Termination detection

The recently established computational equivalence between the traditional message-passing model and the mobile-agents model is based on the existence of a mobile-agents algorithm that simulates the execution of message-passing algorithms. Like most existing protocols for mobile agents, this simulation protocol works correctly only if the agents are fault-free. We consider the problem of performing the simulation of message-passing algorithms when the simulating agents may crash unexpectedly. We show how to simulate any distributed algorithm for the message-passing model in a mobile-agents system with k agents, tolerating up to f ≤ k −1 crashes during the simulation. Two fault-tolerant simulation algorithms are presented, one for non-anonymous settings (i.e., where either the networks nodes or the agents or both have distinct identities), and one for anonymous systems (where both the network nodes and the agents are anonymous). In both cases, the simulation overhead is polynomial. An interesting feature of the algorithm for the anonymous setting is that it allows for a self-balancing fault-tolerant simulation: Even though the agents may crash at any time, the algorithm ensures that the simulation proceeds flawlessly irrespective of the agent crashes and the system always stabilizes to a state where the workload is equally distributed among the remaining agents. Finally, unlike the existing fault-free simulation algorithm, both our protocols are able to detect termination even if the simulated algorithm has no explicit termination detection.

In this paper we describe a technique for automatic construction of ontology, a semantic representation of a conceptualization, for any domain, organization or enterprise whose Web site is existent with quiet a big mine of information. An user interactive system is developed with the help of which any organization, which has a Web site to maintain data, but has no corresponding semantic mark up, can automatically construct the ontology and further use that to model domain knowledge and make use of various Semantic Web applications like Semantic Web search engine etc. The automated construction of ontology will facilitate further the growth, popularity and usage of the Semantic Web and Semantic Web technologies as well as serve as a basis for Artificial Intelligence reasoning.

With rapidly increasing concurrency, the HPC community is looking for new parallel programming paradigms to make best use of current and up-coming machines. Under the Japanese CREST funding program, the post-petascale HPC project developed the XMP programming paradigm, a pragma-based partitioned global address space (PGAS) approach. Good tool support for debugging and performance analysis is crucial for the productivity and therefore acceptance of a new programming paradigm. In this work we investigate which properties of a parallel programing language specification may help tools to highlight correctness and performance issues or help to avoid common issues in parallel programming in the first place. In this paper we exercise these investigations on the example of XMP. We also investigate the question how to improve the reusability of existing correctness and performance analysis tools. CCS CONCEPTS • Software and its engineering → Correctness; Parallel programming languages; Software maintenance tools;

With rapidly increasing concurrency, the HPC community is looking for new parallel programming paradigms to make best use of current and up-coming machines. Under the Japanese CREST funding program, the post-petascale HPC project developed the XMP programming paradigm, a pragma-based partitioned global address space (PGAS) approach. Good tool support for debugging and performance analysis is crucial for the productivity and therefore acceptance of a new programming paradigm. In this work we investigate which properties of a parallel programing language specification may help tools to highlight correctness and performance issues or help to avoid common issues in parallel programming in the first place. In this paper we exercise these investigations on the example of XMP. We also investigate the question how to improve the reusability of existing correctness and performance analysis tools.

Rule-based programs used in mission-and safety-critical applications need to be shown to be free of hazards. This paper discusses formal proof-techniques which promise to assist designers in this task. In this paper we show that the shared dataspace language Swarm has many key features in common with rule-based languages. We outline an assertional programming logic for Swarm programs and use the logic to reason about the correctness of a simple program. This logic is a suitable foundation for the development of techniques specific to present and future rule-based languages.

Reliability, defined as the guarantee that a program satisfies its specifications, is an important aspect of many applications for which rule-based expert systems are suited. Verification refer to the process used to determine the reliability of the rule-based program. Because past approaches to verification are informal, guarantees of reliability cannot fully be made without severely restricting the system. On the other hand, by constructing formal specifications for a program and showing the program satisfies those specifications, guarantees of reliability can be made. This paper presents an assertional approach to the verification of rule-based programs.

