ppxscal/embedding_network huggingface dataset:
A Smart Fuzzer for x86 Executables
Authors: Andrea Lanzi, Lorenzo Martignoni, Mattia Monga, Roberto Paleari
Venue: Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Software Engineering Workshops (2007)

The automatic identification of security-relevant flaws in binary executables is still a young but promising research area. In this paper, we describe a new approach for the identification of vulnerabilities in object code we called smart fuzzing. While conventional fuzzing uses random input to discover crash conditions, smart fuzzing restricts the input space by using a preliminary static analysis of the program, then refined by monitoring each execution. In other words, the search is driven by a mix of static and dynamic analysis in order to lead the execution path to selected corner cases that are the most likely to expose vulnerabilities, thus improving the effectiveness of fuzzing as a means for finding security breaches in black-box programs.
Electro-thermal simulation of MEMS elements
Authors: M. Rencz
Venue: Proceedings of the Symposium on Design, Test, Integration and Packaging of MEMS/MOEMS (2003)

In this paper we present a new algorithm, developed for the layout based electro-thermal simulation of integrated circuits and MEMS. The method uses simultaneous iteration of the thermal and electrical behavior. The general advantage of this method over simulator coupling is that, it is also suitable to cope with very fast changes. The usual drawback is however, that the thermal nodes have to be added to the nodes of the electrical network, rendering usually huge networks to be simulated. In our thermal modeling method the thermal system is represented by a matrix of Foster networks. The solution of these can be partly pre-calculated, partly separated from the solution of the electrical nodes, resulting in fast and accurate electro-thermal simulation. Case studies are presented to show the applicability of the method for the analysis of thermally operated MEMS elements. The results of the electro-thermal simulation of a realized MEMS electro-thermal converter show very good matching with the results measured on the structure.
Performance Measurement of Novice HPC Programmers' Code
Authors: Rola Alameh, Nico Zazworka, Jeffrey K. Hollingsworth
Venue: Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Software Engineering Workshops (2007)

Performance is one of the key factors of improving productivity in High Performance Computing (HPC). In this paper we discuss current studies in the field of performance measurement of codes captured in classroom experiments for the High Productivity Computing Project (HPCS). We give two examples of measurements introducing two new hypotheses: spending more effort doesn't always result in improvement of performance for novices; the use of higher level MPI functions promises better performance for novices. We also present a tool - the Automated Performance Measurement System (APMS). APMS helps to partially automate the measurement of the performance of a set of parallel programs with several inputs. The design and implementation of the tool is flexible enough to allow other researchers to conduct similar studies.
The Complexity of a Probabilistic Approach to Deal with Missing Values in a Decision Tree
Authors: Lamis Hawarah, Ana Simonet, Michel Simonet
Venue: Proceedings of the Eighth International Symposium on Symbolic and Numeric Algorithms for Scientific Computing (2006)

We describe the complexity of an approach to fill missing values in decision trees during classification. This approach is derived from the ordered attribute trees method which builds a decision tree for each attribute and uses these trees to fill the missing attribute values. Both our approach and theirs are based on the Mutual Information between the attributes and the class. Our method takes into account the dependence between attributes by using Mutual Information. The result of the classification process is a probability distribution instead of a single class. In this paper, we explain our classification algorithm. We then calculate the complexity of constructing the attribute trees and the complexity of classifying a new instance with missing values using our classification algorithm.
Stability for first order delay dynamic equations on time scales
Authors: Haihua Wu, Zhan Zhou
Venue: Computers Mathematics with Applications (2007)

In this paper, we establish some sufficient conditions for the uniform stability and the uniformly asymptotical stability of the first order delay dynamic equation x^@D(t)+p(t)x(t-@t(t))=0,t@?T, where T is a time scale, p(.) is rd-continuous and positive, the delay function @t:T->(0,r]. Our results unify the corresponding ones for differential and difference equations. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time to discuss the asymptotical behavior of delay dynamic equations on time scales.
Pointer warping in heterogeneous multi-monitor environments
Authors: Hrvoje Benko, Steven Feiner
Venue: Proceedings of Graphics Interface 2007 (2007)

Warping the pointer across monitor bezels has previously been demonstrated to be both significantly faster and preferred to the standard mouse behavior when interacting across displays in homogeneous multi-monitor configurations. Complementing this work, we present a user study that compares the performance of four pointer-warping strategies, including a previously untested frame-memory placement strategy, in heterogeneous multi-monitor environments, where displays vary in size, resolution, and orientation. Our results show that a new frame-memory pointer warping strategy significantly improved targeting performance (up to 30% in some cases). In addition, our study showed that, when transitioning across screens, the mismatch between the visual and the device space has a significantly bigger impact on performance than the mismatch in orientation and visual size alone. For mouse operation in a highly heterogeneous multi-monitor environment, all our participants strongly preferred using pointer warping over the regular mouse behavior.
Models Wagging the Dog: Are Circuits Constructed with Disparate Parameters?
Authors: Thomas Nowotny, Attila Szücs, Rafael Levi, Allen I. Selverston
Venue: Neural Computation (2007)

