74,651 research outputs found
Patenting Computer Data Structures: The Ghost, the Machine and the Federal Circuit
Courts view data structures, the mechanism by which computers store data in meaningful relationships, differently than do computer scientists. While computer scientists recognize that data structures have aspects that are both physical (how they are stored in memory) and logical (the relationships among the stored information), the Federal Circuit, in its attempts to set clear standards of the scope of patentability of data structures, has not fully appreciated their dualistic nature. This i-brief explains what data structures are, explores how courts have wrestled with setting a limiting principle to determine their patentability, and discusses the resultant impact on claim drafting
JGraphT -- A Java library for graph data structures and algorithms
Mathematical software and graph-theoretical algorithmic packages to
efficiently model, analyze and query graphs are crucial in an era where
large-scale spatial, societal and economic network data are abundantly
available. One such package is JGraphT, a programming library which contains
very efficient and generic graph data-structures along with a large collection
of state-of-the-art algorithms. The library is written in Java with stability,
interoperability and performance in mind. A distinctive feature of this library
is the ability to model vertices and edges as arbitrary objects, thereby
permitting natural representations of many common networks including
transportation, social and biological networks. Besides classic graph
algorithms such as shortest-paths and spanning-tree algorithms, the library
contains numerous advanced algorithms: graph and subgraph isomorphism; matching
and flow problems; approximation algorithms for NP-hard problems such as
independent set and TSP; and several more exotic algorithms such as Berge graph
detection. Due to its versatility and generic design, JGraphT is currently used
in large-scale commercial, non-commercial and academic research projects. In
this work we describe in detail the design and underlying structure of the
library, and discuss its most important features and algorithms. A
computational study is conducted to evaluate the performance of JGraphT versus
a number of similar libraries. Experiments on a large number of graphs over a
variety of popular algorithms show that JGraphT is highly competitive with
other established libraries such as NetworkX or the BGL.Comment: Major Revisio
A storage and access architecture for efficient query processing in spatial database systems
Due to the high complexity of objects and queries and also due to extremely
large data volumes, geographic database systems impose stringent requirements on their
storage and access architecture with respect to efficient query processing. Performance
improving concepts such as spatial storage and access structures, approximations, object
decompositions and multi-phase query processing have been suggested and analyzed as
single building blocks. In this paper, we describe a storage and access architecture which
is composed from the above building blocks in a modular fashion. Additionally, we incorporate
into our architecture a new ingredient, the scene organization, for efficiently
supporting set-oriented access of large-area region queries. An experimental performance
comparison demonstrates that the concept of scene organization leads to considerable
performance improvements for large-area region queries by a factor of up to 150
Causal Dependence Tree Approximations of Joint Distributions for Multiple Random Processes
We investigate approximating joint distributions of random processes with
causal dependence tree distributions. Such distributions are particularly
useful in providing parsimonious representation when there exists causal
dynamics among processes. By extending the results by Chow and Liu on
dependence tree approximations, we show that the best causal dependence tree
approximation is the one which maximizes the sum of directed informations on
its edges, where best is defined in terms of minimizing the KL-divergence
between the original and the approximate distribution. Moreover, we describe a
low-complexity algorithm to efficiently pick this approximate distribution.Comment: 9 pages, 15 figure
- …