The term shared dataspace refers to the general class of programming languages in which the principal means of communication among the concurrent components of programs is a common, content-addressable data structure called a dataspace. In the programming language and artificial intelligence communities, there is considerable interest in such languages, e.g., logic-based languages, production rule systems, and the Linda language. However, these languages have not been the subject extensive program verification research. This paper specifies a proof system for the shared dataspace language Swarm-a proof system similar in

The OpenSHMEM Analyzer is a compiler-based tool that can help users detect errors and provide useful analyses about their OpenSHMEM applications. The tool is built on top of the Open64 compiler and presents OpenSHMEM information as feedback to the user. Some of the analyses it provides include checks for correct usage of symmetric variables in OpenSHMEM calls, out-of-bounds checks for symmetric data, checks for the correct initialization of pointers to symmetric data, and symmetric data alias information. In this paper we describe the main features and design of the tool, and evaluate it with the OpenSHMEM Validation Suite, the UTS application and the IS NAS parallel benchmark.

Most highly dynamic infrastructure-less networks have in common that the assumption of connectivity does not necessarily hold at a given instant. Still, communication routes can be available between any pair of nodes over time and space. These networks (variously called delay-tolerant, disruptive-tolerant, challenged) are naturally modeled as time-varying graphs (or evolving graphs), where the existence of an edge is a function of time. In this paper we study deterministic computations under unstructured mobility, that is when the edges of the graph appear infinitely often but without any (known) pattern. In particular, we focus on the problem of broadcasting with termination detection. We explore the problem with respect to three possible metrics: the date of message arrival (foremost), the time spent doing the broadcast (fastest), and the number of hops used by the broadcast (shortest). We prove that the solvability and complexity of this problem vary with the metric considered, as well as with the type of knowledge a priori available to the entities. These results draw a complete computability map for this problem when mobility is unstructured.

We consider infrastructure-less highly dynamic networks, where connectivity does not necessarily hold, and the network may actually be disconnected at every time instant. These networks are naturally modeled as time-varying graphs. Clearly the task of designing protocols for these networks is less difficult if the environment allows waiting (i.e., it provides the nodes with store-carryforward-like mechanisms such as local buffering) than if waiting is not feasible. We provide a quantitative corroboration of this fact in terms of the expressivity of the corresponding time-varying graph; that is in terms of the language generated by the feasible journeys in the graph. We prove that the set of languages Lnowait when no waiting is allowed contains all computable languages. On the other end, we prove that Lwait is just the family of regular languages. This gap is a measure of the computational power of waiting. We also study bounded waiting; that is when waiting is allowed at a node only for at most d time units. We prove the negative result that L wait[d] = Lnowait.

Highly dynamic networks rarely offer end-to-end connectivity at a given time. Yet, connectivity in these networks can be established over time and space, based on temporal analogues of multi-hop paths (also called journeys). Attempting to optimize the selection of the journeys in these networks naturally leads to the study of three cases: shortest (minimum hop), fastest (minimum duration), and foremost (earliest arrival) journeys. Efficient centralized algorithms exists to compute all cases, when the full knowledge of the network evolution is given. In this paper, we study the distributed counterparts of these problems, i.e. shortest, fastest, and foremost broadcast with termination detection (TDB), with minimal knowledge on the topology. We show that the feasibility of each of these problems requires distinct features on the evolution, through identifying three classes of dynamic graphs wherein the problems become gradually feasible: graphs in which the reappearance of edges is recurrent (class R), bounded-recurrent (B), or periodic (P), together with specific knowledge that are respectively n (the number of nodes), ∆ (a bound on the recurrence time), and p (the period). In these classes it is not required that all pairs of nodes get in contact-only that the overall footprint of the graph is connected over time. Our results, together with the strict inclusion between P, B, and R, implies a feasibility order among the three variants of the problem, i.e. TDB[f oremost] requires weaker assumptions on the topology dynamics than TDB[shortest], which itself requires less than TDB[f astest]. Reversely, these differences in feasibility imply that the computational powers of Rn, B ∆ , and Pp also form a strict hierarchy.