In a recent article, Prinz, Bucher, and Marder (2004) addressed the fundamental question of whether neural systems are built with a fixed blueprint of tightly controlled parameters or in a way in which properties can vary largely from one individual to another, using a database modeling approach. Here, we examine the main conclusion that neural circuits indeed are built with largely varying parameters in the light of our own experimental and modeling observations. We critically discuss the experimental and theoretical evidence, including the general adequacy of database approaches for questions of this kind, and come to the conclusion that the last word for this fundamental question has not yet been spoken.
A query-centric approach to supporting the development of context-aware applications for mobile ad hoc networks
Authors: Gruia-Catalin Roman
Venue:  (2006)

The wide-spread use of mobile computing devices has led to an increased demand for applications that operate dependably in opportunistically formed networks. A promising approach to supporting software development for such dynamic settings is to rely on the context-aware computing paradigm, in which an application views the state of the surrounding ad hoc network as a valuable source of contextual information that can be used to adapt its behavior. Collecting context information distributed across a constantly changing network remains a significant technical challenge. This dissertation presents a query-centered approach to simplifying context interactions in mobile ad hoc networks. Using such an approach, an application programmer views the surrounding world as a single data repository over which descriptive queries can be issued. Distributed context information appears to be locally available, effectively hiding the complex networking tasks required to acquire context in an open and dynamic setting. This dissertation identifies the research issues associated with developing a query-centric approach and discusses solutions to providing query-centric support to application developers. To promote rapid and dependable software development, a query-centric middleware is provided to the application programmer. These solutions provide the means to reason about the correctness of an application's design and potentially to reduce programmer effort and error.
Hyperdraw: a new computer aided drawing system based on prediction of drawing action
Authors: Hirokatsu So, Ichiroh Kanaya, Kosuke Sato
Venue: Proceedings of the international conference on Advances in computer entertainment technology (2007)

Traditional pens and papers are often the most preferable drawing materials for industrial designers, though computer aided design (CAD) systems are widely used in industrial design field. Such CAD systems are too strict for designers to draw their sketches freely and lack some real feeling of drawing. Somehow, especially in industrial design field, designers need to be assisted when they are drawing sketches since it is difficult even for professional designers to draw beautiful lines and curves every time they move their pens. The authors introduce a new computer aided drawing system, which is called Hyperdraw, in this paper. The Hyperdraw system "reads" its user's mind: it predicts and curves/lines that the user is intending to draw on a canvas and shows guide on the canvas by using mixed reality (MR) technology.
Postplacement rewiring by exhaustive search for functional symmetries
Authors: Kai-Hui Chang, Igor L. Markov, Valeria Bertacco
Venue: ACM Transactions on Design Automation of Electronic Systems (TODAES) (2007)

We propose two new algorithms for rewiring: a postplacement optimization that reconnects pins of a given netlist without changing the logic function and gate locations. In the first algorithm, we extract small subcircuits consisting of several gates from the design and reconnect pins according to the symmetries of the subcircuits. To enhance the power of symmetry detection, we also propose a graph-based symmetry detector that can identify permutational and phase-shift symmetries on multiple input and output wires, as well as hybrid symmetries, creating abundant opportunities for rewiring. Our second algorithm, called long-range rewiring, is based on reconnecting equivalent pins and can augment the first approach for further optimization. We apply our techniques for wirelength optimization and observe that they provide wirelength reduction comparable to that achieved by detailed placement.
Secure Software Architecture, Design, Implementation and Assurance
Authors: Robert C. Seacord, Sven Dietrich, Daniel Plakosh
Venue: Proceedings of the 40th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (2007)

Society's increased dependency on networked software systems has been matched by an increase in the number of attacks aimed at these systems. These attacks--directed at organizations and individuals--have resulted in loss and compromise of sensitive data, system damage, lost productivity, and financial loss [1]. While many of the attacks on the Internet today are merely a nuisance, there is growing evidence that criminals, terrorists, and other malicious actors view vulnerabilities in software systems as a tool to reach their goals. Current security engineering methods are demonstrably inadequate, as software vulnerabilities are currently being reported to the CERT/CC at a rate of over 4,000 per year [2]. These vulnerabilities are caused by software designs and implementations that do not adequately protect systems and by development practices that do not focus sufficiently on eliminating implementation defects that result in security flaws. An opportunity exists for systematic improvement that can lead to secure software architectures, designs, and implementations.
Modular subclass verification: safely creating correct subclasses without superclass code
Authors: Gary T. Leavens
Venue:  (2006)

