ppxscal/embedding_network huggingface dataset:
Failure Detection and Consensus in the Crash-Recovery Model
Authors: Marcos K Aguilera, Wei Chen, Sam Toueg
Venue:  (1998)

We study the problems of failure detection and consensus in asynchronous systems in which processes may crash and recover, and links may lose messages. We first propose new failure detectors that are particularly suitable to the crash-recovery model. We next determine under what conditions stable storage is necessary to solve consensus in this model. We then give two matching consensus algorithms that use the new failure detectors: one requires stable storage and the other does not. Both algorithms tolerate link failures and are particularly efficient in the runs that are most likely in practice --those with no failures or failure detector mistakes. In such runs, consensus is achieved within 3d time and with 4n messages, where d is the maximum message delay and n is the number of processes in the system.
Predictable network computing
Authors: A. Polze, M. Werner, G. Fohler
Venue: Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS '97) (1997)

Clusters of networked commercial, off the shelf (COTS) workstations are presently used for computation intensive tasks that were typically assigned to parallel computers in the past. However, it is hardly possible to predict the timing behavior of such systems or to give guarantees about execution times. We show how our SONiC (Shared Objects Net-interconnected Computer) system can control timing and partitioning of a workstation as a step towards a distributed real time system built from COTS components. SONiC provides a class based programming interface for creation of replicated shared objects of arbitrary, user defined sizes. Weak consistency protocols are employed to improve system performance. Our scheduling service ensures the requested interactive behavior of a workstation while simultaneously giving a specified number of CPU cycles to parallel tasks. Using offline scheduling methods we are able to implement real time guaranteed services on COTS workstations.
AVID: A system for the Interactive Development of Verifiably Correct Programs
Authors: Dean B. Krafft
Venue:  (1981)

The AVID system is designed to Aid Verification through the techniques of Interactive program Development. AVID continues the work in programming logics begun at Cornell University in 1975. It provides a syntax-directed editing environment for the development by stepwise refinement of programs and proofs in the PL/CV2 programming logic. AVID is another step in the continuing effort to provide methods and software tools for developing correct programs. AVID contains a number of important contributions to the area of program/proof development. To allow the full power of the AVID verification facilities to be applied to programs developed by stepwise refinement, we created a new program construct, called an ATTAIN block, that formalizes the concept of a refinement level. This construct allows the independent verification of different refinement levels, and thus of partially developed programs. Using this construct, AVID can guarantee that the refinement in a top-down development actually implements its high-level specification. AVID is the first system to support the interactive display of logical dependency in proofs. We have developed a new algorithm, built on the congruence closure method for deciding the theory of equality, that efficiently determines logical dependency within this theory. This algorithm is independent of the AVID system, and has potential applications wherever the congruence closure method is used. AVID also contains some significant contributions to the area of syntax-directed editor design. AVID makes use of a standard, powerful, and widely available screen-oriented editor as its user interface. The system design gives a strategy for the incorporation of other powerful editors into syntax-directed development systems. AVID is also the first system to make extensive use of derived nonterminals to avoid redundant specification and to guide the user in developing his proof. Perhaps AVID''s most important contribution is its demonstration of the feasibility of a system to support and enforce the development by stepwise refinement of provably correct programs. For programs that must be correct, this approach may be one of the most promising. One final contribution of the AVID project is the system itself as a base for future research. The modular design of the AVID system and its facilities for the high-level description of AVID language constructs make the system easy to modify and to build on. There are already several projects planning to use AVID in this fashion. AVID has been implemented on a DEC VAX 11/780 under the Berkeley UNIX operating system. The current version of the system, which supports the development and verification of the predicate calculus portion of PL/CV2, consists of approximately 20,000 lines of C language source code. When running on the VAX, the current system requires 230K bytes of memory. A version of the system suitable for distribution is expected to be available by January 1982.
Optimization of the stochastic dynamic production cycling problem by a genetic algorithm
Authors: Masao Yokoyama, Harold W. Lewis,  III
Venue: Computers and Operations Research (2003)

