Exploiting the Temporal Logic Hierarchy and the Non-Confluence Property for Efficient LTL Synthesis

The classic approaches to synthesize a reactive system from a linear temporal logic (LTL) specification first translate the given LTL formula to an equivalent omega-automaton and then compute a winning strategy for the corresponding omega-regular game. To this end, the obtained omega-automata have to be (pseudo)-determinized where typically a variant of Safra's determinization procedure is used. In this paper, we show that this determinization step can be significantly improved for tool implementations by replacing Safra's determinization by simpler determinization procedures. In particular, we exploit (1) the temporal logic hierarchy that corresponds to the well-known automata hierarchy consisting of safety, liveness, Buechi, and co-Buechi automata as well as their boolean closures, (2) the non-confluence property of omega-automata that result from certain translations of LTL formulas, and (3) symbolic implementations of determinization procedures for the Rabin-Scott and the Miyano-Hayashi breakpoint construction. In particular, we present convincing experimental results that demonstrate the practical applicability of our new synthesis procedure

Generation of Lamprey Monoclonal Antibodies (Lampribodies) Using the Phage Display System.

The variable lymphocyte receptors (VLRs) consist of leucine rich repeats (LRRs) and comprise the humoral antibodies produced by lampreys and hagfishes. The diversity of the molecules is generated by stepwise genomic rearrangements of LRR cassettes dispersed throughout the VLRB locus. Previously, target-specific monovalent VLRB antibodies were isolated from sea lamprey larvae after immunization with model antigens. Further, the cloned VLR cDNAs from activated lamprey leukocytes were transfected into human cell lines or yeast to select best binders. Here, we expand on the overall utility of the VLRB technology by introducing it into a filamentous phage display system. We first tested the efficacy of isolating phage into which known VLRB molecules were cloned after a series of dilutions. These experiments showed that targeted VLRB clones could easily be recovered even after extensive dilutions (1 to 109). We further utilized the system to isolate target-specific "lampribodies" from phage display libraries from immunized animals and observed an amplification of binders with relative high affinities by competitive binding. The lampribodies can be individually purified and ostensibly utilized for applications for which conventional monoclonal antibodies are employed

"The Fight for Freedom". The Basque Government in-Exile and its Communities through American Editions of Euzko Deya (1939-1953).2

Este artículo analiza la actitud de la emigración política vasca en América hacia la estrategia paradiplomática desempeñada por el Gobierno vasco en el exilio entre 1936 y 1953. A tal efecto, se han seleccionado los diarios Euzko Deya Buenos Aires y Euzko Deya México, a través de los cuáles se han reconstruido las opiniones vertidas por la colectividad vasca, especialmente, las del exilio político, ante tres acontecimientos de especial relevancia: Guerra Civil, la desaparición del presidente Aguirre durante la II Guerra Mundial y la actitud de Estados Unidos en la ONU con respecto a España.This article analyzes the attitude of the Basque political emigration in America towards the paradiplomatic strategy which was carried out by the Basque Government in-exile between 1936 and 1953. For that purpose, we have selected the Mexican and Argertinian editions of the Euzko Deya's newspaper in order to rebuild the Basque communities' opinions, particularly those of political exile, before three facts of special relevance: Spanish Civil War, the dissapearence of president Aguirre during World War II and the attitude of USA with respect to Spain at the UNO

Transnational Soldiers and Guerrilla Warfare from the Spanish Civil War to the Second World War

This article analyses how military institutions incorporated innovations in their tactics using the intermediary role of transnational soldiers in the Spanish Civil War. The Soviet experience of guerrilla warfare during the Russian Civil War was transferred to foreign volunteers during the war in Spain thanks to the collaboration of Soviet experts advising the Spanish Republican Army. After the war, these soldiers’ knowledge and experience of guerrilla warfare were invaluable to the Allied Armies during the Second World War. This article analyses the role of International Brigaders in the OSS in the USA, North Africa, and Europe during the Second World War

The Lost American Tradition: American Foreign Public Engagement & the Origins of American Public Diplomacy, 1776 - 1948

