Extending Nunchaku to Dependent Type Theory

Nunchaku is a new higher-order counterexample generator based on a sequence of transformations from polymorphic higher-order logic to first-order logic. Unlike its predecessor Nitpick for Isabelle, it is designed as a stand-alone tool, with frontends for various proof assistants. In this short paper, we present some ideas to extend Nunchaku with partial support for dependent types and type classes, to make frontends for Coq and other systems based on dependent type theory more useful.Comment: In Proceedings HaTT 2016, arXiv:1606.0542

National innovation systems, developing countries, and the role of intermediaries: a critical review of the literature

Developed over the past three decades, the national innovation system concept (NIS) has been widely used by both scholars and policy makers to explain how interactions between a set of distinct, nationally bounded institutions supports and facilitates technological change and the emergence and diffusion of new innovations. This concept provides a framework by which developing countries can adopt for purposes of catching up. Initially conceived on structures and interactions identified in economically advanced countries, the application of the NIS concept to developing countries has been gradual and has coincided – in the NIS literature – with a move away from overly macro-interpretations to an emphasis on micro-level interactions and processes, with much of this work questioning the nation state as the most appropriate level of analysis, as well as the emergence of certain intermediary actors thought to facilitate knowledge exchange between actors and institutions. This paper reviews the NIS literature chronologically, showing how this shift in emphasis has diminished somewhat the importance of both institutions, particularly governments, and the process of institutional capacity building. In doing so, the paper suggests that more recent literature on intermediaries such as industry associations may offer valuable insights to how institutional capacity building occurs and how it might be directed, particularly in the context of developing countries where governance capacities are often lacking, contributing to less effective innovation systems, stagnant economies, and unequal development

Raising new opportunities for the Next Economy by exploring variable user needs for Computational Co-Design

Digital Fabrication promises to revolutionize manufacturing, bringing both economic, social and environmental benefits. Combined with Computational CoDesign it can raise the creative potential of both designers and users. However, today the productive use of Digital Fabrication and Computational Design requires significant effort and specialised know-how, so valorising these practices calls for the identification of the application fields that benefit the most from them. This paper presents a tool for helping the discovery of design opportunities across comprehensive, ramified lists of product categories, where designers can identify possible points of intervention. The web-based tool allows the rapid evaluation of numerous product categories according to an extendable set of factors and inspiring questions related to the necessity of personalization, aiming to stimulate designers to consider unexpected frontiers of innovation. Beyond the scope of the research project, this tool has the potential to assist designers in finding applications also for other emerging technologies in a structured and scalable wa

A maastrichti deficitmutató a globális válság időszakában = The Maastricht deficit index in the era of global crisis

