Message from the general chair

Journal ArticleI am very pleased to welcome all attendees to the 2012 IEEE International Symposium on Performance Analysis of Systems and Software (ISPASS) in New Brunswick, New Jersey on April 1-3, 2012. The conference represents the hard work of several organizing committee members and contributing authors. We all hope that the conference will be highly productive for every attendee. ISPASS has emerged as a premier forum for research on tools and performance analysis. This year's program continues that tradition. Dr. Viji Srinivasan of IBM T.J. Watson did an excellent job as program chair. She assembled a world-class program committee, and efficiently organized the reviewing and PC meeting. She was meticulous in her review assignments, which contributed greatly to a fair review process. I am very thankful to a dedicated program committee and external reviewers that spent many hours providing feedback to several authors. I'd also like to thank Dr. Mazda Marvasti (VMware) and Prof. Margaret Martonosi (Princeton) for agreeing to deliver keynote presentations. The conference is being kicked off with an excellent serving of workshops and tutorials on Sunday April 1st. I appreciate the efforts of Vijay Reddi (UT Austin) who served as the Workshop/Tutorial Chair. I also thank the organizers of the workshops and tutorials for the time they are putting into augmenting the ISPASS program

Message from the general chair

[No abstract available

Welcome message from General Chair Dr. Robert V. Duncan

The welcome message from the ICCF18 general chair, Dr. Robert V. Duncan

Department of Marketing News, Spring 2015

Articles in this issue include: AMA Recognized as Top 30 Club Message from the chair Faculty spotlight: Debra Kellerman Student of the Term: Karen Herron General Business Major Returns to Marketing Remembering Professor Tom Zupan

Rhetoric in legislative bargaining with asymmetric information

We analyze a three-player legislative bargaining game over an ideological and a distributive decision. Legislators are privately informed about their ideological intensities, i.e., the weight placed on the ideological decision relative to the weight placed on the distributive decision. Communication takes place before a proposal is offered and majority rule voting determines the outcome. We show that it is not possible for all legislators to communicate informatively. In particular, the legislator who is ideologically more distant from the proposer cannot communicate informatively, but the closer legislator may communicate whether he would \compromise "or flight" on ideology. Surprisingly, the proposer may be worse off when bargaining with two legislators (under majority rule) than with one (who has veto power), because competition between the legislators may result in less information conveyed in equilibrium. Despite separable preferences, the proposer is always better off making proposals for the two dimensions together

Exploring the Effectiveness of Transit Security Awareness Campaigns in the San Francisco Bay Area, Research Report 09-19

Public involvement in alerting officials of suspicious and potentially harmful activity is critical to the overall security of a transit system. As part of an effort to get passengers and the public involved, many transit agencies have security awareness campaigns. The objective of this research is to learn how transit agencies seek to make security awareness campaigns effective and explore how they measure the effectiveness of such campaigns, if at all. This research project includes data from case studies of five major agencies that provide transit service in the San Francisco Bay Area region. The case study data are comprised of descriptions of the types of security awareness campaigns the agencies have implemented, the goals of the campaigns, and how they seek to make their campaigns effective, as well as whether and how these agencies measure and determine the effectiveness of their campaigns. A positive finding of this research is the consistency with which Bay Area transit organizations address the need for passenger awareness as part of their overall security program. However, none of the five agencies analyzed for this study measures the effectiveness of their campaigns. Whereas they all have a similar goal—to increase passenger awareness about security issues—little evidence exists confirming to what extent they are achieving this goal. The paper concludes with suggestions for using outcome measurements to provide a reasonable indication of a campaign’s effectiveness by capturing the public’s response to a campaign

A Message Passing Approach for Decision Fusion in Adversarial Multi-Sensor Networks

We consider a simple, yet widely studied, set-up in which a Fusion Center (FC) is asked to make a binary decision about a sequence of system states by relying on the possibly corrupted decisions provided by byzantine nodes, i.e. nodes which deliberately alter the result of the local decision to induce an error at the fusion center. When independent states are considered, the optimum fusion rule over a batch of observations has already been derived, however its complexity prevents its use in conjunction with large observation windows. In this paper, we propose a near-optimal algorithm based on message passing that greatly reduces the computational burden of the optimum fusion rule. In addition, the proposed algorithm retains very good performance also in the case of dependent system states. By first focusing on the case of small observation windows, we use numerical simulations to show that the proposed scheme introduces a negligible increase of the decision error probability compared to the optimum fusion rule. We then analyse the performance of the new scheme when the FC make its decision by relying on long observation windows. We do so by considering both the case of independent and Markovian system states and show that the obtained performance are superior to those obtained with prior suboptimal schemes. As an additional result, we confirm the previous finding that, in some cases, it is preferable for the byzantine nodes to minimise the mutual information between the sequence system states and the reports submitted to the FC, rather than always flipping the local decision