Most of the existing literature on American public diplomacy focuses on both historic and present-day use. Literature by academics and practitioners, as well as government reports and studies done by think tanks, all repeatedly highlight the same problems affecting public diplomacy of the United States (from the end of World War II through today): an absence of strategy - what public diplomacy should do and how; as well as clearly defining the role of public diplomacy in American statecraft; and uneven and ineffective implementation. Interestingly, some of the literature on public diplomacy recognizes the practice to date back before the twentieth century, yet there are no studies examining public diplomacy practice prior to the twentieth century. This study offers a new approach to evaluating and understanding the use of public diplomacy in American statecraft by broadening the understanding and interpretation of diplomacy. The aim of this research is to understand how past uses and techniques of foreign public engagement evolved into modern public diplomacy as a tool of American statecraft. The study explores six historic cases where the United States’ government or private American citizens actively engaged with foreign publics, starting with the American Revolution in 1776 through the passage of the Smith-Mundt Bill of 1948. Each case looks specifically at the role foreign public engagement plays in American statecraft, while also identifying trends in American foreign public engagement and making connections between past practice of foreign public engagement and public diplomacy, and analysing how trends and past practice or experience influenced modern American public diplomacy

The Register, 2007-09-19

https://digital.library.ncat.edu/atregister/2386/thumbnail.jp

Raqs Sharqi in Cultural Diplomacy; An Important but Neglected Diplomatic Tool in U.S.-Egypt Diplomatic Relations “Soft Power is a dance that requires partners.

Following the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, America’s image abroad plunged, especially in the Arab world, where anti-Americanism has been on the rise. America’s hard power alone can no longer efficiently boost America’s reputation and the U.S. government has abandoned its soft power resources. Although important, the linchpin of public diplomacy, known as cultural diplomacy, I argue has become a neglected diplomatic tool in U.S.-Middle East relations. Accordingly, this thesis will explore the role of dance in cultural diplomacy as a catalyst of releasing tension and bringing peace among nation-states, especially in U.S.-Egypt relations. After the calamities of the Egyptian Revolution in 2011, the role of Egypt as a valuable U.S. ally in the Arab world has brought uncertainty among U.S. foreign policy makers, mainly because of its Muslim Brotherhood-nurtured Egyptian president. The U.S. Department of State should revisit its soft power strategies such as its successful cultural exchange programs during the Cold War, and apply them to its current U.S.-Egypt relations. In order to test my hypothesis, I will elucidate the importance of Raqs Sharqi as an effective diplomatic tool of cultural diplomacy in U.S.-Egypt relations. Hence, special attention will be given to the critical assessment of several case studies during the Cold War, in particular, the role of American dancers as cultural diplomats, who successfully broke down ideological and cultural barriers in political hot spots with growing anti- Americanism. The conclusion offers recommendations that serve as a prescription to reduce anti-American attitudes. Although Raqs Sharqi in cultural diplomacy is not a panacea to U.S.-Middle East relations, I argue it is an important feature of soft power. Key words: cultural diplomacy, international relations, soft power, Raqs Sharqi, dance

The Strange Commodity of Cultural Exchange: Martha Graham and the State Department on Tour, 1955-1987

The study of Martha Graham's State Department tours and her modern dance demonstrates that between 1955 and 1987 a series of Cold Wars required a steady product that could meet "informational" propaganda needs over time. After World War II, dance critics mitigated the prewar influence of the German and Japanese modernist artists to create a freed and humanist language because modern dance could only emerge from a nation that was free, and not from totalitarian regimes. Thus the modern dance became American, while at the same time it represented a universal man. During the Cold War, the aging of Martha Graham's dance, from innovative and daring to traditional and even old-fashioned, mirrored the nation's transition from a newcomer that advertised itself as the postwar home of freedom, modernity, and Western civilization to an established power that attempted to set international standards of diplomacy. Graham and her works, read as texts alongside State Department country plans, United States Information Agency publicity, other documentary evidence, and oral histories, reveal a complex matrix of relationships between government agencies and the artists they supported, as well as foundations, private individuals, corporations, country governments, and representatives of business and culture. Because four elements of Graham's modern dance created by her biography can be traced back to ideas of American identity, human universalism, Asian culture, and the Western canon of ancient Greek, European, and biblical texts, the State Department deployed her work throughout Europe and Asia to transmit ideas about America with choreography that could demonstrate cultural convergences, or the merging of American modernist techniques with host country elements. This targeted strategy of advertisement for international leaders, which translated host-country traditions with a universal language of the modern dance, made in America, argued that the United States would and could partner with the nation states Graham visited in order to achieve foreign policy agendas