The documentation of object-oriented frameworks and class libraries needs to provide enough information so programmers can reason about the correctness of subclass methods without superclass code. Even though a superclass method satisfies its specification and behaves properly in the context of the superclass itself, a new subclass may cause that method to have unexpected or unverifiable behavior. For example, inherited superclass code can call down to subclass methods which may cause a superclass method to no longer satisfy its specification. Furthermore, without superclass code, downcalls can result in unverifiable side-effects. Aliasing can also result in unexpected or unverifiable side-effects. In this dissertation, we present a reasoning technique that allows programmers, who have no access to superclass code, to avoid the problems caused by downcalls and aliasing. The rules use the specification of the abstract data representation of a class and the frame axiom of each method to determine when a method override is necessary and when verifiers can safely reason about the behavior of super-calls. We describe a type system and propose a tool that would warn when a super-call is unsafe or when a superclass method needs to be overridden. A verification logic is also presented and proved sound. The verification logic is based on specifications given in the Java Modeling Language (JML) and uses superclass and subclass specifications to modularly verify the correctness of subclass code. A set of guidelines is proposed for class library implementers that, if followed, guarantees that superclass methods will always be safe to call and that our verification logic can safely be used. These guidelines make our technique easy to use in practice.
Pickling state in the javaTM system
Authors: Roger Riggs, Jim Waldo, Ann Wollrath, Krishna Bharat
Venue: Proceedings of the 2nd conference on USENIX Conference on Object-Oriented Technologies (COOTS) - Volume 2 (1996)

The JavaTM system (hereafter referred to simply as "Java") inherently supports the transmission of stateless computation in the form of object classes. In this paper we address the related task of capturing the state of a Java object in a serialized form for the purposes of transmission or storage, to be used later in reconstituting an equivalent object. This is accomplished by a mechanism known as pickling[2][3][5]. Pickling is the process of creating a serialized representation of objects. Pickling defines the serialized form to include meta information that identifies the type of each object and the relationships between objects within a stream. Values and types are serialized with enough information to insure that the equivalent typed object and the objects to which it refers can be recreated. Unpickling is the complementary process of recreating objects from the serialized representation. Pickling and unpickling extract from the Java Virtual machine, at runtime, any meta information needed to pickle the fields of objects. Class specific methods are only required to customize the pickling process.
Budget optimization in search-based advertising auctions
Authors: Jon Feldman, S Muthukrishnan, Martin Pal, Cliff Stein
Venue: Proceedings of the 8th ACM conference on Electronic commerce (2007)

Internet search companies sell advertisement slots based on users' search queries via an auction. While there has been previous work onthe auction process and its game-theoretic aspects, most of it focuses on the Internet company. In this work, we focus on the advertisers, who must solve a complex optimization problem to decide how to place bids on keywords to maximize their return (the number of user clicks on their ads) for a given budget. We model the entire process and study this budget optimization problem. While most variants are NP-hard, we show, perhaps surprisingly, that simply randomizing between two uniform strategies that bid equally on all the keywordsworks well. More precisely, this strategy gets at least a 1-1/ε fraction of the maximum clicks possible. As our preliminary experiments show, such uniform strategies are likely to be practical. We also present inapproximability results, and optimal algorithms for variants of the budget optimization problem.
An Ontology-Based Approach to Constructing Medical Computational Problems for Use in Electronic Medical Education
Authors: Charalampos Bratsas, Evangelos Kaimakamis, Vassilis Koutkias, Panagiotis D. Bamidis, Nicos Maglaveras
Venue: Proceedings of the Twentieth IEEE International Symposium on Computer-Based Medical Systems (2007)

Recently, a great interest has emerged in e-learning approaches for medical education. In particular, Problem/Case based learning constitutes a significant initiative in the domain. In this paper, we propose an ontology-based approach to constructing medical computational problems (MCPs) to be used in electronic medical education. Specifically, we elaborate on a novel ontological schema for MCP description that semantically annotates problems and their associated solutions (in terms of algorithms and implementations), linked with the IEEE metadata standard for learning objects (LOM) and its healthcare extension (Healthcare LOM). We present the overall procedure involved in the construction of the educational framework on MCPs, the involved actors, and the semantic schema of the corresponding knowledge model developed. The applicability and virtue of the proposed approach is illustrated via an example test case lesson on pulmonary embolism.
An Introduction to Inertial and Visual Sensing
Authors: Peter Corke, Jorge Lobo, Jorge Dias
Venue: International Journal of Robotics Research (2007)

