defined.
The environment was studied using the richness distributions inside a
parallelepiped with base side of 1 Mpc and height proportional to the
photometric redshift precision. Radio AGNs are found to be always located in
environments significantly richer than those around galaxies with no radio
emission. Moreover, a distinction based on radio AGN power shows that the
significance of the environmental effect is only maintained for low-power radio
sources. The results of this work show that denser environments play a
significant role in enhancing the probability that a galaxy hosts a radio AGN
and, in particular, low-power ones.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figures. Contribution to the proceedings of the conference
  "The Universe of Digital Sky Surveys", Napoli, November 25th-28th, 201
Galaxy evolution within the Kilo-Degree Survey

The ESO Public Kilo-Degree Survey (KiDS) is an optical wide-field imaging
survey carried out with the VLT Survey Telescope and the OmegaCAM camera. KiDS
will scan 1500 square degrees in four optical filters (u, g, r, i). Designed to
be a weak lensing survey, it is ideal for galaxy evolution studies, thanks to
the high spatial resolution of VST, the good seeing and the photometric depth.
The surface photometry have provided with structural parameters (e.g. size and
S\'ersic index), aperture and total magnitudes have been used to derive
photometric redshifts from Machine learning methods and stellar
masses/luminositites from stellar population synthesis. Our project aimed at
investigating the evolution of the colour and structural properties of galaxies
with mass and environment up to redshift $z \sim 0.5$ and more, to put
constraints on galaxy evolution processes, as galaxy mergers.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figures, to appear on the refereed Proceeding of the "The
  Universe of Digital Sky Surveys" conference held at the INAF--OAC, Naples, on
  25th-28th november 2014, to be published on Astrophysics and Space Science
  Proceedings, edited by Longo, Napolitano, Marconi, Paolillo, Iodic
Digital Sky Surveys from the ground: Status and Perspectives

I first review the status of Digital Sky Surveys. The focus will be on
extragalactic surveys with an area of more than 100 sq.deg. The Sloan Digital
Sky Survey is the archetype of such imaging surveys and it is its great success
that has prompted great activity in this field. The latest surveys explore
wider, fainter and higher resolution and also a longer wavelength range than
SDSS. Many of these surveys overlap particularly in the S Hemisphere where we
now have Pan-STARRS, DES and the ESO VST surveys, and our aim here is to
compare their properties. Since there is no dedicated article on the VST ATLAS
in this symposium, we shall especially review the properties of this particular
survey. This easily fits onto our other main focus which is to compare
overlapping Southern Surveys and see how they best fit with the available NIR
imaging data. We conclude that the Southern Hemisphere will soon overtake the
North in terms of multiwavelength imaging. However we note that the South has
more limited opportunities for spectroscopic follow-up and this weakness will
persist during the LSST era. Some new perspectives are offered on this and
other aspects of survey astronomy.Comment: 16 pages, 12 figures, Refereed Proceeding of the "The Universe of
  Digital Sky Surveys" conference held at the INAF - Observatory of
  Capodimonte, Naples, on 25th-28th November 2014, to be published in
  Astrophysics and Space Science Proceedings, edited by Longo, Napolitano,
  Marconi, Paolillo, Iodic
Strong lens search in the ESO public Survey KiDS

We have started a systematic search of strong lens candidates in the ESO
public survey KiDS based on the visual inspection of massive galaxies in the
redshift range $0.1<z<0.5$. As a pilot program we have inspected 100 sq. deg.,
which overlap with SDSS and where there are known lenses to use as a control
sample. Taking advantage of the superb image quality of VST/OmegaCAM, the
colour information and accurate model subtracted images, we have found 18 new
lens candidates, for which spectroscopic confirmation will be needed to confirm
their lensing nature and study the mass profile of the lensing galaxies.Comment: 4 pages, 1 figure, to appear on the refereed Proceeding of the "The
  Universe of Digital Sky Surveys" conference held at the INAF--OAC, Naples, on
  25th-28th november 2014, to be published on Astrophysics and Space Science
  Proceedings, edited by Longo, Napolitano, Marconi, Paolillo, Iodic