McBurney v. Young: Testing the Limits of Citizens-Only Freedom of Information Laws

This commentary previews an upcoming Supreme Court case, McBurney v. Young, in which the Court will decide whether the citizens-only provision of Virginia\u27s Freedom of Information Act violates the Privileges and Immunities Clause or the dormant Commmerce Clause

Certifying the restricted isometry property is hard

This paper is concerned with an important matrix condition in compressed sensing known as the restricted isometry property (RIP). We demonstrate that testing whether a matrix satisfies RIP is NP-hard. As a consequence of our result, it is impossible to efficiently test for RIP provided P \neq NP

COST Action IC 1402 ArVI: Runtime Verification Beyond Monitoring -- Activity Report of Working Group 1

This report presents the activities of the first working group of the COST Action ArVI, Runtime Verification beyond Monitoring. The report aims to provide an overview of some of the major core aspects involved in Runtime Verification. Runtime Verification is the field of research dedicated to the analysis of system executions. It is often seen as a discipline that studies how a system run satisfies or violates correctness properties. The report exposes a taxonomy of Runtime Verification (RV) presenting the terminology involved with the main concepts of the field. The report also develops the concept of instrumentation, the various ways to instrument systems, and the fundamental role of instrumentation in designing an RV framework. We also discuss how RV interplays with other verification techniques such as model-checking, deductive verification, model learning, testing, and runtime assertion checking. Finally, we propose challenges in monitoring quantitative and statistical data beyond detecting property violation

A Purely Functional Computer Algebra System Embedded in Haskell

We demonstrate how methods in Functional Programming can be used to implement a computer algebra system. As a proof-of-concept, we present the computational-algebra package. It is a computer algebra system implemented as an embedded domain-specific language in Haskell, a purely functional programming language. Utilising methods in functional programming and prominent features of Haskell, this library achieves safety, composability, and correctness at the same time. To demonstrate the advantages of our approach, we have implemented advanced Gr\"{o}bner basis algorithms, such as Faug\`{e}re's $F_4$ and $F_5$, in a composable way.Comment: 16 pages, Accepted to CASC 201

Review of the Policy, Regulatory Mechanisms and Administration of Biosafety in Eastern and Southern Africa: A study of Kenya, South Africa, Malawi and the ASARECA initiative

This report summarises the results of a review of the policy, regulatory mechanisms and administration of biosafety in Kenya, Malawi and South Africa and under the ASARECA regional initiative. The report focuses on the current situation and provides insights as to the form that developments in the area of regulation of biotechnology are likely to take. The first section is an introduction, which provides the definition and scope of biotechnology as used in this report. It provides a brief status of agricultural research; the areas of research and the actors involved in biotechnology in the study countries. With the exception of South Africa, experimentation in transgenic crops is still under development. Most of the current agricultural biotechnology R&D activities focus on improving crop productivity. The actors are mainly National Agriculture Research Institutes, International Agricultural Research Centres and universities. Private sector involvement is in the form of multinational companies. The second section discusses the frameworks for the regulation of biotechnology. These include international obligations, regional attempts, as well as national efforts in regulating biotechnology in the study countries. Regulation at the national level has been in the form of national policies, national strategies and through legislation. In Kenya and in most countries under the ASARECA initiative, acts of parliament are yet to be enacted. The proposed bill and regulations in Kenya and the proposed regional regulatory structure under ASARECA are discussed with the aim of providing an insight as to the trend regulation in these jurisdictions is likely to take. The third section is a discussion on institutional arrangements in the field of agricultural biotechnology. Who are the institutional actors? What are the synergies? What is the institutional capacity in terms of human resources and physical infrastructure? This section also explores the commercialisation and innovation attempts in the study countries. It examines public perception and acceptance of modern biotechnology and ends with a brief mention on intellectual property protection in the study countries. South Africa has a developed institutional structure with impressive facilities and adequate human resource capacity. Critical mass in modern biotechnology in the other study countries is yet to be attained. Facilities for experimentation in GM technology are likewise lacking in Kenya, Malawi and other ASARECA countries. The fourth section summarises the review and presents the way forward. South Africa is best placed to handle applications for testing transgenics such as the rosette-resistant groundnut developed by ICRISAT. A representative from the Malawi biosafety committee should be involved in the testing of the groundnuts in RSA as part of a capacity building exercise and also to pave the way for the testing of the groundnuts in Malawi. In Kenya, there are indications that once an event is approved elsewhere, it is likely to receive timely approval subject to any additional testing that the National Biosafety Board may deem necessary. ICRISAT would have to collaborate with the KARI Institutional Biosafety Committee through which the application to the National Biosafety Committee would be made

Testing formula satisfaction

We study the query complexity of testing for properties defined by read once formulae, as instances of massively parametrized properties, and prove several testability and non-testability results. First we prove the testability of any property accepted by a Boolean read-once formula involving any bounded arity gates, with a number of queries exponential in \epsilon and independent of all other parameters. When the gates are limited to being monotone, we prove that there is an estimation algorithm, that outputs an approximation of the distance of the input from satisfying the property. For formulae only involving And/Or gates, we provide a more efficient test whose query complexity is only quasi-polynomial in \epsilon. On the other hand we show that such testability results do not hold in general for formulae over non-Boolean alphabets; specifically we construct a property defined by a read-once arity 2 (non-Boolean) formula over alphabets of size 4, such that any 1/4-test for it requires a number of queries depending on the formula size

Automatic Test Generation for Space

The European Space Agency (ESA) uses an engine to perform tests in the Ground Segment infrastructure, specially the Operational Simulator. This engine uses many different tools to ensure the development of regression testing infrastructure and these tests perform black-box testing to the C++ simulator implementation. VST (VisionSpace Technologies) is one of the companies that provides these services to ESA and they need a tool to infer automatically tests from the existing C++ code, instead of writing manually scripts to perform tests. With this motivation in mind, this paper explores automatic testing approaches and tools in order to propose a system that satisfies VST needs

Birchfield v. North Dakota: Warrantless Breath Tests and the Fourth Amendment

In Birchfield v. North Dakota, the Supreme Court explored warrantless breath tests during DUI stops and their validity under the Fourth Amendment. To determine their constitutionality, the Court adopted a balancing test, weighing the government’s interest in preventing instances of drunk driving with the intrusion on an individual’s privacy. The Court ultimately concluded that warrantless breath tests are constitutional when conducted incident to a lawful DUI arrest. This commentary explores the Court’s reasoning and holding and will argue that the Court was correct in deciding that a warrant is not necessary for conducting a breath test incident to a lawful DUI arrest