On shared-memory systems, Cilk-style work-stealing has been used to effectively parallelize irregular task-graph based applications such as Unbalanced Tree Search (UTS). There are two main difficulties in extending this approach to distributed memory. In the shared memory approach, thieves (nodes without work) constantly attempt to asynchronously steal work from randomly chosen victims until they find work. In distributed memory, thieves cannot autonomously steal work from a victim without disrupting its execution. When work is sparse, this results in performance degradation. In essence, a direct extension of traditional work-stealing to distributed memory violates the work-first principle underlying work-stealing. Further, thieves spend useless CPU cycles attacking victims that have no work, resulting in system inefficiencies in multi-programmed contexts. Second, it is non-trivial to detect active distributed termination (detect that programs at all nodes are looking for work, henc...

A 2-stage detector was designed to find rho-independent transcription terminators in the Escherichia coli genome. The detector includes a Stochastic Context Free Grammar (SCFG) component and a Support Vector Machine (SVM) component. To find terminators, the SCFG searches the intergenic regions of nucleotide sequence for local matches to a terminator grammar that was designed and trained utilizing examples of known terminators. The grammar selects sequences that are the best candidates for terminators and assigns them a prefix, stem-loop, suffix structure using the Cocke-Younger-Kasaami (CYK) algorithm, modified to incorporate energy affects of base pairing. The parameters from this inferred structure are passed to the SVM classifier, which distinguishes terminators from non-terminators that score high according to the terminator grammar. The SVM was trained with negative examples drawn from intergenic sequences that include both featureless and RNA gene regions (which were assigned prefix, stem-loop, suffix structure by the SCFG), so that it successfully distinguishes terminators from either of these. The classifier was found to be 96.4% successful during testing.

A 2-stage detector was designed to find rho-independent transcription terminators in the Escherichia coli genome. The detector includes a Stochastic Context Free Grammar (SCFG) component and a Support Vector Machine (SVM) component. To find terminators, the SCFG searches the intergenic regions of nucleotide sequence for local matches to a terminator grammar that was designed and trained utilizing examples of known terminators. The grammar selects sequences that are the best candidates for terminators and assigns them a prefix, stem-loop, suffix structure using the Cocke-Younger-Kasaami (CYK) algorithm, modified to incorporate energy affects of base pairing. The parameters from this inferred structure are passed to the SVM classifier, which distinguishes terminators from non-terminators that score high according to the terminator grammar. The SVM was trained with negative examples drawn from intergenic sequences that include both featureless and RNA gene regions (which were assigned prefix, stem-loop, suffix structure by the SCFG), so that it successfully distinguishes terminators from either of these. The classifier was found to be 96.4% successful during testing.

Purpose: Design reliable distributed protocols Special math needed for explanation: Algebra Special math needed to use results: Same Results useful to: Theoreticians and distributed-software developers Summary & Conclusions-Termination detection is among the fundamental problems encountered in distributed systems. Several papers have appeared to solve the termination detection problem where the underlying network does not have any faults. In this paper, the problem of detecting termination in a network which has at most one faulty node is considered and several message-efficient protocols are presented. The protocols are then extended to multiple node failures. The network is assumed to be connected in spite of the failures. This paper first addresses the problem of termination detection in a faulty network where there can be at most one fault. For this simple case, a reliable protocol is provided for detecting termination. Some optimization is performed to arrive at a protocol which is message-efficient. The protocols are easy to implement because of their simplicity and do not generate excessive number of messages. No assumptions are made about the network being synchronous. The only assumption is that node failures should be visible to some/all of the neighbors. The case of k-node failures can then be handled easily and the protocol for single node failures can be directly used with some minor modifications in a network where there may be k failed nodes. No finite amount of additional hardware can make any network tolerant to all types of faults. A widely accepted approach is to design hardware components with very high reliability while designing software that is also fault-tolerant. Thus, the approach here to reliability of networks is through software faulttolerance. The network must remain connected. If the network is partitioned, then there are numerous interesting questions arise but they are not treated here. The protocols are being implemented on a network of SUN work stations.

