1,675 research outputs found
Deciding Conditional Termination
We address the problem of conditional termination, which is that of defining
the set of initial configurations from which a given program always terminates.
First we define the dual set, of initial configurations from which a
non-terminating execution exists, as the greatest fixpoint of the function that
maps a set of states into its pre-image with respect to the transition
relation. This definition allows to compute the weakest non-termination
precondition if at least one of the following holds: (i) the transition
relation is deterministic, (ii) the descending Kleene sequence
overapproximating the greatest fixpoint converges in finitely many steps, or
(iii) the transition relation is well founded. We show that this is the case
for two classes of relations, namely octagonal and finite monoid affine
relations. Moreover, since the closed forms of these relations can be defined
in Presburger arithmetic, we obtain the decidability of the termination problem
for such loops.Comment: 61 pages, 6 figures, 2 table
Implementation and Performance Evaluation of a Parallel Transitive Closure Algorithms on PRISMA/DB
This paper is one of the first to discuss actual implementation of and experimentation with parallel transitive closure operations on a full-fledged relational database system. It brings two research efforts together; the development of an efficient execution strategy for parallel computation of path problems, called Disconnection Set Approach, and the development and implementation of a parallel, main-memory DBMS, called PRISMA/DB. First, we report on the implementation of the disconnection set approach on PRISMA/DB, showing how the latter's design allowed us to easily extend the functionality of the system. Second, we investigate the disconnection set approach's parallel behavior and performance by means of extensive experimentation. It is shown that the parallel implementation of the disconnection set approach yields very good performance characteristics, and that (super)linear speedup w.r.t. a special implementation of semi-naive is achieved for regular, so-called linear fragmenta..
SMT Solving for Functional Programming over Infinite Structures
We develop a simple functional programming language aimed at manipulating
infinite, but first-order definable structures, such as the countably infinite
clique graph or the set of all intervals with rational endpoints. Internally,
such sets are represented by logical formulas that define them, and an external
satisfiability modulo theories (SMT) solver is regularly run by the interpreter
to check their basic properties.
The language is implemented as a Haskell module.Comment: In Proceedings MSFP 2016, arXiv:1604.0038
Computational fact checking from knowledge networks
Traditional fact checking by expert journalists cannot keep up with the
enormous volume of information that is now generated online. Computational fact
checking may significantly enhance our ability to evaluate the veracity of
dubious information. Here we show that the complexities of human fact checking
can be approximated quite well by finding the shortest path between concept
nodes under properly defined semantic proximity metrics on knowledge graphs.
Framed as a network problem this approach is feasible with efficient
computational techniques. We evaluate this approach by examining tens of
thousands of claims related to history, entertainment, geography, and
biographical information using a public knowledge graph extracted from
Wikipedia. Statements independently known to be true consistently receive
higher support via our method than do false ones. These findings represent a
significant step toward scalable computational fact-checking methods that may
one day mitigate the spread of harmful misinformation
Formal Derivation of Concurrent Garbage Collectors
Concurrent garbage collectors are notoriously difficult to implement
correctly. Previous approaches to the issue of producing correct collectors
have mainly been based on posit-and-prove verification or on the application of
domain-specific templates and transformations. We show how to derive the upper
reaches of a family of concurrent garbage collectors by refinement from a
formal specification, emphasizing the application of domain-independent design
theories and transformations. A key contribution is an extension to the
classical lattice-theoretic fixpoint theorems to account for the dynamics of
concurrent mutation and collection.Comment: 38 pages, 21 figures. The short version of this paper appeared in the
Proceedings of MPC 201
Exact Computation of Influence Spread by Binary Decision Diagrams
Evaluating influence spread in social networks is a fundamental procedure to
estimate the word-of-mouth effect in viral marketing. There are enormous
studies about this topic; however, under the standard stochastic cascade
models, the exact computation of influence spread is known to be #P-hard. Thus,
the existing studies have used Monte-Carlo simulation-based approximations to
avoid exact computation.
We propose the first algorithm to compute influence spread exactly under the
independent cascade model. The algorithm first constructs binary decision
diagrams (BDDs) for all possible realizations of influence spread, then
computes influence spread by dynamic programming on the constructed BDDs. To
construct the BDDs efficiently, we designed a new frontier-based search-type
procedure. The constructed BDDs can also be used to solve other
influence-spread related problems, such as random sampling without rejection,
conditional influence spread evaluation, dynamic probability update, and
gradient computation for probability optimization problems.
We conducted computational experiments to evaluate the proposed algorithm.
The algorithm successfully computed influence spread on real-world networks
with a hundred edges in a reasonable time, which is quite impossible by the
naive algorithm. We also conducted an experiment to evaluate the accuracy of
the Monte-Carlo simulation-based approximation by comparing exact influence
spread obtained by the proposed algorithm.Comment: WWW'1
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