Regular Methods for Operator Precedence Languages

The operator precedence languages (OPLs) represent the largest known subclass of the context-free languages which enjoys all desirable closure and decidability properties. This includes the decidability of language inclusion, which is the ultimate verification problem. Operator precedence grammars, automata, and logics have been investigated and used, for example, to verify programs with arithmetic expressions and exceptions (both of which are deterministic pushdown but lie outside the scope of the visibly pushdown languages). In this paper, we complete the picture and give, for the first time, an algebraic characterization of the class of OPLs in the form of a syntactic congruence that has finitely many equivalence classes exactly for the operator precedence languages. This is a generalization of the celebrated Myhill-Nerode theorem for the regular languages to OPLs. As one of the consequences, we show that universality and language inclusion for nondeterministic operator precedence automata can be solved by an antichain algorithm. Antichain algorithms avoid determinization and complementation through an explicit subset construction, by leveraging a quasi-order on words, which allows the pruning of the search space for counterexample words without sacrificing completeness. Antichain algorithms can be implemented symbolically, and these implementations are today the best-performing algorithms in practice for the inclusion of finite automata. We give a generic construction of the quasi-order needed for antichain algorithms from a finite syntactic congruence. This yields the first antichain algorithm for OPLs, an algorithm that solves the ExpTime-hard language inclusion problem for OPLs in exponential time

