ppxscal/embedding_network huggingface dataset:
Entry-level information systems personnel: a comparative study of ethical attitudes
Authors: Andrew Morris, Gary Jones, Jonathan Rubinsztein
Venue: Proceedings of the 1993 conference on Computer personnel research (1993)

A comparison of the ethical attitudes of South African undergraduate and Honours students, majoring in Information Systems (IS), and their American counterparts was undertaken in order to test the hypothesis: Compared to their American counterparts, South African entry-level IS personnel find a broader range of ethical dilemmas to be more &ldquo;more acceptable&rdquo;. Based upon original research by David Paradice of Texas A M University (Paradice, 1990) using a scenario-based questionnaire, respondents were asked to assess a variety of actions according to a scale of: acceptable, questionable or unacceptable behaviour. A total of 175 completed questionnaires were received from students at three of South Africa's major universities (Cape Town, Pretoria and Witwatersrand), and these were compared to the sample of 125 American students. In 13 of the 19 instances South African students were &ldquo;more accepting&rdquo; or &ldquo;ethically lenient&rdquo; than the American sample. Similar demographic characteristics between the samples discounts their influence as a determining factor in these different ethical attitudes. Although religious conviction may be a determining factor the sample results showed no correlation, and socio-economic grouping similarly did not reveal any correlation to scenario responses. The importance of exposure to ethical issues at tertiary institutions is supported by prior literature and research, and is mooted as the factor that influences, with particular intensity, prospective employees' ethical attitudes. Many American students receive at least superficial ethical instruction, while in South Africa this is almost totally absent from IS curricula. Differences in the responses received could possibly be attributed to this factor. A conclusion drawn is that the inclusion of ethical instruction in IS curricula at academic institutions should be an urgent objective of the IS profession. By sensitizing prospective IS employees to ethical issues, it is expected that they will be more ethically responsible in their decision-making.
Breathing Time Warp
Authors: Jeff S. Steinman
Venue: Proceedings of the seventh workshop on Parallel and distributed simulation (1993)

Time Warp and Breathing Time Buckets are two general-purpose optimistic synchronization strategies for supporting parallel discrete-event simulations. However, each one of these approaches has potential fatal shortcomings. Time Warp may exhibit rollback explosions that can cause an avalance of antimessages. Breathing Time Buckets, on the other hand, may not be able to process enough events per synchronization cycle to remain efficient. A new strategy, called Breathing Time Warp, has been developed in the Synchronous Parallel Environment for Emulation and Discrete-Event Simulation (SPEEDES) operating sytem. This new strategy solves both of these problems by mixing the two algorithms together, resulting in the best of both methods. This paper describes the implementation of the Breathing Time Warp algorithm in SPEEDES, and then shows how this new approach sometimes improves the performance of parallel discrete-event simulations.
Definitions of dependence distance
Authors: William Pugh
Venue: ACM Letters on Programming Languages and Systems (LOPLAS) (1992)

Data dependence distance is widely used to characterize data dependences in advance optimizing compilers. The standard definition of dependence distance assumes that loops are normalized (have constant lower bounds and a step of 1); there is not a commonly accepted definition for unnormalized loops. We have identified several potential definitions, all of which give the same answer for normalized loops. There are a number of subtleties involved in choosing between these definitions, and no one definition is suitable for all applications.
Distributing Data and Control for Ray Tracing in Parallel
Authors: Didier Badouel, Kadi Bouatouch, Thierry Priol
Venue: IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications (1994)

We first briefly describe the methodology of programming ray-tracing algorithms on distributed-memory parallel computers, or DMPCs, and review previous efforts to overcome the problems of data distribution and load balancing. Then we present two algorithms designed for DMPCs and implemented on an Intel iPSC/2. We also compare the results of our experiments with them. The first algorithm, a data-oriented parallel implementation based on message passing, demonstrates how complex designing a parallel ray-tracing algorithm can be. The second algorithm shows how we can eliminate some complexity using a control-oriented parallel approach and a shared virtual memory.
Does Scheme enhance an introductory programming course?: some preliminary empirical results
Authors: A. Michael Berman
Venue: ACM SIGPLAN Notices (1994)

There is no consensus within the Computer Science community as to which programming language or languages ought to be used in introductory courses. In recent years a substantial contingent has proposed the use of Scheme, a dialect of Lisp, as a candidate for "Best First Language"; however, despite the articles touting success with this approach, there have been no empirical studies comparing the results of using Scheme versus other languages. This paper is a first step towards collecting data that might answer this question. We compare two pre-major courses at a four-year college, one taught using a structured version of Basic, the other taught using Scheme. A survey was used to compare student attitudes towards computer science and programming at the end of the course. While the survey was too small to provide statistically significant answers, there were indications that Scheme may in fact do a better job of capturing and holding students' interest in Computer Science.
Inductive logic programming and learnability
Authors: Jörg-Uwe Kietz, Sašo Džeroski
Venue: ACM SIGART Bulletin (1994)