We describe a rapid, automated method for direct detection of known single-base changes in genomic DNA. Fluorescence-based DNA minisequence analysis is employed in a templatedependent reaction which involves a single nucleotide extension of an oligonucleotide primer by the correct fluorescently-tagged dideoxynucleotide chain terminator. Detection following electrophoresis on denaturing acrylamide gels is facilitated by alkaline phosphatase treatment of reaction products after extension followed by isopropanol precipitation of the dye-tagged, singlebase-extended primer to remove unincorporated deoxynucleotides. Fluorescence analysis of the incorporated dye tag reveals the identity of the template nucleotide immediately 3" to the primer site. This technique does not require radioactivity or biotinylated PCR product, relies on the incorporation of a single dideoxynucleotide terminator to extend the primer by one nucleotide and takes advantage of the sensitivity of fluorescent terminators developed for automated DNA sequence analysis. As a demonstration, we have applied the assay to human genomic DNA for detection of the sickle mutation in the ,8-globin gene, and have also examined feasibility for simultaneous delineation using a multiplex-like strategy in a single gel-lane of some of the most common .8-thalassemia mutations in the Mediterranean basin.

The termination detection problem involves detecting whether an ongoing distributed computation has ceased all its activities. We investigate the termination detection problem in an asynchronous distributed system under the crash-recovery model. It has been shown that the problem is impossible to solve under the crashrecovery model in general. We identify two conditions under which the termination detection problem can be solved in a safe manner. We also propose algorithms to detect termination under the conditions identified.

A new stochastic framework is proposed for distribution system restoration (DSR) problem. In this framework, dynamic programming (DP) is used to solve DSR problem for a distribution system that accommodates various technologies of distributed generation units and storage systems. Time and sequence of distribution feeders which should be energised after a blackout are chosen as stages of DP algorithm. In addition, uncertainties associated with the power received from transmission network in the period of system restoration are modelled as some probabilistic scenarios. The complexity of attained optimisation problem is reduced using some state reduction techniques. These techniques enable DP algorithm to reach nearoptimal solution as well as computationally efficient calculation procedure. The proposed restoration framework is applied on a real-world test system and the results prove its effectiveness and practicality.

A new stochastic framework is proposed for distribution system restoration (DSR) problem. In this framework, dynamic programming (DP) is used to solve DSR problem for a distribution system that accommodates various technologies of distributed generation units and storage systems. Time and sequence of distribution feeders which should be energised after a blackout are chosen as stages of DP algorithm. In addition, uncertainties associated with the power received from transmission network in the period of system restoration are modelled as some probabilistic scenarios. The complexity of attained optimisation problem is reduced using some state reduction techniques. These techniques enable DP algorithm to reach nearoptimal solution as well as computationally efficient calculation procedure. The proposed restoration framework is applied on a real-world test system and the results prove its effectiveness and practicality.

A distributed and fully symmetric solution is presented for the distributed termination problem. In contrast to the existing solutions. the above solution does not require a predesignated process to detect termination. The case of asynchronous communications is also discussed.

Abstract: Eleven reformulated gasoline fuels (RFGs) were evaluated by CVS tests on a chassis dynamometer to compare their effect on vehicle emissions of toxic volatile organic compounds (HVOCs). Fuel formulations were prepared by varying their contents of aromatics, ...

In 2020 Bang-Jensen et al. generalized the Hajós join of two graphs to the class of digraphs and generalized several results for vertex colorings in digraphs. Although, as a consequence of these results, a digraph can be obtained by Hajós constructions (directed Hajós join and identifying non-adjacent vertices), determining the Hajós constructions to obtain the digraph is a complex problem. In particular, Bang-Jensen et al. posed the problem of determining the Hajós operations to construct the symmetric 5-cycle from the complete symmetric digraph of order 3 using only Hajós constructions. We successfully adapted a rank-based genetic algorithm to solve this problem by the introduction of innovative recombination and mutation operators from graph theory. The Hajós Join became the recombination operator and the identification of independent vertices became the mutation operator. In this way, we were able to obtain a sequence of only 16 Hajós operations to construct the symmetric cycle of order 5.

