4,972 research outputs found
JWalk: a tool for lazy, systematic testing of java classes by design introspection and user interaction
Popular software testing tools, such as JUnit, allow frequent retesting of modified code; yet the manually created test scripts are often seriously incomplete. A unit-testing tool called JWalk has therefore been developed to address the need for systematic unit testing within the context of agile methods. The tool operates directly on the compiled code for Java classes and uses a new lazy method for inducing the changing design of a class on the fly. This is achieved partly through introspection, using Java’s reflection capability, and partly through interaction with the user, constructing and saving test oracles on the fly. Predictive rules reduce the number of oracle values that must be confirmed by the tester. Without human intervention, JWalk performs bounded exhaustive exploration of the class’s method protocols and may be directed to explore the space of algebraic constructions, or the intended design state-space of the tested class. With some human interaction, JWalk performs up to the equivalent of fully automated state-based testing, from a specification that was acquired incrementally
The Error-Pattern-Correcting Turbo Equalizer
The error-pattern correcting code (EPCC) is incorporated in the design of a
turbo equalizer (TE) with aim to correct dominant error events of the
inter-symbol interference (ISI) channel at the output of its matching Viterbi
detector. By targeting the low Hamming-weight interleaved errors of the outer
convolutional code, which are responsible for low Euclidean-weight errors in
the Viterbi trellis, the turbo equalizer with an error-pattern correcting code
(TE-EPCC) exhibits a much lower bit-error rate (BER) floor compared to the
conventional non-precoded TE, especially for high rate applications. A
maximum-likelihood upper bound is developed on the BER floor of the TE-EPCC for
a generalized two-tap ISI channel, in order to study TE-EPCC's signal-to-noise
ratio (SNR) gain for various channel conditions and design parameters. In
addition, the SNR gain of the TE-EPCC relative to an existing precoded TE is
compared to demonstrate the present TE's superiority for short interleaver
lengths and high coding rates.Comment: This work has been submitted to the special issue of the IEEE
Transactions on Information Theory titled: "Facets of Coding Theory: from
Algorithms to Networks". This work was supported in part by the NSF
Theoretical Foundation Grant 0728676
Matching Tree-Level Matrix Elements with Interleaved Showers
We present an implementation of the so-called CKKW-L merging scheme for
combining multi-jet tree-level matrix elements with parton showers. The
implementation uses the transverse-momentum-ordered shower with interleaved
multiple interactions as implemented in PYTHIA8. We validate our procedure
using e+e--annihilation into jets and vector boson production in hadronic
collisions, with special attention to details in the algorithm which are
formally sub-leading in character, but may have visible effects in some
observables. We find substantial merging scale dependencies induced by the
enforced rapidity ordering in the default PYTHIA8 shower. If this rapidity
ordering is removed the merging scale dependence is almost negligible. We then
also find that the shower does a surprisingly good job of describing the
hardness of multi-jet events, as long as the hardest couple of jets are given
by the matrix elements. The effects of using interleaved multiple interactions
as compared to more simplistic ways of adding underlying-event effects in
vector boson production are shown to be negligible except in a few sensitive
observables. To illustrate the generality of our implementation, we also give
some example results from di-boson production and pure QCD jet production in
hadronic collisions.Comment: 44 pages, 23 figures, as published in JHEP, including all changes
recommended by the refere
An efficient length- and rate-preserving concatenation of polar and repetition codes
We improve the method in \cite{Seidl:10} for increasing the finite-lengh
performance of polar codes by protecting specific, less reliable symbols with
simple outer repetition codes. Decoding of the scheme integrates easily in the
known successive decoding algorithms for polar codes. Overall rate and block
length remain unchanged, the decoding complexity is at most doubled. A
comparison to related methods for performance improvement of polar codes is
drawn.Comment: to be presented at International Zurich Seminar (IZS) 201
Probabilistic Shaping for Finite Blocklengths: Distribution Matching and Sphere Shaping
In this paper, we provide for the first time a systematic comparison of
distribution matching (DM) and sphere shaping (SpSh) algorithms for short
blocklength probabilistic amplitude shaping. For asymptotically large
blocklengths, constant composition distribution matching (CCDM) is known to
generate the target capacity-achieving distribution. As the blocklength
decreases, however, the resulting rate loss diminishes the efficiency of CCDM.
We claim that for such short blocklengths and over the additive white Gaussian
channel (AWGN), the objective of shaping should be reformulated as obtaining
the most energy-efficient signal space for a given rate (rather than matching
distributions). In light of this interpretation, multiset-partition DM (MPDM),
enumerative sphere shaping (ESS) and shell mapping (SM), are reviewed as
energy-efficient shaping techniques. Numerical results show that MPDM and SpSh
have smaller rate losses than CCDM. SpSh--whose sole objective is to maximize
the energy efficiency--is shown to have the minimum rate loss amongst all. We
provide simulation results of the end-to-end decoding performance showing that
up to 1 dB improvement in power efficiency over uniform signaling can be
obtained with MPDM and SpSh at blocklengths around 200. Finally, we present a
discussion on the complexity of these algorithms from the perspective of
latency, storage and computations.Comment: 18 pages, 10 figure
Functional Dependencies Unleashed for Scalable Data Exchange
We address the problem of efficiently evaluating target functional
dependencies (fds) in the Data Exchange (DE) process. Target fds naturally
occur in many DE scenarios, including the ones in Life Sciences in which
multiple source relations need to be structured under a constrained target
schema. However, despite their wide use, target fds' evaluation is still a
bottleneck in the state-of-the-art DE engines. Systems relying on an all-SQL
approach typically do not support target fds unless additional information is
provided. Alternatively, DE engines that do include these dependencies
typically pay the price of a significant drop in performance and scalability.
In this paper, we present a novel chase-based algorithm that can efficiently
handle arbitrary fds on the target. Our approach essentially relies on
exploiting the interactions between source-to-target (s-t) tuple-generating
dependencies (tgds) and target fds. This allows us to tame the size of the
intermediate chase results, by playing on a careful ordering of chase steps
interleaving fds and (chosen) tgds. As a direct consequence, we importantly
diminish the fd application scope, often a central cause of the dramatic
overhead induced by target fds. Moreover, reasoning on dependency interaction
further leads us to interesting parallelization opportunities, yielding
additional scalability gains. We provide a proof-of-concept implementation of
our chase-based algorithm and an experimental study aiming at gauging its
scalability with respect to a number of parameters, among which the size of
source instances and the number of dependencies of each tested scenario.
Finally, we empirically compare with the latest DE engines, and show that our
algorithm outperforms them
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