The paper gives an overview of theoretical results in the rapidly growing field of inductive logic programming (ILP). The ILP learning situation (generality model, background knowledge, examples, hypotheses) is formally characterized and various restrictions of it are discussed in the light of their impact on learnability. The two dominant models of learnability, PAC-learning and identification in the limit, are extended to take into account the ILP learning situation. Several learnability results for logic programs are then presented, both positive and negative.
Resolving cognitive conflict in requirements definition: a blackboard-based model and system architecture
Authors: Jeff Butterfield, Jay G. Cooprider, Sukumar Rathnam
Venue: Proceedings of the 1994 computer personnel research conference on Reinventing IS : managing information technology in changing organizations: managing information technology in changing organizations (1994)

Many IS managers consider requirements definition to be one of the most difficult phases in a system analysis and design project. It is also felt that no other phase contributes as much to the potential success or failure of the final product. One of the reasons that a successful requirements analysis is so elusive is because the information needed for an accurate solution is distributed among the individual designers and domain experts that comprise the design team.Inherent in a requirements analysis are two problems: the actual problem of understanding and defining the artifact under design, and the problem of eliciting the ideas and information that each individual possesses and integrating these into a coherent and comprehensive design specification.This paper explores this problem of cognitive conflict within a requirements analysis domain. The characteristics of the problem are examined and a proposed process of resolution is considered. A blackboard-based framework is presented as a possible vehicle for implementing the proposed resolution scheme. The characteristics of the blackboard model are discussed and it's applicable features are examined in detail. The requirements of a system to support requirements analysis are presented along with the design details of BARD, a blackboard assisted requirements definition system. Implications for design and directions for future research are outlined.
Complexity of bi-directional data flow analysis
Authors: Dhananjay M. Dhamdhere, Uday P. Khedker
Venue: Proceedings of the 20th ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT symposium on Principles of programming languages (1993)

The concept of an information flow path arising from the generalized theory of data flow analysis [21] is used to analyze the complexity of data flow analysis. The width (w) of a program flow graph with respect to a class of data flow problems is introduced as a measure of the complexity of round-robin iterative analysis. This provides the first known complexity result for round robin iterative analysis of bidirectional data flows commonly used in algorithms based on the suppression of partial redundancies [6, 7, 8, 9, 17, 18, 25]. We also show that width provides a better bound on the complexity of unidirectional data flows than the classical notion of depth. The paper presents ways to reduce the width, and thereby the complexity of flow analysis, for several interesting problems. Complexity analysis using the notion of width is also shown to motivate efficient solution methods for various bidirectional problems, viz. The alternating iterations method, and an interval analysis based elimination method for the partial redundancy elimination problems. The paper also presents a condition for the decomposability of a bidirectional problem into a sequence of unidirectional problems.
An approximate analysis of a real-time database concurrency control protocol via Markov modeling
Authors: Özgür Ulusoy
Venue: ACM SIGMETRICS Performance Evaluation Review (1993)

Transactions processed in a real-time database system (RTDBS) are associated with real-time constraints typically in the form of deadlines. Computer-integrated manufacturing, the stock market, banking, and command and control systems are several examples of RTDBS applications where the timeliness of transaction response is as important as the consistency of data. Design of a RTDBS requires the integration of concepts from both real-time systems and database systems to handle the timing and consistency requirements together; i.e., to execute transactions so as to both meet the deadlines and maintain the database consistency.
Exploratory sequential data analysis: traditions, techniques and tools
Authors: Carolanne Fisher, Penelope Sanderson
Venue: ACM SIGCHI Bulletin (1993)

In many areas of HCI, investigators make video or audio recordings of humans working with computers and other humans. These recordings capture verbalizations, actions, and often general aspects of the working environment as well. The investigator then explores and analyses these data in the light of some HCI research or design issue. Protocol analysis, video analysis, interaction analysis, conversation analysis, discourse analysis, sequential data analysis, task analysis, etc., are all examples of such research activity. What they have in common is a concern with handling dynamic, on-line, event-driven behavior that unfolds over time and with capturing the essence of that behavior in summary statements.
Attributed String Matching by Split-and-Merge for On-Line Chinese Character Recognition
Authors: Yih-Tay Tsay, Wen-Hsiang Tsai
Venue: IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (1993)

