ppxscal/embedding_network huggingface dataset:
The Making of the MCM/70 Microcomputer
Authors: Zbigniew Stachniak
Venue: IEEE Annals of the History of Computing (2003)

MCM/70, manufactured by Micro Computer Machines (MCM), was a small desktop microcomputer designed to provide the APL programming language environment for business, scientific, and educational use. MCM was among the first companies to fully recognize and act upon microprocessor technology's immense potential for developing a new generation of cost-effective computing systems. This article discusses the pioneering work on personal microcomputers conducted at MCM in the early 1970s and, in particular, the making of the MCM/70 microcomputer.
The SoSM revisited: a critical realist perspective
Authors: Philip J. Dobson
Venue: Critical reflections on information systems: a systemic approach (2003)

The chapter revisits the System of System Methodologies (SoSM) and suggests that use of the SoSM as a framework for defining methodological assumptions is difficult when the concerned methodologies have significantly different meanings for one axis of the framework--"system" complexity. It is suggested that the purpose of the underlying system can provide a more appropriate frame for defining system approaches--such purpose being defined as interaction or transformation (Mathiassen & Nielsen, 2000).The chapter also uses aspects of critical realism to provide insights into the SoSM and the critical theory underpinning the framework. The SoSM helped to highlight the neglect of coercive situations and ultimately helped prompt the development of critical systems theory which is focused on three basic commitments, critical awareness, methodological pluralism, and emancipation. Maru and Woodford (2001) recently argue that the focus on emancipation has been relegated due to a concentration on pluralism. This chapter suggests that this is a logical outcome of the epistemological focus of the underlying critical theory of Habermas. The Habermas focus on the epistemological or knowledge-based aspects of the development process must necessarily relegate the importance of ontological matters such as the conditions necessary for emancipatory practice. This chapter proposes that the philosophy of critical realism has insights to offer through its highlighting of the ontological issues in more detail and in arguing for a recognition of the deep structures and mechanisms involved in social situations.
Design of an Asynchronous Digital System with B-ternary Logic
Authors: Yasunori Nagata, Masao Mukaidono
Venue: Proceedings of the 27th International Symposium on Multiple-Valued Logic (1997)

Some of the recent digital systems have a serious clock skew problem which comes from huge hardware implementations and high speed operations in VLSI's. To overcome this problem, clock distribution techniques and more notably, asynchronous system design methodologies, have been investigated. Since, the latest asynchronous digital systems use two-rail logic with two-phase data transfer manner, more than two-fold hardware is required in comparison with the synchronous system. In this article, we present design of asynchronous digital system which is based on B-ternary logic so as to process binary data. The system consists of data-path and its controller. We provide B-ternary two-phase binary data processing in the data-path and its control procedure, which is based on shake-hand protocol. The functional units of the system are presented, that is, ternary-in binary-out memory with request/acknowledge detector and control unit. These units are fabricated with terry NOR, NAND, INVERTER gates and ternary Muller's C-elements.
A Language Independent Approach for Detecting Duplicated Code
Authors: Stéphane Ducasse, Matthias Rieger, Serge Demeyer
Venue: Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance (1999)

Code duplication is one of the factors that severely complicates the maintenance and evolution of large software systems. Techniques for detecting duplicated code exist but rely mostly on parsers, technology that has proven to be brittle in the face of different languages and dialects. In this paper we show that is possible to circumvent this hindrance by applying a language independent and visual approach, i.e. a tool that requires no parsing, yet is able to detect a significant amount of code duplication. We validate our approach on a number of case studies, involving four different implementation languages and ranging from 256 K up to 13Mb of source code size.
Metrics for Measuring the Effectiveness of Software-Testing Tools
Authors: James B. Michael, Bernard J. Bossuyt, Byron B. Snyder
Venue: Proceedings of the 13th International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering (2002)

The levels of quality, maintainability, testability, and stabilityof software can be improved and measured through the use ofautomated testing tools throughout the software developmentprocess. Automated testing tools assist software engineers togauge the quality of software by automating the mechanicalaspects of the software-testing task. Automated testing toolsvary in their underlying approach, quality, and ease-of-use,among other characteristics. In this paper we propose a suiteof objective metrics for measuring tool characteristics, as anaid in systematically evaluating and selecting automated testingtools.
Applying Design Metrics to a Large-Scale Software System
Authors: W. Eric Wong, Joseph R. Horgan, Michael Syring, Wayne Zage
Venue: Proceedings of the The Ninth International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering (1998)