We describe a rapid, automated method for direct detection of known single-base changes in genomic DNA. Fluorescence-based DNA minisequence analysis is employed in a templatedependent reaction which involves a single nucleotide extension of an oligonucleotide primer by the correct fluorescently-tagged dideoxynucleotide chain terminator. Detection following electrophoresis on denaturing acrylamide gels is facilitated by alkaline phosphatase treatment of reaction products after extension followed by isopropanol precipitation of the dye-tagged, singlebase-extended primer to remove unincorporated deoxynucleotides. Fluorescence analysis of the incorporated dye tag reveals the identity of the template nucleotide immediately 3" to the primer site. This technique does not require radioactivity or biotinylated PCR product, relies on the incorporation of a single dideoxynucleotide terminator to extend the primer by one nucleotide and takes advantage of the sensitivity of fluorescent terminators developed for automated DNA sequence analysis. As a demonstration, we have applied the assay to human genomic DNA for detection of the sickle mutation in the ,8-globin gene, and have also examined feasibility for simultaneous delineation using a multiplex-like strategy in a single gel-lane of some of the most common .8-thalassemia mutations in the Mediterranean basin.

The global quiescence of a distributed computation (or distributed termination detection) is an important problem. Some concurrent programming languages and systems provide global quiescence detection as a built-in feature so that programmers do not need to write special synchronization code to detect quiescence. This paper introduces partial quiescence (PQ), which generalizes quiescence detection to a specified part of a distributed computation. Partial quiescence is useful, for example, when two independent concurrent computations that both rely on global quiescence need to be combined into a single program. The paper describes how we have designed and implemented a PQ mechanism within an experimental version of the JR concurrent programming language. Our early results are promising qualitatively and quantitatively.

The global quiescence of a distributed computation (or distributed termination detection) is an important problem. Some concurrent programming languages and systems provide global quiescence detection as a built-in feature so that programmers do not need to write special synchronization code to detect quiescence. This paper introduces partial quiescence (PQ), which generalizes quiescence detection to a specified part of a distributed computation. Partial quiescence is useful, for example, when two independent concurrent computations that both rely on global quiescence need to be combined into a single program. The paper describes how we have designed and implemented a PQ mechanism within an experimental version of the JR concurrent programming language. Our early results are promising qualitatively and quantitatively.

For large-scale and complex societies of agents monitoring and control are important to both agent designers and society administrators. Specifically, interaction monitoring and termination detection are of importance in optimising performance of a system and keeping users up-to-date on progress. Both monitoring and termination detection are well-studied problems for distributed object systems. In this paper, we investigate how these approaches can be applied to agent systems. We present a novel algorithm, which takes advantage of a monitor's additional information on partial behaviour specifications of the agents to derive observable termination criteria. We sketch an implementation and qualitatively compare our novel algorithm to the existing distributed systems approaches and propose future experimental work.

We introduce a theoretical algorithm and its practical version to perform decentralized detection of the global convergence of parallel asynchronous iterative algorithms. We prove that even if the algorithm is completely decentralized, the detection of global convergence is achieved on one processor under the classical conditions. The proposed algorithm is very useful in the context of grid computing in which the processors are distributed and in which detecting the convergence on a master processor may be penalizing or even impossible as in Peer to Peer computations framework. Finally, the efficiency of the practical algorithm is illustrated in a typical experiment.

The OpenSHMEM Analyzer is a compiler-based tool that can help users detect errors and provide useful analyses about their OpenSHMEM applications. The tool is built on top of the Open64 compiler and presents OpenSHMEM information as feedback to the user. Some of the analyses it provides include checks for correct usage of symmetric variables in OpenSHMEM calls, out-of-bounds checks for symmetric data, checks for the correct initialization of pointers to symmetric data, and symmetric data alias information. In this paper we describe the main features and design of the tool, and evaluate it with the OpenSHMEM Validation Suite, the UTS application and the IS NAS parallel benchmark.

