GATE -- an Environment to Support Research and Development in Natural Language Engineering

We describe a software environment to support research and development in natural language (NL) engineering. This environment -- GATE (General Architecture for Text Engineering) -- aims to advance research in the area of machine processing of natural languages by providing a software infrastructure on top of which heterogeneous NL component modules may be evaluated and refined individually or may be combined into larger application systems. Thus, GATE aims to support both researchers and developers working on component technologies (e.g. parsing, tagging, morphological analysis) and those working on developing end-user applications (e.g. information extraction, text summarisation, document generation, machine translation, and second language learning). GATE will promote reuse of component technology, permit specialisation and collaboration in large-scale projects, and allow for the comparison and evaluation of alternative technologies. The first release of GATE is now available

Fast operating system emulation on an exokernel architecture

Thesis (M. Eng.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 1997.Includes bibliographical references (p. 35).by Russell Thomas Hunt.M.Eng

Modules as values in a persistent object store

Journal ArticleWe report on an object manager (OM) providing persistent implementations for C ++ classes. Our OM generalizes this problem to that of managing persistent modules, where the module concept is an abstract data type (ADT). This approach permits a powerful suite of module manipulation operations to be applied uniformly to modules of many provenances, including non-class based entities such as conventional object files, application libraries, and shared system libraries. OMOS, a generalized linker and loader, plays a central role in our OM. Class implementations are represented by OMOS modules, which in turn are constructed from OMOS meta-objects encapsulating linkage blueprints. We cleanly solve the problems of (i) logically (but not physically) including executable object files in our OM, (ii) reconciling class inheritance history and linkage history, and (iii) supporting alternative implementations of a class, for client interoperability or version control

A File System Component Compiler

File System development is a difficult and time consuming task, the results of which are rarely portable across operating systems. Several proposals to improve the vnode interface to allow for more flexible file system design and implementation have been made in recent years, but none is used in practice because they require costly fundamental changes to kernel interfaces, only operating systems vendors can make those changes, are still non-portable, tend to degrade performance, and do not appear to provide immediate return on such an investment. This proposal advocates a language for describing file systems, called FiST. The associated translator can generate portable C code — kernel resident or not — that implements the described file system. No kernel source code is needed and no existing vnode interface must change. The performance of the file systems automatically generated by FiST can be within a few percent of comparable hand-written file systems. The main benefits to automation are that development and maintenance costs are greatly reduced, and that it becomes practical to prototype, implement, test, debug, and compose a vastly larger set of such file systems with different properties. The proposed thesis will describe the language and its translator, use it to implement a few file systems on more than one platform, and evaluate the performance of the automatically generated code

TrustShadow: Secure Execution of Unmodified Applications with ARM TrustZone

The rapid evolution of Internet-of-Things (IoT) technologies has led to an emerging need to make it smarter. A variety of applications now run simultaneously on an ARM-based processor. For example, devices on the edge of the Internet are provided with higher horsepower to be entrusted with storing, processing and analyzing data collected from IoT devices. This significantly improves efficiency and reduces the amount of data that needs to be transported to the cloud for data processing, analysis and storage. However, commodity OSes are prone to compromise. Once they are exploited, attackers can access the data on these devices. Since the data stored and processed on the devices can be sensitive, left untackled, this is particularly disconcerting. In this paper, we propose a new system, TrustShadow that shields legacy applications from untrusted OSes. TrustShadow takes advantage of ARM TrustZone technology and partitions resources into the secure and normal worlds. In the secure world, TrustShadow constructs a trusted execution environment for security-critical applications. This trusted environment is maintained by a lightweight runtime system that coordinates the communication between applications and the ordinary OS running in the normal world. The runtime system does not provide system services itself. Rather, it forwards requests for system services to the ordinary OS, and verifies the correctness of the responses. To demonstrate the efficiency of this design, we prototyped TrustShadow on a real chip board with ARM TrustZone support, and evaluated its performance using both microbenchmarks and real-world applications. We showed TrustShadow introduces only negligible overhead to real-world applications.Comment: MobiSys 201

Design and Implementation of a Distributed Middleware for Parallel Execution of Legacy Enterprise Applications

A typical enterprise uses a local area network of computers to perform its business. During the off-working hours, the computational capacities of these networked computers are underused or unused. In order to utilize this computational capacity an application has to be recoded to exploit concurrency inherent in a computation which is clearly not possible for legacy applications without any source code. This thesis presents the design an implementation of a distributed middleware which can automatically execute a legacy application on multiple networked computers by parallelizing it. This middleware runs multiple copies of the binary executable code in parallel on different hosts in the network. It wraps up the binary executable code of the legacy application in order to capture the kernel level data access system calls and perform them distributively over multiple computers in a safe and conflict free manner. The middleware also incorporates a dynamic scheduling technique to execute the target application in minimum time by scavenging the available CPU cycles of the hosts in the network. This dynamic scheduling also supports the CPU availability of the hosts to change over time and properly reschedule the replicas performing the computation to minimize the execution time. A prototype implementation of this middleware has been developed as a proof of concept of the design. This implementation has been evaluated with a few typical case studies and the test results confirm that the middleware works as expected