Consecutive strokes of Chinese characters tend to be connected in fast writing, and this causes a problem for most stroke-based recognition approaches. A recognition scheme for recognizing cursive Chinese characters under the constraint of correct stroke writing orders is proposed. The recognition scheme consists of two phases: candidate character selection and detailed matching. In the former phase, an input script with N strokes is used to split the strokes of each reference character into N corresponding parts. In the latter phase, the connected input strokes are broken into multiple strokes under the guidance of candidate characters. In both phases, dynamic programming is employed for stroke or character matching. Good experimental results prove the feasibility of the proposed approach for cursive Chinese character recognition.
Original Contribution: Model-based neural networks
Authors: Terry M. Caelli, David McG. Squire, Tom P. J. Wild
Venue: Neural Networks (1993)

In this paper we show how neural networks can be formulated in terms of various parameterised connection models which explicitly encode desired properties of the target system. Such a modelling approach to neural networks raises issues about their relationships to other technologies such as Adaptive Filtering and Principal Components Analysis. The benefits of this approach can be a significant decrease in the parameter space, improved generalisation, and a learning procedure which guarantees a priori specified invariance constraints.
Issues and approaches for migration/cohabitation between legacy and new systems
Authors: Rodolphe Nassif, Don Mitchusson
Venue: Proceedings of the 1993 ACM SIGMOD international conference on Management of data (1993)

Corporate Subject Data Bases (CSDB) are being introduced to reduce data redundancy, maintain the integrity of the data, provide a uniform data access interface, and have data readily available to make business decisions. During the transition phase, there is a need to maintain Legacy Systems (LS), CSDB, and to synchronize between them. Choosing the right granularity for migration of data and functionality is essential to the success of the migration strategy. Technologies being used to support the transition to CSDB include relational systems supporting stored procedures, remote procedures, expert systems, object-oriented approach, reengineering tools, and data transition tools. For our Customer CSDB to be deployed in 1993, cleanup of data occurs during initial load of the CSDB. Nightly updates are needed during the transition phase to account for operations executed through LS. There is a lack of an integrated set of tools to help in the transition phase.
Non-concurrency analysis
Authors: Stephen P. Masticola, Barbara G. Ryder
Venue: Proceedings of the fourth ACM SIGPLAN symposium on Principles and practice of parallel programming (1993)

Non-concurrency analysis is a set of techniques for statically identifying pairs (or sets) of statements in a concurrent program which can never happen together. This information aids programmers in debugging and manually optimizing programs, improves the precision of data flow analysis, enables optimized translation of rendezvous, facilitates dead code elimination and other automatic optimizations, and allows anomaly detection in explicitly parallel programs. We present a framework for non-concurrency analysis, capable of incorporating previous analysis algorithms [CS88, DS92] and improving upon them. We show general theoretical results which are useful in estimating non-concurrency, and examples of non-concurrency analysis frameworks for two synchronization primitives: the Ada rendezvous and binary semaphores. Both of these frameworks have a low-order polynomial bound on worst-case solution time. We provide experimental evidence that static non-concurrency analysis of Ada programs can be accomplished in a reasonable time, and is generally quite accurate. Our framework, and the set of refinement components we develop, also exhibits dramatic accuracy improvements over [DS91], when the latter is used as a stand-alone algorithm, as demonstrated by our experiments.
Compiling machine-independent parallel programs
Authors: Michael Philippsen, Ernst A. Heinz, Paul Lukowicz
Venue: ACM SIGPLAN Notices (1993)

Initial evidence is presented that explicitly parallel, machine-independent programs can automatically be translated into parallel machine code that is competitive in performance with hand-written code.The programming language used is Modula-2*, an extension of Modula-2, which incorporates both data and control parallelism in a portable fashion. An optimizing compiler targeting MIMD, SIMD, and SISD machines translates Modula-2* into machine-dependent C code.The performance of the resulting code is compared to that of equivalent, carefully hand-coded and tuned prograins. On a MasPar MP-1 (SIMD machine with up to 16k processors) the Modula-2* programs typically achieve 80% of the performance of the hand-coded parallel versions. When targeting sequential processors, the Modula-2* programs reach 90% of the performance of hand-coded sequential C. (There are no MIMD results yet.)The effects of two major optimization techniques, synchronization point elimination and data/process alignment are also quantified.
INTERCHI'93: a manager's view
Authors: Peter Stevens
Venue: ACM SIGCHI Bulletin (1993)

