Formal methods for surviving the jungle of heterogeneous parallelism

pre-printThe parallel programming community will soon be entering the ‘jungle' of heterogeneous hardware and software. Unfortunately, we are not adequately preparing future programmers (today's students) to cope with the many challenges of heterogeneous concurrency, especially in their ability to rigorously specify and verify concurrent systems. Concerted action is urgently needed to create a body of education material supplemented by effective software tools that help gain working knowledge of specification and verification techniques. We suggest funding models and incentives that can help create this material and put them into wide practice

Interprocess communication in highly distributed systems

Issued as Final technical report, Project no. G-36-632Final technical report has title: Interprocess communication in highly distributed system

Swarming Reconnaissance Using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles in a Parallel Discrete Event Simulation

Current military affairs indicate that future military warfare requires safer, more accurate, and more fault-tolerant weapons systems. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) are one answer to this military requirement. Technology in the UAV arena is moving toward smaller and more capable systems and is becoming available at a fraction of the cost. Exploiting the advances in these miniaturized flying vehicles is the aim of this research. How are the UAVs employed for the future military? The concept of operations for a micro-UAV system is adopted from nature from the appearance of flocking birds, movement of a school of fish, and swarming bees among others. All of these natural phenomena have a common thread: a global action resulting from many small individual actions. This emergent behavior is the aggregate result of many simple interactions occurring within the flock, school, or swarm. In a similar manner, a more robust weapon system uses emergent behavior resulting in no weakest link because the system itself is made up of simple interactions by hundreds or thousands of homogeneous UAVs. The global system in this research is referred to as a swarm. Losing one or a few individual unmanned vehicles would not dramatically impact the swarms ability to complete the mission or cause harm to any human operator. Swarming reconnaissance is the emergent behavior of swarms to perform a reconnaissance operation. An in-depth look at the design of a reconnaissance swarming mission is studied. A taxonomy of passive reconnaissance applications is developed to address feasibility. Evaluation of algorithms for swarm movement, communication, sensor input/analysis, targeting, and network topology result in priorities of each model\u27s desired features. After a thorough selection process of available implementations, a subset of those models are integrated and built upon resulting in a simulation that explores the innovations of swarming UAVs

An introduction to English stylistics

http://www.ester.ee/record=b1336595*es

Internationalizing "International Communication"

International communication as a field of inquiry is, in fact, not very “internationalized.” Rather, it has been taken as a conceptual extension or empirical application of U.S. communication, and much of the world outside the West has been socialized to adopt truncated versions of Pax Americana’s notion of international communication. At stake is the “subject position” of academic and cultural inquirers: Who gets to ask what kind of questions? It is important to note that the quest to establish universally valid “laws” of human society with little regard for cultural values and variations seems to be running out of steam. Many lines of intellectual development are reckoning with the important dimensions of empathetic understanding and subjective consciousness. In Internationalizing "International Communication," Lee and others argue that we must reject both America-writ-large views of the world and self-defeating mirror images that reject anything American or Western on the grounds of cultural incompatibility or even cultural superiority. The point of departure for internationalizing “international communication” must be precisely the opposite of parochialism – namely, a spirit of cosmopolitanism. Scholars worldwide have a moral responsibility to foster global visions and mutual understanding, which forms, metaphorically, symphonic harmony made of cacophonic sounds

Revealing Reality : Four Asian Filmmakers Visualize the Transnational Imaginary

This dissertation posits that four Asian filmmakers engage in “revealing reality” in unique but interconnected ways that employ innovative narrative and cinematic/visual techniques, including a direct address to the senses and an augmenting of their vision with fantasy or surrealism. My study argues that Hou Hsiao-hsien (Taiwan), Jia Zhangke (China), Tsai Ming-liang (Taiwan), and Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Thailand) mobilize this visual and narrative strategy to participate in debates about globalization and to comment on the state of their respective nations, the concept of the nation, and the transnational. The films of each artist are examined in detail; I investigate their stylistic choices and their works’ cultural significance on local and global terms in relation to critical theory, particularly postcolonial theory. The dissertation argues that these filmmakers’ works both constitute and conceive the transnational imaginary, the space within which border gnosis and subaltern pasts are produced. It counters arguments that one cannot posit cultural explanations for a filmmaker’s stylistic choices and argues that there is a way to read a filmmaker’s style and films as politically significant. Overall, the project posits film as an analytical tool, and employs interdisciplinary methods used by scholars in film or cultural and media studies who engage with these lenses and frames. By analyzing the technique and the political implications of several films by each filmmaker in a transnational context, it expands the boundaries of American Studies, charting a nexus of border gnosis, subaltern pasts, and the transnational imaginary. Together, this dissertation supports the argument that the varieties of realism developed throughout this region during this period have expanded the transnational imaginary and have contributed to discourse on globalization, postcolonialism, and the multicultural project. Each artist\u27s modification or manipulation of the tenets or rules of realism are suited to their purpose and their aim to “reveal reality,” and this revelation is aimed at twin goals of beauty and political truth