A globális válságot megelőzően a gazdaságpolitikai viták középpontjában világszerte a költségvetési fegyelem állt. Úgy tűnt, hogy konzervatív fiskális politika mellett elkerülhetőek a „nagy” válságok, az volt az uralkodó vélemény, hogy a folyófizetési mérleg-hiánynak csak annyiban van jelentősége, amennyiben az a kormányzati szektor hiányára vezethető vissza (Lámfalussy [2008]). Az írás öt olyan válságot vizsgál, amely az Európai Unión belül bontakozott ki. A lett, a svéd, a lengyel, a magyar és a francia gazdaság jól példázza, hogy a korábban alulértékelt kockázatok milyen nagy intenzitással tudnak a felszínre törni. Az értekezés öt fő következtetést von le: ad1) Az öt ország közül a költségvetés felelőtlen gazdálkodása csupán egy esetben (magyar példa) volt a válság magja. Elsősorban a magánszektor túlzott eladósodása és a felelőtlen hitelezés felelt a krízis kibontakozásáért. A folyamatban főszerepet játszott a pénzügyi hatóság elégtelen működése. ad2) A globális válság kialakulását megelőzően a gazdaság túlhevülése kedvezőbb költségvetési helyzetet idézett elő. A külső sokk hatására a reálgazdaság többnyire komoly recesszióba süllyedt, ami nagymértékben közrejátszott a fiskális fegyelem elvesztésében. ad3) Nem csupán a felelőtlen hazai hitelezés jelentette a problémák forrását, hanem a hazai kereskedelmi bankok nagyarányú kitettsége a sérülékeny régiók irányába. A globalizáció folyamatával áll összefüggésbe, hogy jelentős volt a válsággal sújtott országok száma, ami a későbbiekben beszűkítette a gazdaságpolitika lehetőségeit (Blanchard-Leigh [2013]). A kockázatok csökkentéséhez hozzájárul a nemzeti pénzügyi hatóságok tevékenységének jobb összehangolása. ad4) A krízisek a piacgazdaság szükséges velejárói (Lámfalussy [2008]). A 2008-as külső sokk előtt a kormányzati erőfeszítések túlzottan is a válságok megelőzésére összpontosítottak, így elveszett a „valós árazás” az üzleti szereplők körében. Ez a viselkedés vezetett el végül a világméretű válsághoz (Rostowski [2010]). ad5) A maastrichti deficitkritérium (illetve általában a fiskális előírások) huzamosabb ideig abba a hitbe ringatták a befektetőket, nincs különösebb ok aggodalomra a pénzügyek területén, hogy azután még nagyobb legyen a kiábrándultság: ez a fejlemény azonban nem feltétlenül jelenti a maastrichti deficitkritérium költség-haszon mérlegének negativitását vagy a jövőben negatív tartományba billenését. A külső sokk után a nemzeti és az uniós gazdaságpolitikai alakítók is élénkebb figyelemmel kísérik a költségvetési folyamatok mellett az egyéb makrogazdasági indikátorokat, illetőleg a pénzügyi szféra szabályozását. A hipotézisek közül a legfontosabbnak az értekezés annak a bizonyítását tekintette, hogy a gazdaságpolitika alakítóinak a fiskális folyamatok és az azokat leképező fiskális mutatók mellett az egyéb makrogazdasági indikátorokat, illetve a pénzügyi szféra szabályozását is élénk figyelemmel kell kísérniük. A gazdaságpolitika megítélése nagyon komplex feladat, a kockázatok értékelése számos problémát vet fel. De még ha ez a feladat sikeresen is megvalósítható, jóvátehetetlenül kevésnek bizonyul, amennyiben a nemzeti hatóságok nem rendelkeznek megfelelő szintű felelősségérzettel

Higher-order Program Verification as Satisfiability Modulo Theories with Algebraic Data-types

We report on work in progress on automatic procedures for proving properties of programs written in higher-order functional languages. Our approach encodes higher-order programs directly as first-order SMT problems over Horn clauses. It is straight-forward to reduce Hoare-style verification of first-order programs into satisfiability of Horn clauses. The presence of closures offers several challenges: relatively complete proof systems have to account for closures; and in practice, the effectiveness of search procedures depend on encoding strategies and capabilities of underlying solvers. We here use algebraic data-types to encode closures and rely on solvers that support algebraic data-types. The viability of the approach is examined using examples from the literature on higher-order program verification

Bank Supervision Russian style: Rules versus Enforcement and Tacit Objectives

We focus on the conflict between two central bank objectives, namely individual bank stability and systemic stability. We study the licensing policy of the Central Bank of Russia (CBR) in 1999-2002. Banks in poorly banked regions, banks that are too big to be disciplined adequately and banks that are active on the interbank market enjoy protection from license withdrawal, showing a tacit concern for systemic stability. The CBR is also reluctant to withdraw licenses from banks that violate the individuals’ deposits to capital ratio, because this conflicts with the tacit CBR objective to secure depositor trust and systemic stability.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/40164/3/wp778.pd

Rotation Invariance and Extensive Data Augmentation: A Strategy for the MItosis DOmain Generalization (MIDOG) Challenge

