9,592 research outputs found
An empirical investigation into branch coverage for C programs using CUTE and AUSTIN
Automated test data generation has remained a topic of considerable interest for several decades because it lies at the heart of attempts to automate the process of Software Testing. This paper reports the results of an empirical study using the dynamic symbolic-execution tool. CUTE, and a search based tool, AUSTIN on five non-trivial open source applications. The aim is to provide practitioners with an assessment of what can be achieved by existing techniques with little or no specialist knowledge and to provide researchers with baseline data against which to measure subsequent work. To achieve this, each tool is applied 'as is', with neither additional tuning nor supporting harnesses and with no adjustments applied to the subject programs under test. The mere fact that these tools can be applied 'out of the box' in this manner reflects the growing maturity of Automated test data generation. However, as might be expected, the study reveals opportunities for improvement and suggests ways to hybridize these two approaches that have hitherto been developed entirely independently. (C) 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved
The pharmacophore kernel for virtual screening with support vector machines
We introduce a family of positive definite kernels specifically optimized for
the manipulation of 3D structures of molecules with kernel methods. The kernels
are based on the comparison of the three-points pharmacophores present in the
3D structures of molecul es, a set of molecular features known to be
particularly relevant for virtual screening applications. We present a
computationally demanding exact implementation of these kernels, as well as
fast approximations related to the classical fingerprint-based approa ches.
Experimental results suggest that this new approach outperforms
state-of-the-art algorithms based on the 2D structure of mol ecules for the
detection of inhibitors of several drug targets
Energy-Efficient Algorithms
We initiate the systematic study of the energy complexity of algorithms (in
addition to time and space complexity) based on Landauer's Principle in
physics, which gives a lower bound on the amount of energy a system must
dissipate if it destroys information. We propose energy-aware variations of
three standard models of computation: circuit RAM, word RAM, and
transdichotomous RAM. On top of these models, we build familiar high-level
primitives such as control logic, memory allocation, and garbage collection
with zero energy complexity and only constant-factor overheads in space and
time complexity, enabling simple expression of energy-efficient algorithms. We
analyze several classic algorithms in our models and develop low-energy
variations: comparison sort, insertion sort, counting sort, breadth-first
search, Bellman-Ford, Floyd-Warshall, matrix all-pairs shortest paths, AVL
trees, binary heaps, and dynamic arrays. We explore the time/space/energy
trade-off and develop several general techniques for analyzing algorithms and
reducing their energy complexity. These results lay a theoretical foundation
for a new field of semi-reversible computing and provide a new framework for
the investigation of algorithms.Comment: 40 pages, 8 pdf figures, full version of work published in ITCS 201
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