In this paper we present a tutorial introduction to two important senses for biological and robotic systems &#x2014; inertial and visual perception. We discuss the fundamentals of these two sensing modalities from a biological and an engineering perspective. Digital camera chips and micro-machined accelerometers and gyroscopes are now commodities, and when combined with today's available computing can provide robust estimates of self-motion as well 3D scene structure, without external infrastructure. We discuss the complementarity of these sensors, describe some fundamental approaches to fusing their outputs and survey the field.
Predictive Modelling of Heterogeneous Sequence Collections by Topographic Ordering of Histories
Authors: Ata Kabán
Venue: Machine Learning (2007)

We propose a model-based approach to the twofold problem of prediction and exploratory analysis of heterogeneous symbolic sequence collections. Our model is based on seeking low entropy local representations joined together with a smooth nonlinear mixing process. Low entropy components are desirable, as they tend to be both more interpretable and more predictable. The nonlinear mixing in turn acts as a regulariser, and in addition, it creates a topographic ordering of the sequence histories, which is useful for exploratory purposes. The combination of these two modelling elements is performed through the generative probabilistic formalism, which ensures a flexible and technically sound predictive modelling framework. Unlike previous generative topographic modelling approaches for discrete data, the estimation algorithm associated with our model is designed to scale to large data sets by exploiting data sparseness. In addition, local convergence is guaranteed without the need for tuning optimisation parameters or making approximations to the non-Gaussian likelihood. These characteristics make it the first generative topographic model for discrete symbolic data with large scale real-world applicability. We analyse and discuss the relationship of our approach with a number of models and methods. We empirically demonstrate robustness against varying sample sizes, leading to significant improvements in terms of predictive performance over the state of the art. Finally we detail an application to the prediction and exploratory analysis of a large real-world web navigation sequence collection.
Testing Intrusion Detection Systems in MANET: A Comprehensive Study
Authors: Hadi Otrok, Joey Paquet, Mourad Debbabi, Prabir Bhattacharya
Venue: Proceedings of the Fifth Annual Conference on Communication Networks and Services Research (2007)

In this paper, we study the problem of testing Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) in Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANET). Testing is achieved by simulating different measurements. We modify the testing measurements of infrastructure-based networks to be compatible with the characteristics of MANET. Moreover, we add some new features and their associated measurements that we believe important for testing new proposed IDS. The modified measurements with the new added ones form a set of measurements that will be used throughout the testing process. To the best of our knowledge, there has not been any work done for testing IDS in MANET. Simulators are the most common tools used for testing the IDS. Therefore, we add some precautions for choosing a simulator and a list of available simulators. The precautions will help researchers to test the measurements efficiently and the list of simulators will guide them to select one according to their needs. Finally, we present some input parameter precautions that help on having more trustworthy testing results.
Deploying virtual machines as sandboxes for the grid
Authors: Sriya Santhanam, Pradheep Elango, Andrea Arpaci-Dusseau, Miron Livny
Venue: Proceedings of the 2nd conference on Real, Large Distributed Systems - Volume 2 (2005)

The ability to securely run arbitrary untrusted code on a wide variety of execution platforms is a challenging problem in the Grid community. One way to achieve this is to run the code inside a contained, isolated environment, namely a "sandbox". Virtual machines provide a natural solution to the security and resource management issues that arise in sandboxing. We explore different designs for the VM-enabled sandbox and evaluate them with respect to various factors like structure, security guarantees, user convenience, feasibility and overheads in one such grid environment. Our experiments indicate that the use of on-demand VMs imposes a constant startup overhead, with I/O-intensive applications incurring additional overheads depending on the design of the sandbox.
Integration of work based learning in engineering education
Authors: F. K. Fink
Venue: Proceedings of the Frontiers in Education Conference, 2001. 31st Annual - Volume 02 (2001)

Developing a new engineering educational set-up, which integrates formal education and productive work is a new challenge. The best way to learn and understand a theory is trying to see whether you can apply the theory in engineering problem solving. Therefore it is obvious to try to combine the academic learning process and engineering problem solving. This has been one of the fundamental reasons for the existing problem based learning concept (PBL). In the light of the experiences from this PBL concept some further development makes it possible to integrate work based learning in academic engineering education. This presentation gives some examples on how this is being implemented now and discusses further improvements by combining engineering education, continuing professional development and productive engineering.