Given a simple digraph D on n vertices (with n ≥ 2), there is a natural construction of a semigroup of transformations D. For any edge (a, b) of D, let a → b be the idempotent of rank n − 1 mapping a to b and fixing all vertices other than a; then, define D to be the semigroup generated by a → b for all (a, b) ∈ E(D). For α ∈ D , let (D, α) be the minimal length of a word in E(D) expressing α. It is well known that the semigroup Sing n of all transformations of rank at most n − 1 is generated by its idempotents of rank n − 1. When D = K n is the complete undirected graph, Howie and Iwahori, independently, obtained a formula to calculate (K n , α), for any α ∈ K n = Sing n ; however, no analogous non-trivial results are known when D = K n. In this paper, we characterise all simple digraphs D such that either (D, α) is equal to Howie-Iwahori's formula for all α ∈ D , or (D, α) = n − fix(α) for all α ∈ D , or (D, α) = n − rk(α) for all α ∈ D. We also obtain bounds for (D, α) when D is an acyclic digraph or a strong tournament (the latter case corresponds to a smallest generating set of idempotents of rank n − 1 of Sing n). We finish the paper with a list of conjectures and open problems.

Wadler's deforestation algorithm eliminates intermediate data structures from functional programs. To be suitable for inclusion in a compiler, deforestation must terminate on all programs. Several techniques exist to ensure termination of deforestation on all first-order programs, but general techniques for higher-order programs were introduced only recently first by Hamilton and then by Marlow. We present a new technique for ensuring termination of deforestation on all higher-order programs that allows useful transformation steps prohibited in Hamilton's and Marlow's techniques. The technique uses a constraint-based higher-order control-flow analysis. We also relate our technique to previous approaches to termination of first-and higher-order deforestation in some detail.

We investigate global measures of vertex similarity for knowledge graphs. While vertex similarity has been explored in the context of directed, unlabelled graphs, measures based on recursive algorithms or learning frameworks can be costly to compute, assume labelled data, and/or provide poorly-interpretable results. Knowledge graphs further imply unique challenges for vertex similarity in terms of scale and diversity. We thus propose and explore global measures of vertex similarity for Knowledge Graphs that (i) are unsupervised, (ii) offer explanations of similarity results; (iii) take into consideration edge labels; and (iv) are robust in terms of redundant or interdependent information. Given that these measures can still be costly to compute precisely, we propose an approximation strategy that enables computation at scale. We compare our measures with a recursive measure (SimRank) for computing vertex similarity over subsets of Wikidata.

Credit risk models, particularly those that seek to understand what signals are given by companies on the verge of bankruptcy, are under constant discussion and continually updated. Statistical models, for example, Discriminant Analysis and Logistic Regression, are traditional and easy to understand. However, new nonstatistical techniques have been recently tested in the financial context, such as the case of machine learning mechanisms. In this paper, we developed bankruptcy forecasting models for non-financial companies, using a data set that covers the period from 1980 to 2014. We examined static variables, growth variables and also growth variation variables in order to discriminate two groups: firms that did not go bankrupt and firms that went bankrupt within one (fiscal) year after analysis of their data. To study the discretionary capacity, we applied seven techniques, among statistics and machine learning. In view of the number of models evaluated, the analyses are rich and ...

We present an efficient approach to detect a locally stable predicate in a distributed computation. Examples of properties that can be formulated as locally stable predicates include termination and deadlock of a subset of processes. Our algorithm does not require application messages to be modified to carry control information (e.g., vector timestamps), nor does it inhibit events (or actions) of the underlying computation. The worst-case message complexity of our algorithm is O(n(m + 1)), where n is the number of processes in the system and m is the number of events executed by the underlying computation. We show that, in practice, its message complexity should be much lower than its worst-case message complexity. The detection latency of our algorithm is O(d) time units, where d is the diameter of communication topology. Our approach also unifies several known algorithms for detecting termination and deadlock. We also show that our algorithm for detecting a locally stable predicate can be used to efficiently detect a stable predicate that is a monotonic function of other locally stable predicates.