A production system to produce products of multiple items by several machines to meet time-varying stochastic demand is considered. The planning horizon is finite and divided into discrete periods. The demand in each period is mutually independent random variable whose probability distribution is known. Each machine can process at most one item in each period. Setup cost and setup time are incurred only when a machine changes from production of one item to another. Though this kind of problem can be formulated as a Markov decision model, it requires prohibitively long time to obtain a solution. Therefore, an eclectic model is proposed, where items are treated as variables to be determined at the beginning of the planning horizon and production quantities are determined as a policy. The objective function to be minimized is the expectation of the sum of production costs, inventory-holding costs, shortage costs and setup costs. A solution procedure consisting of a genetic algorithm and dynamic programming is proposed to obtain a near-optimal solution for the eclectic model. Three kinds of computational experiments are provided. First, we investigate preliminarily the difference between the optimal value for our eclectic model and the optimal value for the pure Markov decision model in which both items and production quantities are determined as a policy. It has been seen that the difference of the optimal values for the two models is small and the proposed eclectic model is effective. Secondly, we evaluate preliminarily the performance of the genetic algorithm itself for a deterministic model with a single machine that is a special case of the eclectic model. We have found that the genetic algorithm is so effective that we can apply it to the eclectic model. Thirdly, we provide main computational experiments to evaluate the performance of the proposed solution procedure consisting of the genetic algorithm and dynamic programming for the eclectic model. It has been found that good solutions can be obtained efficiently by the proposed solution procedure.
Estimating frequency of change
Authors: Junghoo Cho, Hector Garcia-Molina
Venue: ACM Transactions on Internet Technology (TOIT) (2003)

Many online data sources are updated autonomously and independently. In this article, we make the case for estimating the change frequency of data to improve Web crawlers, Web caches and to help data mining. We first identify various scenarios, where different applications have different requirements on the accuracy of the estimated frequency. Then we develop several "frequency estimators" for the identified scenarios, showing analytically and experimentally how precise they are. In many cases, our proposed estimators predict change frequencies much more accurately and improve the effectiveness of applications. For example, a Web crawler could achieve 35&percnt; improvement in "freshness" simply by adopting our proposed estimator.
Towards a formal specification method for graphical user interfaces using modularized graph grammars
Authors: M. Goedicke, B. E. Sucrow
Venue: Proceedings of the 8th International Workshop on Software Specification and Design (1996)

Well designed graphical user interfaces offer a high potential to increase the productivity of human users. The necessary condition for such a good performance is that the user interface represents the semantics of the underlying application in a clear and comprehensible way. This means, especially, that not only syntactical layout but also semantic consistency conditions between the various interaction objects have to be presented in a graphical user interface appropriately. This is usually termed semantic feedback. Many representation schemes have been proposed to express the properties of graphical man machine interfaces. However, many of them concentrate on control flow design and do not easily scale up to realistic problems. We propose a graph and graph grammar based approach which addresses the problem of semantic consistency of dialogs in graphical user interfaces. The main emphasis lies on an appropriate specification of the consistency conditions between the various graphical interaction objects of a man machine interface. We also propose a modularization technique in order to cope with large systems. We show the expressiveness and modularization features of our approach which is based on an analysis of the relationships between the various graphical interaction objects and conclude with remarks on future work.
A New Approach for Calculating Implications of Fuzzy Rules
Authors: Tuan D. Pham
Venue: Proceedings of the 2002 IEEE International Conference on Artificial Intelligence Systems (ICAIS'02) (2002)

Fuzzy inference systems have been pervasive in many areas of applications concerning machine learning and decision analysis where numerical computation and human heuristics integrate. This paper introduces an approach for computing the implications of fuzzy rules that consist of multiple input variables. Input variables are partitioned on the basis of information gain, and multiple secondary input attributes are computed by the Choquet fuzzy integral. Theproposed model is computationally efficient in both capturing and aggregating attributes at detailed levels.
Towards an Automatic Quality Evaluation of Natural Language Software Specifications
Authors: Giuseppe Lami
Venue:  (1999)

Requirements Specification is a crucial phase of the software life-cycle. Providing the software engineer with tools and techniques for evaluating quality of Software Requirements may solve some of the problems due to possible lacks of quality of them. In this paper, first a feasible Quality Model is defined for Software Requirements written in Natural Language (NL). The term feasible means that the Quality Properties of this Quality Model can be evaluated by means of Indicators automatically and numerically measurable. Then, the results of the validation of this Quality Model on industrial cases are presented. The encouraging outcomes of the validation have been taken into account for starting the realization of an automatic tool for verifying the adherence to syntax/lexical constraints of the requirement sentences to guarantee the conformance to the Quality Model. This tool should be a valid support for the reviewer of NL Software Requirements. EMAIL:: lami@iei.pi.cnr.it
Support for environment-mediated human cooperation in large-scale reuse-based projects
Authors: I. Alloui, F. Oquendo
Venue: Proceedings of the 10th International Software Process Workshop (1996)