MSL Framework: (Minimum Service Level Framework) for cloud providers and users

Cloud Computing ensures parallel computing and emerged as an efficient technology to meet the challenges of rapid growth of data that we experienced in this Internet age. Cloud computing is an emerging technology that offers subscription based services, and provide different models such as IaaS, PaaS and SaaS among other models to cater the needs of different user groups. The technology has enormous benefits but there are serious concerns and challenges related to lack of uniform standards or nonexistence of minimum benchmark for level of services offered across the industry to provide an effective, uniform and reliable service to the cloud users. As the cloud computing is gaining popularity, organizations and users are having problems to adopt the service ue to lack of minimum service level framework which can act as a benchmark in the selection of the cloud provider and provide quality of service according to the user’s expectations. The situation becomes more critical due to distributed nature of the service provider which can be offering service from any part of the world. Due to lack of minimum service level framework that will act as a benchmark to provide a uniform service across the industry there are serious concerns raised recently interms of security and data privacy breaches, authentication and authorization issues, lack of third party audit and identity management problems, integrity, confidentiality and variable data availability standards, no uniform incident response and monitoring standards, interoperability and lack of portability standards, identity management issues, lack of infrastructure protection services standards and weak governance and compliance standards are major cause of concerns for cloud users. Due to confusion and absence of universal agreed SLAs for a service model, different quality of services is being provided across the cloud industry. Currently there is no uniform performance model agreed by all stakeholders; which can provide performance criteria to measure, evaluate, and benchmark the level of services offered by various cloud providers in the industry. With the implementation of General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and demand from cloud users to have Green SLAs that provides better resource allocations mechanism, there will be serious implications for the cloud providers and its consumers due to lack of uniformity in SLAs and variable standards of service offered by various cloud providers. This research examines weaknesses in service level agreements offered by various cloud providers and impact due to absence of uniform agreed minimum service level framework on the adoption and usage of cloud service. The research is focused around higher education case study and proposes a conceptual model based on uniform minimum service model that acts as benchmark for the industry to ensure quality of service to the cloud users in the higher education institution and remove the barriers to the adoption of cloud technology. The proposed Minimum Service Level (MSL) framework, provides a set of minimum and uniform standards in the key concern areas raised by the participants of HE institution which are essential to the cloud users and provide a minimum quality benchmark that becomes a uniform standard across the industry. The proposed model produces a cloud computing implementation evaluation criteria which is an attempt to reduce the adoption barrier of the cloud technology and set minimum uniform standards followed by all the cloud providers regardless of their hosting location so that their performance can be measured, evaluated and compared across the industry to improve the overall QoS (Quality of Service) received by the cloud users, remove the adoption barriers and concerns of the cloud users and increase the competition across the cloud industry.A computação em nuvem proporciona a computação paralela e emergiu como uma tecnologia eficiente para enfrentar os desafios do crescimento rápido de dados que vivemos na era da Internet. A computação em nuvem é uma tecnologia emergente que oferece serviços baseados em assinatura e oferece diferentes modelos como IaaS, PaaS e SaaS, entre outros modelos para atender as necessidades de diferentes grupos de utilizadores. A tecnologia tem enormes benefícios, mas subsistem sérias preocupações e desafios relacionados com a falta de normas uniformes ou inexistência de um referencial mínimo para o nível de serviços oferecidos, na indústria, para proporcionar uma oferta eficaz, uniforme e confiável para os utilizadores da nuvem. Como a computação em nuvem está a ganhar popularidade, tanto organizações como utilizadores estão enfrentando problemas para adotar o serviço devido à falta de enquadramento de nível de serviço mínimo que possa agir como um ponto de referência na seleção de provedor da nuvem e fornecer a qualidade dos serviços de acordo com as expectativas do utilizador. A situação torna-se mais crítica, devido à natureza distribuída do prestador de serviço, que pode ser oriundo de qualquer parte do mundo. Devido à falta de enquadramento de nível de serviço mínimo que irá agir como um benchmark para fornecer um serviço uniforme em toda a indústria, existem sérias preocupações levantadas recentemente em termos de violações de segurança e privacidade de dados, autenticação e autorização, falta de questões de auditoria de terceiros e problemas de gestão de identidade, integridade, confidencialidade e disponibilidade de dados, falta de uniformidade de normas, a não resposta a incidentes e o monitoramento de padrões, a interoperabilidade e a falta de padrões de portabilidade, questões relacionadas com a gestão de identidade, falta de padrões de serviços de proteção das infraestruturas e fraca governança e conformidade de padrões constituem outras importantes causas de preocupação para os utilizadores. Devido à confusão e ausência de SLAs acordados de modo universal para um modelo de serviço, diferente qualidade de serviços está a ser fornecida através da nuvem, pela indústria da computação em nuvem. Atualmente, não há desempenho uniforme nem um modelo acordado por todas as partes interessadas; que pode fornecer critérios de desempenho para medir, avaliar e comparar o nível de serviços oferecidos por diversos fornecedores de computação em nuvem na indústria. Com a implementação do Regulamento Geral de Protecção de Dados (RGPD) e a procura da nuvem com base no impacto ambiental (Green SLAs), são acrescentadas precupações adicionais e existem sérias implicações para os forncedores de computação em nuvem e para os seus consumidores, também devido à falta de uniformidade na multiplicidade de SLAs e padrões de serviço oferecidos. A presente pesquisa examina as fraquezas em acordos de nível de serviço oferecidos por fornecedores de computação em nuvem e estuda o impacto da ausência de um quadro de nível de serviço mínimo acordado sobre a adoção e o uso no contexto da computação em nuvem. A pesquisa está orientada para a adoção destes serviços para o caso do ensino superior e as instituições de ensino superior e propõe um modelo conceptualt com base em um modelo de serviço mínimo uniforme que funciona como referência para a indústria, para garantir a qualidade do serviço para os utilizadores da nuvem numa instituição de ensino superior de forma a eliminar as barreiras para a adoção da tecnologia de computação em nuvem. O nível de serviço mínimo proposto (MSL), fornece um conjunto mínimo de normas uniformes e na áreas das principais preocupações levantadas por responsáveis de instituições de ensino superior e que são essenciais, de modo a fornecer um referencial mínimo de qualidade, que se possa tornar um padrão uniforme em toda a indústria. O modelo proposto é uma tentativa de reduzir a barreira de adoção da tecnologia de computação em nuvem e definir normas mínimas seguidas por todos os fornecedores de computação em nuvem, independentemente do seu local de hospedagem para que os seus desempenhos possam ser medidos, avaliados e comparados em toda a indústria, para melhorar a qualidade de serviço (QoS) recebida pelos utilizadores e remova as barreiras de adoção e as preocupações dos utilizadores, bem como fomentar o aumento da concorrência em toda a indústria da computação em nuvem