User interface design, human factors and enterprise-wide technology planning continue to be increasingly important in the design of products ranging from industrial controls to workstation and PC software. According to a recent survey by Brad Myers and Mary Beth Rosson, reported in the proceedings of CH'92, "an average of 48% of the code is devoted to the user interface portion" for the projects they surveyed. CHI conferences in the past have provided important venues for learning about advances in the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) field. INTERCHI'93, a joint conference of INTERACT and CHI, looks to be especially important. Planned for April of 1993 in Amsterdam, the conference presents both unique advantages and challenges because of its European location.
Surface-to-Surface Intersections
Authors: Nicholas M. Patrikalakis
Venue: IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications (1993)

Techniques for computing intersections of algebraic surfaces with piecewise rational polynomial parametric surface patches and intersections of two piecewise rational polynomial parametric surface patches are discussed. The techniques are classified using four categories-lattice evolution methods, marching methods, subdivision methods, and analytic methods-and their principal features are discussed. It is shown that some of these methods also apply to the general parametric surface-intersection problem.
Higher-order binding-time analysis
Authors: Kei Davis
Venue: Proceedings of the 1993 ACM SIGPLAN symposium on Partial evaluation and semantics-based program manipulation (1993)

The partial evaluation process requires a binding-time analysis. Binding-time analysis seeks to determine which parts of a program's result is determined when some part of the input is known. Domain projections provide a very general way to encode a description of which parts of a data structure are static (known), and which are dynamic (not static). For first-order functional languages Launchbury [Lau91a] has developed an abstract interpretation technique for binding-time analysis in which the basic abstract value is a projection. Unfortunately this technique does not generalise easily to higher-order languages. This paper develops such a generalisation: a projection-based abstract interpretation suitable for higher-order binding-time analysis. Launchbury [Lau91b] has shown that binding-time analysis and strictness analysis are equivalent problems at first order, and for projection-based analyses have exactly the same safety condition. We argue that the same is true at higher order, and hence our development also leads to a higher-order projection-based strictness analysis. The principal limitation of our technique is the restriction to monomorphic typing.
An investigation of content representation using text grammars
Authors: D. V. Rama, Padmini Srinivasan
Venue: ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS) (1993)

We extend prior work on a model for natural language text representation and retrieval using a linguistic device called text grammar. We demonstrate the value of this approach in accessing relevant items from a collection of empirical abstracts in a medical domain. The advantage, when compared to traditional keyword retrieval, is that this approach is a significant move towards knowledge representation and retrieval. Text representation in this model includes keywords and their conceptual roles in the text. In particular, it involves extracting TOPIC predicates representing the research issue addressed and DESIGN predicates representing important methodological features of the empirical study. Preliminary experimentation shows that keywords exhibit a variety of text-grammar roles in a text database. Second, as intuitively expected, retrieval using TOPIC predicates identifies a smaller subset of texts than Boolean retrieval does. These empirical results along with the theoretical work indicate that the representation and retrieval strategies proposed have a significant potential. Finally, EMPIRICIST, a prototype system is described. In it the text representation predicates are implemented as a network while retrieval is through constrained-spreading activation strategies.
Constant interaction-time scatter/gather browsing of very large document collections
Authors: Douglass R. Cutting, David R. Karger, Jan O. Pedersen
Venue: Proceedings of the 16th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval (1993)

The Scatter/Gather document browsing method uses fast document clustering to produce table-of-contents-like outlines of large document collections. Previous work [1] developed linear-time document clustering algorithms to establish the feasibility of this method over moderately large collections. However, even linear-time algorithms are too slow to support interactive browsing of very large collections such as Tipster, the DARPA standard text retrieval evaluation collection. We present a scheme that supports constant interaction-time Scatter/Gather of arbitrarily large collections after near-linear time preprocessing. This involves the construction of a cluster hierarchy. A modification of Scatter/Gather employing this scheme, and an example of its use over the Tipster collection are presented.
Parallel simulation of communicating finite state machines
Authors: Carl Tropper, Azzedine Boukerche
Venue: Proceedings of the seventh workshop on Parallel and distributed simulation (1993)

We describe, in this paper, a synchronization/deadlock resolution mechanism for a network of communicating finite state machines implemented on a parallel machine. As it is message-based, it is appropriate for distributed memory machines. The technique was inspired by a project at the Jet Propulsion laboratories whose goal is the specification and verification of the software used to control the interplanetary spacecraft operated by the laboratory. The network of communicating finite state machines makes use of write messages to alter the value of the variables describing the finite state machines and read messages to determine the state of the variables. Since a blocking protocol is employed, it is possible for deadlocks to occur. Consequently, we describe deadlock resolution algorithms. Our algorithms were implemented on an iPSC/2 hypercube, demonstrating good performance on a queueing network model.