Support for cooperation in large-scale reuse-based projects is required to assist developers in carrying out the complex and distributed system composition process. The position paper presents Peace+knowledge-based formalism for modelling interactions among project participants and a system for enacting those models. The main two key concepts named interaction and intention, are inspired from two theories: the speech acts theory and the theory of rational action. Peace+process centred environment is founded on the multi-agent paradigm of distributed artificial intelligence.
Knowledge Discovery in a Dairy Cattle Database (Mining for predictive models)
Authors: H. A. Abbass, P. Macrossan, M. Towsey, K. Mengersen, G. D. Finn
Venue:  (1999)

Proper design of a breeding program has been an issue of primary concern in much animal breeding research during the last decade. Data Mining (DM) is a powerful paradigm for finding patterns that can be used to predict the productivity of progeny given information about their sire, dam and the environment. The more accurate the discovered patterns, the more genetic gain one can achieve in a breeding program. This paper describes a DM process on an Australian dairy database. The focal point of this paper is the selection of a point estimation model for predicting the daughter milk yield within an intelligent decision support system, currently being developed for the Australian dairy industry. The selection of the minimum number of attributes, sufficient for satisfactory prediction, and of an accurate mining algorithm form the overall objective of the paper. In addition, the advantages of Bayesian neural networks over conventional feed-forward neural networks are explored.
Fault Detection in Routing Protocols
Authors: Daniel Massey, Bill Fenner
Venue: Proceedings of the Seventh Annual International Conference on Network Protocols (1999)

Routing protocol faults cause problems ranging from an inability to communicate to excessive routing overhead. This paper proposes a system for detecting a wide range of routing protocol faults. Our system deploys virtual routers called RouteMonitors to monitor a routing protocol. We deployed RouteMonitors in the MBone's DVMRP infrastructure and uncovered a number of faults. We were also able to identify the cause of these errors and deploy fixes. The result was a substantial improvement in DVMRP route stability. This paper reviews the RouteMonitor approach and details the results achieved in the MBone.
Interactive Image Retrieval by Color Distributions
Authors: C. Colombo, I. Genovesi, A. del Bimbo
Venue: Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Multimedia Computing and Systems (1998)

This paper presents an interactive system for the organization and retrieval of images from a database based on color distributions and simple geometric properties of clustered image regions. The system creates its internal query representation based on color sketches, visual examples, and on a memory of previous queries. Experimental evidence relating system performance to human expectation is discussed.
An Experimental Digital Library Platform - A Demonstrator Prototype for the DigLib Project at SICS
Authors: Anette Hulth, Anna Jonsson
Venue:  (1999)

Within the framework of the Digital Library project at SICS, this thesis describes the implementation of a demonstrator prototype of a digital library (DigLib); an experimental platform integrating several functions in one common interface. It includes descriptions of the structure and formats of the digital library collection, the tailoring of the search engine Dienst, the construction of a keyword extraction tool, and the design and development of the interface. The platform was realised through sicsDAIS, an agent interaction and presentation system, and is to be used for testing and evaluating various tools for information seeking. The platform supports various user interaction strategies by providing: search in bibliographic records (Dienst); an index of keywords (the Keyword Extraction Function (KEF)); and browsing through the hierarchical structure of the collection. KEF was developed for this thesis work, and extracts and presents keywords from Swedish documents. Although based on a comparatively simple algorithm, KEF contributes by supplying a long-felt want in the area of Information Retrieval. Evaluations of the tasks and the interface still remain to be done, but the digital library is very much up and running. By implementing the platform through sicsDAIS, DigLib can deploy additional tools and search engines without interfering with already running modules. If wanted, agents providing other services than SICS can supply, can be plugged in.
An Infrastructure for Open-Architecture Digital Libraries
Authors: Carl Lagoze, Sandra Payette
Venue:  (1998)

A digital library is a managed collection of digital objects and services that support the storage, discovery, retrieval, and preservation of those objects. We describe an open architecture in which core digital library functionality is partitioned into a set of well-defined services. Each service can be accessed through a set of service requests that define its public interface. This paper describes a general digital object model and a set of service components, which include a naming service, a repository service, an index service, and a collection service. Interoperability is promoted when digital libraries are assembled from this set of core service components.
Marker-less Tracking for AR: A Learning-Based Approach
Authors: Y. Genc, S. Riedel, F. Souvannavong, C. Akinlar, N. Navab
Venue: Proceedings of the 1st International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality (2002)