Three metrics were used to extract design information from existing code to identify structural stress points in a software system being analyzed: Di, an internal design metric which incorporates factors related to a module's internal structure; De, an external design metric which focuses on a module's external relationships to other modules in the software system; and D(G), a composite design metric which is the sum of Di and De. Since stress point modules generally have a high probability for being fault-prone, project managers can use the information to determine where additional testing effort should be spent and assign these modules to more experienced programmers if modifications are needed. To make the analysis more accurate and efficient, a design metrics analyzer (xMetrics) was implemented. In this study, we conducted experiments using xMetrics on part of a distributed software system, written in C, with a client-server architecture, and identified a small percentage of its functions as good candidates for fault-proneness. Files containing these functions were then validated by the real defect data collected from a recent major release to its next release for their fault-proneness. Normalized metrics values were also computed by dividing the Di, De, and D(G) values by the corresponding function size determined by non-blank and non-comment lines of code to study the possible impact of function size on these metrics. Results indicate that function size has little impact on the predictive quality of our design metrics in identifying fault-prone functions.
Multicast and self-routing in ATM radix trees and banyan networks
Authors: K. L. E. Law, A. Leon-Garcia
Venue: Proceedings of the Fourteenth Annual Joint Conference of the IEEE Computer and Communication Societies (Vol. 3)-Volume - Volume 3 (1995)

Considers methods that perform all point-to-multipoint permutations in ATM radix tree and banyan networks. The authors investigate the relationship between the structure of the routing tab and the ease of performing multicasting. They first consider a simple explicit addressing scheme that requires (N-1)(log/sub 2/N+1) routing bits. They then present an addressing filtering scheme that requires N routing bits. Next they propose a new method, the vertex isolation addressing (VIA) scheme, which requires r(N-1)/(r-1) bits for radix-r tree networks. Thus for binary trees the routing tab i 2(N-1) bits long and as r approaches N the routing tab approaches N bits. The authors demonstrate that the "excess" bits in the VIA routing tab provide certain error detection capabilities. Encoding and decoding algorithms and hardware implementations for the VIA method are presented. Modified VIA schemes are then investigated for large tree networks. Finally the authors show that the VIA scheme and its modifications are applicable to banyan networks.
Virtual Reality - An Approach to Improve the Generation of Fault-Free Software for Programmable Logic Controllers (PLC)
Authors: D. Spath, U. Osmers
Venue: Proceedings of the 2nd IEEE International Conference on Engineering of Complex Computer Systems (1996)

Software development for programmable logical controllers is usually based on low-level languages such as the instruction list or the ladder diagram. At the same time, the programmer looks at a machine or an assembly system in a bit-oriented way; he translates the operational sequences into logical and/or time based combinations of binary signals described by the means of Boolean algebra. This classical method causes a lot of problems in reality so it should be improved. It is the aim of the report to show a way developing PLC-software graphically and interactively within a Virtual Reality (VR) based system (VPLC).
A Group Communication Approach for Mobile Computing MobileChannel: an ISIS Tool for Mobile Services
Authors: Kenjiro Cho, Kenneth P. Birman
Venue:  (1994)

This paper examines group communication as an infrastructure to support mobility of users, and presents a simple scheme to support user mobility by means of switching a control point between replicated servers. We describe the design and implementation of a set of tools, called MobileChannel, for use with the ISIS system. MobileChannel is based on a combination of the two replication schemes: the primary-backup approach and the state machine approach. MobileChannel implements a reliable one-to-many FIFO channel, in which a mobile client sees a single reliable server; servers, acting as a state machine, see multicast messages from clients. Migrations of mobile clients are handled as an intentional primary switch, and hands-offs or server failures are completely masked to mobile clients. To achieve high performance, servers are replicated at a sliding-window level. Our scheme provides a simple abstraction of migration, eliminates complicated hand-off protocols, provides fault-tolerance and is implemented within the existing group communication mechanism.
Searching for an alternative plan
Authors: Ariel Felner, Alex Pomeransky, Jeffrey S. Rosenschein
Venue: Proceedings of the second international joint conference on Autonomous agents and multiagent systems (2003)