Automated detection of mitotic figures in histopathology images is a challenging task: here, we present the different steps that describe the strategy we applied to participate in the MIDOG 2021 competition. The purpose of the competition was to evaluate the generalization of solutions to images acquired with unseen target scanners (hidden for the participants) under the constraint of using training data from a limited set of four independent source scanners. Given this goal and constraints, we joined the challenge by proposing a straight-forward solution based on a combination of state-of-the-art deep learning methods with the aim of yielding robustness to possible scanner-related distributional shifts at inference time. Our solution combines methods that were previously shown to be efficient for mitosis detection: hard negative mining, extensive data augmentation, rotation-invariant convolutional networks. We trained five models with different splits of the provided dataset. The subsequent classifiers produced F1-score with a mean and standard deviation of 0.747±0.032 on the test splits. The resulting ensemble constitutes our candidate algorithm: its automated evaluation on the preliminary test set of the challenge returned a F1-score of 0.6828

Applications, tools and techniques on the road to exascale computing

This volume of the book series “Advances in Parallel Computing” contains the proceedings of ParCo2011, the 14th biennial ParCo Conference, held from 31 August to 3 September 2011, in Ghent, Belgium. In an era when physical limitations have slowed down advances in the performance of single processing units, and new scientific challenges require exascale speed, parallel processing has gained momentum as a key gateway to HPC (High Performance Computing). Historically, the ParCo conferences have focused on three main themes: Algorithms, Architectures (both hardware and software) and Applications. Nowadays, the scenery has changed from traditional multiprocessor topologies to heterogeneous manycores, incorporating standard CPUs, GPUs (Graphics Processing Units) and FPGAs (Field Programmable Gate Arrays). These platforms are, at a higher abstraction level, integrated in clusters, grids, and clouds. This is reflected in the papers presented at the conference and the contributions as included in these proceedings. An increasing number of new algorithms are optimized for heterogeneous platforms and performance tuning is targeting extreme scale computing. Heterogeneous platforms utilising the compute power and energy efficiency of GPGPUs (General Purpose GPUs) are clearly becoming mainstream HPC systems for a large number of applications in a wide spectrum of application areas. These systems excel in areas such as complex system simulation, real-time image processing and visualisation, etc. High performance computing accelerators may well become the cornerstone of exascale computing applications such as 3-D turbulent combustion flows, nuclear energy simulations, brain research, financial and geophysical modelling. The exploration of new architectures, programming tools and techniques was evidenced by the mini-symposia “Parallel Computing with FPGAs” and “Exascale Programming Models”. The need for exascale hardware and software was also stressed in the industrial session, with contributions from Cray and the European exascale software initiative. Our sincere appreciation goes to the keynote speakers who gave their perspectives on the impact of parallel computing today and the road to exascale computing tomorrow. Our heartfelt thanks go to the authors for their valuable scientific contributions and to the programme committee who reviewed the papers and provided constructive remarks. The international audience was inspired by the quality of the presentations. The attendance and interaction was high and the conference has been an agora where many fruitful ideas were exchanged and explored. We wish to express our sincere thanks to the organizers for the smooth operation of the conference. The University conference centre Het Pand offered an excellent environment for the conference as it allowed delegates to interact informally and easily. A special word of thanks is due to the management and support staff of Het Pand for their proficient and friendly support. The organizers managed to put together an extensive social programme. This included a reception at the medieval Town Hall of Ghent as well as a memorable conference dinner. These social events stimulated interaction amongst delegates and resulted in many new contacts being made. Finally we wish to thank all the many supporters who assisted in the organization and successful running of the event. Erik D'Hollander, Ghent University, Belgium Koen De Bosschere, Ghent University, Belgium Gerhard R. Joubert, TU Clausthal, Germany David Padua, University of Illinois, USA Frans Peters, Philips Research, Netherland