Estimating the pose of a camera (virtual or real) in which some augmentation takes place is one of the most important parts of an augmented reality (AR) system. Availability of powerful processors and fast frame grabber shave made vision-based trackers commonly used due to their accuracy as well as flexibility and ease of use. Current vision-based trackers are based on tracking of markers. The use of markers increases robustness and reduces computational requirements. However, their use can be very complicated, as they require certain maintenance. Direct use of scene features for tracking, therefore, is desirable. To this end, we describe a general system that tracks the position and orientation of a camera observing a scene without any visual markers. Our method is base don a two-stage process. In the first stage, a set of features is learned with the help of an external tracking system while in action. The second stage uses these learned features for camera tracking when the system in thefirst stage decides that it is possible to do so. The system is very general so that it can employ any available feature tracking and pose estimation system for learning and tracking. We experimentally demonstrate the viability of the method in real-life examples.
Program Verification for Optimized Byte Copy
Authors: Edoardo S. Biagioni
Venue:  (1994)

We present a program to copy bytes, together with a formal specification and a proof that the code satisfies the specification. The program, which is in the critical path for a network implementation, has been tuned carefully over a period of time; the proof covers the entire program, and is easily updated if the program is modified. The program is written in the Standard ML programming language and was produced as part of the Fox Project implementation of the TCP/IP protocol suite.
Token coherence: decoupling performance and correctness
Authors: Milo M. K. Martin, Mark D. Hill, David A. Wood
Venue: ACM SIGARCH Computer Architecture News (2003)

Many future shared-memory multiprocessor servers will both target commercial workloads and use highly-integrated "glueless" designs. Implementing low-latency cache coherence in these systems is difficult, because traditional approaches either add indirection for common cache-to-cache misses (directory protocols) or require a totally-ordered interconnect (traditional snooping protocols). Unfortunately, totally-ordered interconnects are difficult to implement in glueless designs. An ideal coherence protocol would avoid indirections and interconnect ordering; however, such an approach introduces numerous protocol races that are difficult to resolve.We propose a new coherence framework to enable such protocols by separating performance from correctness. A performance protocol can optimize for the common case (i.e., absence of races) and rely on the underlying correctness substrate to resolve races, provide safety, and prevent starvation. We call the combination Token Coherence, since it explicitly exchanges and counts tokens to control coherence permissions.This paper develops TokenB, a specific Token Coherence performance protocol that allows a glueless multiprocessor to both exploit a low-latency unordered interconnect (like directory protocols) and avoid indirection (like snooping protocols). Simulations using commercial workloads show that our new protocol can significantly outperform traditional snooping and directory protocols.
A New Direction in Hydrodynamic Stability: Beyond Eigenvalues
Authors: Lloyd N. Trefethen, Anne E. Trefethen, Satish C. Reddy, Tobin A. Driscoll
Venue:  (1992)

Fluid flows that are smooth at low speeds become unstable and then turbulent at higher speeds. This phenomenon has traditionally been investigated by linearizing the equations of flow and looking for unstable eigenvalues of the linearized problem, but the results agree poorly in many cases with experiments. Nevertheless, it has become clear in recent years that linear effects play a central role in hydrodynamic instability. A reconciliation of these findings with the traditional analysis can be obtained by considering the "pseudospectra" of the linearized problem, which reveal that small perturbations to the smooth flow in the form of streamwise vortices may be amplified by factors on the order of 10**5 by a linear mechanism, even though all the eigenmodes are stable. The same principles apply also to other problems in the mathematical sciences that involve non-orthogonal eigenfunctions.
How a silver bullet may lose its shine
Authors: Gert-Jan de Vreede, Robert M. Davison, Robert O. Briggs
Venue: Communications of the ACM (2003)

One of the best ways to realize the potential of group support systems is to learn from its failed implementations.
Distributed Route Planning Using Partial Map Building
Authors: Christine J. Alvarado
Venue:  (1998)

Our goal is to manipulate and guide an object across an unknown environment toward a goal in a known location in space. Our tools include a system of manipulation robots, which are "blind" and one mobile scout robot who relies on a series of sonar sensors for information about the environment. Previous solutions to this problem have taken a simultaneous guiding and manipulating approach, moving the whole system under the scout''s guidance. My approach, however, presents a separate scouting algorithm that can return a series of coordinates through which the manipulation system can safely pass to reach the goal in a static environment. This new approach produces more optimal paths to the goal, as well as evading the concern of what actions to take should the entire system reach a dead end. In this paper I will present both the algorithm and the experimental results I obtained when I built the scouting system.