Suppose that an intelligent agent accepts as input a complete plan, i.e., a sequence of states (or operators) that should be followed in order to achieve a goal. For some reason, the given plan cannot be followed by the agent, and thus an alternative plan needs to be found --- but we would like the alternative plan to be as close as possible to the original. To achieve this, we define a number of distance metrics between paths or plans, and characterize these functions and their respective attributes and advantages. We then develop a general algorithm based on best-first search that helps an agent find the most suitable alternative plan efficiently, and propose a number of heuristics for the cost function of this best-first search algorithm. We then experimentally show that our algorithm is efficient in finding an alternative plan.
WebWave: Globally Load Balanced Fully Distributed Caching of Hot Published Documents
Authors: Abdelsalam Heddaya, Sulaiman Mirdad
Venue: Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS '97) (1997)

Document publication service over such a large network as the Internet challenges us to harness available server and network resources to meet fast growing demand. In this paper, we show that large-scale dynamic caching can be employed to globally minimize server idle time, and hence maximize the aggregate server throughput of the whole service. To be efficient, scalable and robust, a successful caching mechanism must have three properties: (1) maximize the global throughput of the system, (2) find cache copies without recourse to a directory service, or to a discovery protocol, and (3) be completely distributed in the sense of operating only on the basis of local information. In this paper, we develop a precise definition, which we call tree load-balance (TLB), of what it means for a mechanism to satisfy these three goals. We present an algorithm that computes TLB off-line, and a distributed protocol that induces a load distribution that converges quickly to a TLB one. Both algorithms place cache copies of immutable documents, on the routing tree that connects the cached document's home server to its clients, thus enabling requests to stumble on cache copies en route to the home server.
Java4P: Java with High-Level Concurrency Constructs
Authors: Lukito E. Nugroho, A. S. M. Sajeev
Venue: Proceedings of the 1999 International Symposium on Parallel Architectures, Algorithms and Networks (1999)

While Java has provided a mechanism for concurrent programming implemented as language constructs, it is too rudimentary for most programmers and has certain limitations that make programs unnecessarily complex and prevent fine-grained concurrency.We have implemented Java4P, an extension of the Java language, that offers a simpler concurrency model and overcomes Java's limitations. Threads are no longer associated with thread objects, allowing concurrency at any level of granularity. Thread creation is made implicit and synchronisation is achieved through method guards. Synchronisation specification is separated from the functional specification to provide a parallel programming model closer to sequential programming.
{\bf (Revision of CS-1983-11.)} - Hybrid Reliability Modeling of Fault-Tolerant Computer Systems
Authors: S K Trivedi, Robert Geist, Mark Smotherman, B J Dugan
Venue:  (1984)

Current technology allows sufficient redundancy in fault-tolerant computer systems to insure that the failure probability due to exhaustion of spares is low. Consequently, the major cause of failure is the inability to correctly detect, isolate, and reconfigure when faults are present. Reliability estimation tools must be flexible enough to accurately model this critical fault-handling behavior and yet remain computationally tractable. This paper discusses reliability modeling techniques that are based on a behavioral decomposition that provides tractability by separating the reliability model along temporal lines into nearly-disjoint fault-occurrence and fault-handling submodels. An Extended Stochastic Petri Net (ESPN) model provides the needed flexibility for representing the fault-handling behavior, while a non-homogeneous Markov chain accounts for the possibly non-Poisson fault-occurrence behavior. Since the submodels are separate, the ESPN submodel, in which all the time constants are of the same order of magnitude, can be simulated. The non-homogeneous Markov chain is solved analytically, and the result is a hybrid model. The method of coverage factors, used to combine the submodels, is generalized to more accurately reflect the fault-handling effectiveness within the fault-occurrence model. However, errors can still arise in the subsequent reliability predictions due to approximations made in the aggregation of the two submodels and due to inaccurate estimation of component failure rates and other model parameters. The accuracy of the model predictions is evaluated analytically, and error bounds on the system reliability are produced. These modeling techniques have been implemented in the HARP (Hybrid Automated Reliability Predictor) program.
A Metaheuristic for the Pickup and Delivery Problem with Time Windows
Authors: Haibing Li, Andrew Lim
Venue: Proceedings of the 13th IEEE International Conference on Tools with Artificial Intelligence (2001)

In this paper, we propose a metaheuristic to solve the pickup and delivery problem with time windows. Our approach is a tabu-embedded simulated annealing algorithm which restarts a search procedure from the current best solution after several non-improving search iterations. The computational experiments on the six newly-generated different data sets marked our algorithm as the first approach to solve large multiple-vehicle PDPTW problem instances with various distribution properties.
Mining Characteristic Rules for Understanding Simulation Data
Authors: Jianping Zhang, Jerzy Bala, Philip S. Barry, Theodore E. Meyer, Sarah K. Johnson
Venue: Proceedings of the 14th IEEE International Conference on Tools with Artificial Intelligence (2002)