A distributed and fully symmetric solution is presented for the distributed termination problem. In contrast to the existing solutions. the above solution does not require a predesignated process to detect termination. The case of asynchronous communications is also discussed.

Feature Recognition (FR) plays major role in engineering significance of a part model and serves as an important support tool for integrated manufacturing. Feature-based systems typically act as inter link between the CAD and CAM activities. These systems can be broadly classified into human-assisted feature definition systems, automatic feature recognition systems and design by features systems. Researchers have come to realize that the best system architecture for a feature-based system would be a blend of the above mentioned systems. In this paper, a new hybrid approach is proposed to recognize machinable features of prismatic part with multiple features on different faces, which is represented in Standard for Exchange of Product Model Data (STEP) AP 203 file format. The hybrid approach uses syntactic pattern recognition, graph based feature recognition and other heuristics to recognize the machinable features of prismatic parts. The product model data represented in STEP AP 203 format is accessed through Java Standard Data Access Interface (JSDAI). Feature recognition is performed in two stages. In the first stage, syntactic pattern recognition method is used to recognize simple orthogonal features. In the second stage, graph based method is used to recognize the remaining features, which were difficult to recognize with the syntactic pattern recognition method. Other heuristics are also used in both the stages to recognize the features.

We characterize exactly the cases in which it is possible to elect a leader in an anonymous network of processors by a deterministic algorithm, and we show that for every network there is a weak election algorithm (i.e., if election is impossible all processors detect this fact in a distributed way).

bytes/s, versus 0.435 bytes/s for the structured file. It should be noted that this is about a factor of ten slower than the MACRO-li assembler processing native input. ACKNOWLEDGMENT The author wishes to acknowledge the efforts of F. Brasch and H. Sabrin in evaluating earlier versions of this paper. | 11 life sciences from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, in 1973, the M.S. def gree in bioengineering from the University of | Illinois at Chicago Circle, Chicago, IL, in 1977, l and the Ph.D. degree in biomedical engineering from Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, in His research interests include human and computer vision, and information theoretic aspects of living systems. Currently, he is involved in medical pattern recognitioni at Medicomp, Inc., Melbourne, FL. Dr. Reuss is a member of the Association for Computing Machinery.

A number of interpolation functions, including some radial basis functions, were evaluated for accuracy and computing time requirements when fitting high dimensional response surfaces. In addition, a hybrid method was developed that uses the best radial basis function for each response surface topology. A set of non-trivial highly noisy response surfaces were fitted by each of these methods and hybrid method was found to be the most reliable and the most accurate. However, the computing cost of the hybrid algorithm rapidly increases with the dimensionality of the surface to be fitted thus limiting the practical utility of this hybrid method to response surfaces with less than approximately 100 dimensions.

Clustered data are a common occurrence in the social and behavioral sciences and pose a challenge when analyzing data using confirmatory factor analysis (CFA). In addition to potentially compromising point estimates and standard errors, factor structures may also differ between levels of analysis when using nested data. However, multilevel CFA (MCFA) can address these concerns and although the procedures for performing MCFA have been proposed over a decade ago, the practice has seen little use in applied psychometric research. This article presents a step-by-step procedure for conducting a MCFA with R using the lavaan package. The dataset and complete R syntax, as well as a function for generating the required matrices, are provided.

The purpose of this paper is to develop the transfer function for the ride and handling performance for military tracked vehicle. This transfer function will be used in placed of the expensive physical hardware or simulation model for further study for robust design and optimization studies. Response Surface Methodology (RSM) approximation technique was used to develop the transfer functions. The RSM comprises of a group of statistical techniques for empirical model building and exploitation. RSM uses Design of Experiment (DOE) and multiple linear regression techniques for fitting of a response surface model that relates the output response to the design variables. The general form of the transfer function is a second order polynomial with unknown parameters to be identified. These unknown parameter were determined using the Central Composite Design (CCD) design of experiments.

