278,372 research outputs found
Basis Token Consistency: A Practical Mechanism for Strong Web Cache Consistency
With web caching and cache-related services like CDNs and edge services playing an increasingly significant role in the modern internet, the problem of the weak consistency and coherence provisions in current web protocols is becoming increasingly significant and drawing the attention of the standards community [LCD01]. Toward this end, we present definitions of consistency and coherence for web-like environments, that is, distributed client-server information systems where the semantics of interactions with resource are more general than the read/write operations found in memory hierarchies and distributed file systems. We then present a brief review of proposed mechanisms which strengthen the consistency of caches in the web, focusing upon their conceptual contributions and their weaknesses in real-world practice. These insights motivate a new mechanism, which we call "Basis Token Consistency" or BTC; when implemented at the server, this mechanism allows any client (independent of the presence and conformity of any intermediaries) to maintain a self-consistent view of the server's state. This is accomplished by annotating responses with additional per-resource application information which allows client caches to recognize the obsolescence of currently cached entities and identify responses from other caches which are already stale in light of what has already been seen. The mechanism requires no deviation from the existing client-server communication model, and does not require servers to maintain any additional per-client state. We discuss how our mechanism could be integrated into a fragment-assembling Content Management System (CMS), and present a simulation-driven performance comparison between the BTC algorithm and the use of the Time-To-Live (TTL) heuristic.National Science Foundation (ANI-9986397, ANI-0095988
Raising the visibility of protected data: A pilot data catalog project
Sharing research data that is protected for legal, regulatory, or contractual reasons can be challenging and current mechanisms for doing so may act as barriers to researchers and discourage data sharing. Additionally, the infrastructure commonly used for open data repositories does not easily support responsible sharing of protected data. This chapter presents a case study of an academic university libraryās work to configure the existing institutional data repository to function as a data catalog. By engaging in this project, university librarians strive to enhance visibility and access to protected datasets produced at the institution and cultivate a data sharing culture
Convergence: How Five Trends Will Reshape the Social Sector
This report highlights five key trends and how their coming together will shape the social sector of the future. Based on extensive review of existing research and in-depth interviews with thought leaders and nonprofit leaders and activists, it explores the trends (Demographic Shifts; Technological Advances; Networks Enabling Work to be Organized in New Ways; Rising Interest in Civic Engagement and Volunteerism; and Blurring of Sector Boundaries) and looks at the ways nonprofits can successfully navigate the changes. The monograph is by La Piana Consulting, a national firm dedicated to strengthening nonprofits and foundations
Next Generation Teaching and Learning ??? Technologies and Trends
The landscape of teaching and learning has been radically shifted
in the last 15 years by the advent of web technologies, which
enabled the emergence of Learning Management Systems (LMS).
These systems changed the educational paradigm by extending the
classroom borders, capturing and persisting course content and
giving instructors more flexibility and access to students and other
resources. However, they also constrained and limited the
evolution of teaching and learning by imposing a traditional,
instructional framework. With the advent of Web 2.0
technologies, participation and collaboration have become
predominant experiences on the Web. The teaching and learning
community, as a whole, has been late to capitalize on these
technologies in the classroom. Part of this trend is due to
constraints in the technology (LMS), and part is due to the fact
that participatory media tools require an additional shift in
educational paradigms, from instructional, on-the-pulpit type of
teaching, to a student-centered, adaptive environment where
students can contribute to the course material and learn from one
another. This panel will discuss the next generation of teaching
and learning, involving more lightweight, modular systems to
empower instructors to be flexible, explore new student-centered
paradigms, and plug and play tools as needed. We will also
discuss how the iSchools are and should be increasingly involved
in studying these new forms, formulating best practices and
supporting the needs of teachers as they move toward more
collaborative learning environments
Synthetic sequence generator for recommender systems - memory biased random walk on sequence multilayer network
Personalized recommender systems rely on each user's personal usage data in
the system, in order to assist in decision making. However, privacy policies
protecting users' rights prevent these highly personal data from being publicly
available to a wider researcher audience. In this work, we propose a memory
biased random walk model on multilayer sequence network, as a generator of
synthetic sequential data for recommender systems. We demonstrate the
applicability of the synthetic data in training recommender system models for
cases when privacy policies restrict clickstream publishing.Comment: The new updated version of the pape
Evolving collective behavior in an artificial ecology
Collective behavior refers to coordinated group motion, common to many animals. The dynamics of a group can be seen as a distributed model, each āanimalā applying the same rule set. This study investigates the use of evolved sensory controllers to produce schooling behavior. A set of artificial creatures āliveā in an artificial world with hazards and food. Each creature has a simple artificial neural network brain that controls movement in different situations. A chromosome encodes the network structure and weights, which may be combined using artificial evolution with another chromosome, if a creature should choose to mate. Prey and predators coevolve without an explicit fitness function for schooling to produce sophisticated, nondeterministic, behavior. The work highlights the role of speciesā physiology in understanding behavior and the role of the environment in encouraging the development of sensory systems
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