The Marine Corps' Project Albert seeks to model complex phenomenon by observing the behavior of relatively simple simulations over thousands of runs. These simulations are based upon lightweight agents, whose essential behavior has been distilled down to a small number of rules. By varying the parameters of these rules, Project Albert simulations can explor emergent complex nonlinear behaviors with the aim of developing insight not readily provided by first principle mathematical models. Thousands of runs of Albert simulation models create large amount of data that describe the associations/correlation between the simulation input and output parameters. Understanding the associations between the simulation input and output parameters is critical to understanding the simulated complex phenomenon. This paper presents a data mining approach to analyzing the large scale and highly uncertain Albert simulation data. Specifically, a characteristic rule discovery algorithm is described in the paper together with its application to the Albert simmulation runtime data.
Task Assignment with Unknown Duration
Authors: Mor Harchol-Balter
Venue: Proceedings of the The 20th International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems ( ICDCS 2000) (2000)

We consider a distributed server system and ask which policy should be used for assigning tasks to hosts. In our server, tasks are not preemptible. In addition, the task's service demand is not known a priori. We are particularly concerned with the case where the workload is heavy-tailed, as is characteristic of many empirically measured computer workloads. We analyze several natural task assignment policies and propose a new one TAGS (Task Assignment based on Guessing Size).The TAGS algorithm is counterintuitive in many respects, including load unbalancing, non-work-conserving, and fairness. We find that under heavy-tailed workloads, TAGS can outperform all task assignment policies known to us by several orders of magnitude with respect to both mean response time and mean slowdown, provided the system load is not too high.
Area and perimeter derivatives of a union of disks
Authors: Ho-Lun Cheng, Herbert Edelsbrunner
Venue: Computer Science in Perspective: Essays Dedicated to Thomas Ottmann (2003)

We give analytic inclusion-exclusion formulas for the area and perimeter derivatives of a union of finitely many disks in the plane.
A Tool Suite for Evolving Legacy Software
Authors: Spencer Rugaber
Venue: Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance (1999)

Evolving an existing software system is fundamentally different from developing one from scratch. Consequently, tools to support evolution must go beyond traditional development tools. This paper describes the Esprit de Corps Suite (EDCS) of software evolution tools. EDCS supports the Mission Oriented Architectural Legacy Evolution (MORALE) software reengineering process. The paper briefly describes MORALE before presenting the individual tools and how they interoperate to support legacy system evolution.
Recognizing Surfaces Using Three-Dimensional Textons
Authors: Thomas Leung, Jitendra Malik
Venue: Proceedings of the International Conference on Computer Vision-Volume 2 - Volume 2 (1999)

We study the recognition of surfaces made from different materials such as concrete, rug, marble or leather on the basis of their textural appearance. Such natural textures arise from spatial variation of two surface attributes: (1) reflectance and (2) surface normal. In this paper, we provide a unified model to address both these aspects of natural texture. The main idea is to construct a vocabulary of prototype tiny surface patches with associated local geometric and photometric properties. We call these 3D textons. Examples might be ridges, grooves, spots or stripes or combinations thereof. Associated with each texton is an appearance vector, which characterizes the local irradiance distribution, represented as a set of linear Gaussian derivative filter outputs, under different lighting and viewing conditions.Given a large collection of images of different materials, a clustering approach is used to acquire a small (on the order of 100) 3D texton vocabulary. Given a few (1 to 4) images of any material, it can be characterized using these textons. We demonstrate the application of this representation for recognition of the material viewed under novel lighting and viewing conditions.
Definability with Bounded Number of Bound Variables
Authors: Neil Immerman, Dexter Kozen
Venue:  (1987)

A theory satisfies the $k$-variable-property if every first-order formula is equivalent to a formula with at most $k$ bound variables (possibly reused). Gabbay has shown that a fixed time structure satisfies the $k$-variable property for some $k$ if and only if there exists a finite basis for the temporal connectives over that structure. We give a model-theoretic method for establishing the $k$-variable property, involving a restricted Ehrenfeucht-Fraisse game in which each player has only $k$ pebbles. We use the method to unify and simplify results in the literature for linear orders. We also establish new $k$-variable properties for various theories of bounded-degree trees, and in each case obtain tight upper and lower bounds on $k$. This gives the first finite basis theorems for branching-time models.