Introduction to the special section on dependable network computing

Dependable network computing is becoming a key part of our daily economic and social life. Every day, millions of users and businesses are utilizing the Internet infrastructure for real-time electronic commerce transactions, scheduling important events, and building relationships. While network traffic and the number of users are rapidly growing, the mean-time between failures (MTTF) is surprisingly short; according to recent studies, in the majority of Internet backbone paths, the MTTF is 28 days. This leads to a strong requirement for highly dependable networks, servers, and software systems. The challenge is to build interconnected systems, based on available technology, that are inexpensive, accessible, scalable, and dependable. This special section provides insights into a number of these exciting challenges

Control aspects of the Schuchuli Village stand-alone photovoltaic power system

A photovoltaic power system in an Arizona Indian village was installed. The control subsystem of this photovoltaic power system was analyzed. The four major functions of the control subsystem are: (1) voltage regulation; (2) load management; (3) water pump control; and (4) system protection. The control subsystem functions flowcharts for the control subsystem operation, and a computer program that models the control subsystem are presented

MAGE: Nearly Zero-Cost Virtual Memory for Secure Computation

Secure Computation (SC) is a family of cryptographic primitives for computing on encrypted data in single-party and multi-party settings. SC is being increasingly adopted by industry for a variety of applications. A significant obstacle to using SC for practical applications is the memory overhead of the underlying cryptography. We develop MAGE, an execution engine for SC that efficiently runs SC computations that do not fit in memory. We observe that, due to their intended security guarantees, SC schemes are inherently oblivious -- their memory access patterns are independent of the input data. Using this property, MAGE calculates the memory access pattern ahead of time and uses it to produce a memory management plan. This formulation of memory management, which we call memory programming, is a generalization of paging that allows MAGE to provide a highly efficient virtual memory abstraction for SC. MAGE outperforms the OS virtual memory system by up to an order of magnitude, and in many cases, runs SC computations that do not fit in memory at nearly the same speed as if the underlying machines had unbounded physical memory to fit the entire computation.Comment: 19 pages; Accepted to OSDI 202

Research on the Central Auditory Mechanisms : Some Recent Methods and Results

Author Institution: University of Rocheste

Degenerations of ideal hyperbolic triangulations

Let M be a cusped 3-manifold, and let T be an ideal triangulation of M. The deformation variety D(T), a subset of which parameterises (incomplete) hyperbolic structures obtained on M using T, is defined and compactified by adding certain projective classes of transversely measured singular codimension-one foliations of M. This leads to a combinatorial and geometric variant of well-known constructions by Culler, Morgan and Shalen concerning the character variety of a 3-manifold.Comment: 31 pages, 11 figures; minor changes; to appear in Mathematische Zeitschrif

SnapLink: Fast and Accurate Vision-Based Appliance Control in Large Commercial Buildings

As the number and heterogeneity of appliances in smart buildings increases, identifying and controlling them becomes challenging. Existing methods face various challenges when deployed in large commercial buildings. For example, voice command assistants require users to memorize many control commands. Attaching Bluetooth dongles or QR codes to appliances introduces considerable deployment overhead. In comparison, identifying an appliance by simply pointing a smartphone camera at it and controlling the appliance using a graphical overlay interface is more intuitive. We introduce SnapLink, a responsive and accurate vision-based system for mobile appliance identification and interaction using image localization. Compared to the image retrieval approaches used in previous vision-based appliance control systems, SnapLink exploits 3D models to improve identification accuracy and reduce deployment overhead via quick video captures and a simplified labeling process. We also introduce a feature sub-sampling mechanism to achieve low latency at the scale of a commercial building. To evaluate SnapLink, we collected training videos from 39 rooms to represent the scale of a modern commercial building. It achieves a 94% successful appliance identification rate among 1526 test images of 179 appliances within 120 ms average server processing time. Furthermore, we show that SnapLink is robust to viewing angle and distance differences, illumination changes, as well as daily changes in the environment. We believe the SnapLink use case is not limited to appliance control: it has the potential to enable various new smart building applications.</jats:p

The pre-WDVV ring of physics and its topology

We show how a simplicial complex arising from the WDVV (Witten-Dijkgraaf-Verlinde-Verlinde) equations of string theory is the Whitehouse complex. Using discrete Morse theory, we give an elementary proof that the Whitehouse complex $\Delta_n$ is homotopy equivalent to a wedge of $(n-2)!$ spheres of dimension $n-4$. We also verify the Cohen-Macaulay property. Additionally, recurrences are given for the face enumeration of the complex and the Hilbert series of the associated pre-WDVV ring.Comment: 13 pages, 4 figures, 2 table