Determine how economic-social factors affect Peru's national competitiveness management, which is represented by productivity as a dependent variable. These factors are seven, so seven specific objectives were proposed, some of them limited by the scarcity of data that were extracted mainly from the World Bank and INEI. On the one hand, the comparison of the general hypothesis, carried out by the multiple regression analysis, gave us as a result, that the economic performance factors, education and health have a positive effect on the dependent variable. On the other hand, factors infrastructure, institutionality, innovation, education through the variable school enrollment in the secondary level and business climate have a negative impact on the dependent variable. Is applied, according to the MCO method. In the econometric analysis with logarithms, it is reflected that the independent variables affect in different ways on the behavior of the dependent variable. Thus, considering the contrasting of the specific hypotheses, it was concluded that, the importance of the incidence of the infrastructure factor is not very significant; the influence of the economic performance factor if relevant; the incidence of the institutional factor is not very significant; the innovation factor does not have a significant impact; the influence of the education factor if it is significantly important; the health factor contributes in a very important way; and the impact of the business climate factor is negative but not significant in the dependent variable. Consequently the coefficients are statistically significant.

It is now well established that the device scaling predicted by Moore's Law is no longer a viable option for increasing the clock frequency of future uniprocessor systems at the rate that had been sustained during the last two decades. As a result, future systems are rapidly moving from uniprocessor to multiprocessor configurations, so as to use parallelism instead of frequency scaling as the foundation for increased compute capacity. The dominant emerging multiprocessor structure for the future is a Non-Uniform Cluster Computing (NUCC) system with nodes that are built out of multi-core SMP chips with non-uniform memory hierarchies, and interconnected in horizontally scalable cluster configurations such as blade servers. Unlike previous generations of hardware evolution, this shift will have a major impact on existing software. Current OO language facilities for concurrent and distributed programming are inadequate for addressing the needs of NUCC systems because they do not support the notions of non-uniform data access within a node, or of tight coupling of distributed nodes. We have designed a modern object-oriented programming language, X10, for high performance, high productivity programming of NUCC systems. A member of the partitioned global address space family of languages, X10 highlights the explicit reification of locality in the form of places;

Distributed Constraint Satisfaction is a framework for modeling and solving distributed problems. Research on the topic intensied during the last ten years when mainly systematic techniques were thoroughly explored. A revival of attention for Distributed Stochastic Algorithms (DSA) was marked by the work of (3, 4, 13, 7, 5). Remarkably, it was proven that Distributed Stochastic Search is a competitive tech- nique. Here we review current DSAs and their intrinsic properties. We also describe a remarkable new algorithm, Distributed Simulated Annealing (DSAN). We show theo- retically and experimentally how it compares with DSA. Experimental evaluation on synchronous versions shows that with current heuristics DSAN competes with the pre- vious winners, DSA-B and DSA-C. Depending on the parameters selected for DSA, DSAN may offer marginally better quality solutions than DSA-B or DSA-C for hard and over-constrained problems. For easy problems DSAN may not lock on the solution and use of te...

It is of critical importance to be aware of the historical discrimination embedded in the data and to consider a fairness measure to reduce bias throughout the predictive modeling pipeline. Various notions of fairness have been defined, though choosing an appropriate metric is cumbersome. Trade-offs and impossibility theorems make such selection even more complicated and controversial. In practice, users (perhaps regular data scientists) should understand each of the measures and (if possible) manually explore the combinatorial space of different measures before they can decide which combination is preferred based on the context, the use case, and regulations. To alleviate the burden of selecting fairness notions for consideration, we propose a framework that automatically discovers the correlations and trade-offs between different pairs of measures for a given context. Our framework dramatically reduces the exploration space by finding a small subset of measures that represent othe...