Entitling concurrency to smart contracts using optimistic transactional memory

It is commonly believed that blockchain is a revolutionary technology for doing business on the Internet. Blockchain is a decentralized, distributed database or ledger of records. It ensures that the records are tamper-proof but publicly readable. Blockchain platforms such as Ethereum [3] and several others execute complex transactions in blocks through user-defined scripts known as smart contracts. Normally, a block of the chain consists of multiple transactions of smart contracts which are added by a miner. To append a correct block into the blockchain, miners execute these transactions of smart contracts sequentially. Later the validators serially re-execute the smart contract transactions of the block. If the validators agree with final state of the blocks as recorded by the miner, then the block is said to be valid and added to the blockchain using a consensus protocol

Knowledge Capturing in Design Briefing Process for Requirement Elicitation and Validation

Knowledge capturing and reusing are major processes of knowledge management that deal with the elicitation of valuable knowledge via some techniques and methods for use in actual and further studies, projects, services, or products. The construction industry, as well, adopts and uses some of these concepts to improve various construction processes and stages. From pre-design to building delivery knowledge management principles and briefing frameworks have been implemented across project stakeholders: client, design teams, construction teams, consultants, and facility management teams. At pre-design and design stages, understanding the client’s needs and users’ knowledge are crucial for identifying and articulating the expected requirements and objectives. Due to underperforming results and missed goals and objectives, many projects finish with highly dissatisfied clients and loss of contracts for some organizations. Knowledge capturing has beneficial effects via its principles and methods on requirement elicitation and validation at the briefing stage between user, client and designer. This paper presents the importance and usage of knowledge capturing and reusing in briefing process at pre-design and design stages especially the involvement of client and user, and explores the techniques and technologies that are usable in briefing process for requirement elicitation

An Investigation on Benefit-Cost Analysis of Greenhouse Structures in Antalya

Significant population increase across the world, loss of cultivable land and increasing demand for food put pressure on agriculture. To meet the demand, greenhouses are built, which are, light structures with transparent cladding material in order to provide controlled microclimatic environment proper for plant production. Conceptually, greenhouses are similar with manufacturing buildings where a controlled environment for manufacturing and production have been provided and proper spaces for standardized production processes have been enabled. Parallel with the trends in the world, particularly in southern regions, greenhouse structures have been increasingly constructed and operated in Turkey. A significant number of greenhouses are located at Antalya. The satellite images demonstrated that for over last three decades, there has been a continuous invasion of greenhouses on all cultivable land. There are various researches and attempts for the improvement of greenhouse design and for increasing food production by decreasing required energy consumption. However, the majority of greenhouses in Turkey are very rudimentary structures where capital required for investment is low, but maintenance requirements are high when compared with new generation greenhouse structures. In this research paper, life-long capital requirements for construction and operation of greenhouse buildings in Antalya has been investigated by using benefit-cost analysis study

Rules for Growth: Promoting Innovation and Growth Through Legal Reform

The United States economy is struggling to recover from its worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. After several huge doses of conventional macroeconomic stimulus - deficit-spending and monetary stimulus - policymakers are understandably eager to find innovative no-cost ways of sustaining growth both in the short and long runs. In response to this challenge, the Kauffman Foundation convened a number of America’s leading legal scholars and social scientists during the summer of 2010 to present and discuss their ideas for changing legal rules and policies to promote innovation and accelerate U.S. economic growth. This meeting led to the publication of Rules for Growth: Promoting Innovation and Growth Through Legal Reform, a comprehensive and groundbreaking volume of essays prescribing a new set of growth-promoting policies for policymakers, legal scholars, economists, and business men and women. Some of the top Rules include: • Reforming U.S. immigration laws so that more high-skilled immigrants can launch businesses in the United States. • Improving university technology licensing practices so university-generated innovation is more quickly and efficiently commercialized. • Moving away from taxes on income that penalize risk-taking, innovation, and employment while shifting toward a more consumption-based tax system that encourages saving that funds investment. In addition, the research tax credit should be redesigned and made permanent. • Overhauling local zoning rules to facilitate the formation of innovative companies. • Urging judges to take a more expansive view of flexible business contracts that are increasingly used by innovative firms. • Urging antitrust enforcers and courts to define markets more in global terms to reflect contemporary realities, resist antitrust enforcement from countries with less sound antitrust regimes, and prohibit industry trade protection and subsidies. • Reforming the intellectual property system to allow for a post-grant opposition process and address the large patent application backlog by allowing applicants to pay for more rapid patent reviews. • Authorizing corporate entities to form digitally and use software as a means for setting out agreements and bylaws governing corporate activities. The collective essays in the book propose a new way of thinking about the legal system that should be of interest to policymakers and academic scholars alike. Moreover, the ideas presented here, if embodied in law, would augment a sustained increase in U.S. economic growth, improving living standards for U.S. residents and for many in the rest of the world

Performance measurement in construction research & development: The use of case study research approach

The process of finding solutions to the research problem does not follow a clear sequential approach, but often takes unexpected turns due to the uncertainties of the research process and its outcomes. However, appropriate research design would be able to identify any problems and pitfalls that the researcher may come across during the process. In this regard, consideration of the research philosophy pertaining to the study helps a researcher in choosing the appropriate approach for a study. Not only the philosophical stance, but also the research problem under investigation and its underling circumstances influence the selection of a research approach. Accordingly, this paper discusses the factors that drive the selection of a case study as the research approach with particular reference to the use of single case study to undertake an in depth inquiry regarding the impact of performance measurement towards construction research and development. Further, this paper discusses the incorporation of multi-phase, multi perspective and multi-method approaches within the single case study to build valid theory

Parallelization of an algorithm for computing involutive Janet bases

Blockchain platforms such as Ethereum and several others execute complex transactions in blocks through user-defined scripts known as smart contracts. To append a correct block into blockchain, miners execute these transactions of smart contracts sequentially. Later the validators serially re-execute the smart contract transactions of the block to validate it. If validation is successful then the block is added to the blockchain using a consensus protocol and miner gets the incentive. In the current era of multi-core processors, by employing the serial execution of the transactions, the miners and validators fail to utilize the cores properly and as a result, have poor throughput. By entitling concurrency to smart contracts execution, we can achieve better efficiency and higher throughput. In this proposal, we develop a novel and efficient technique to execute the smart contract transactions concurrently by miner using optimistic Software Transactional Memory systems (STMs). The miner proposes a block which consists of the set of transactions, conflict graph, hash of previous block and final state of each shared data-objects. Later, we propose concurrent validator which re-executes the same smart contracts concurrently and deterministically with the help of conflict graph given by miner and verifies the final states. On successful validation, proposed block appended into the blockchain and miner gets the incentive. We consider a benchmarks from solidity documentation. We execute the smart contract transactions concurrently using Basic Time stamp Ordering (BTO) and Multi-Version Time stamp Ordering (MVTO) protocols as optimistic STMs. BTO and MVTO miner achieves 3.6x and 3.7x average speedups over serial miner respectively. BTO and MVTO validator outperform average 40.8x and 47.1x than serial validator respectively