Introduction to the special section on dependable network computing

Dependable network computing is becoming a key part of our daily economic and social life. Every day, millions of users and businesses are utilizing the Internet infrastructure for real-time electronic commerce transactions, scheduling important events, and building relationships. While network traffic and the number of users are rapidly growing, the mean-time between failures (MTTF) is surprisingly short; according to recent studies, in the majority of Internet backbone paths, the MTTF is 28 days. This leads to a strong requirement for highly dependable networks, servers, and software systems. The challenge is to build interconnected systems, based on available technology, that are inexpensive, accessible, scalable, and dependable. This special section provides insights into a number of these exciting challenges

Count three for wear able computers

This paper is a postprint of a paper submitted to and accepted for publication in the Proceedings of the IEE Eurowearable 2003 Conference, and is subject to Institution of Engineering and Technology Copyright. The copy of record is available at the IET Digital Library. A revised version of this paper was also published in Electronics Systems and Software, also subject to Institution of Engineering and Technology Copyright. The copy of record is also available at the IET Digital Library.A description of 'ubiquitous computer' is presented. Ubiquitous computers imply portable computers embedded into everyday objects, which would replace personal computers. Ubiquitous computers can be mapped into a three-tier scheme, differentiated by processor performance and flexibility of function. The power consumption of mobile devices is one of the most important design considerations. The size of a wearable system is often a design limitation

A Logic-Based Representation for Coalitional Games with Externalities

We consider the issue of representing coalitional games in multiagent systems that exhibit externalities from coalition formation, i.e., systems in which the gain from forming a coalition may be affected by the formation of other co-existing coalitions. Although externalities play a key role in many real-life situations, very little attention has been given to this issue in the multi-agent system literature, especially with regard to the computational aspects involved. To this end, we propose a new representation which, in the spirit of Ieong and Shoham [9], is based on Boolean expressions. The idea behind our representation is to construct much richer expressions that allow for capturing externalities induced upon coalitions. We show that the new representation is fully expressive, at least as concise as the conventional partition function game representation and, for many games, exponentially more concise. We evaluate the efficiency of our new representation by considering the problem of computing the Extended and Generalized Shapley value, a powerful extension of the conventional Shapley value to games with externalities. We show that by using our new representation, the Extended and Generalized Shapley value, which has not been studied in the computer science literature to date, can be computed in time linear in the size of the input

Developing a distributed electronic health-record store for India

The DIGHT project is addressing the problem of building a scalable and highly available information store for the Electronic Health Records (EHRs) of the over one billion citizens of India