224 research outputs found
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On the effectiveness of run-time checks
Run-time checks are often assumed to be a cost-effective way of improving the dependability of software components, by checking required properties of their outputs and flagging an output as incorrect if it fails the check. However, evaluating how effective they are going to be in a future application is difficult, since the effectiveness of a check depends on the unknown faults of the program to which it is applied. A programming contest, providing thousands of programs written to the same specifications, gives us the opportunity to systematically test run-time checks to observe statistics of their effects on actual programs. In these examples, run-time checks turn out to be most effective for unreliable programs. For more reliable programs, the benefit is relatively low as compared to the gain that can be achieved by other (more expensive) measures, most notably multiple-version diversity
When Can You Fold a Map?
We explore the following problem: given a collection of creases on a piece of
paper, each assigned a folding direction of mountain or valley, is there a flat
folding by a sequence of simple folds? There are several models of simple
folds; the simplest one-layer simple fold rotates a portion of paper about a
crease in the paper by +-180 degrees. We first consider the analogous questions
in one dimension lower -- bending a segment into a flat object -- which lead to
interesting problems on strings. We develop efficient algorithms for the
recognition of simply foldable 1D crease patterns, and reconstruction of a
sequence of simple folds. Indeed, we prove that a 1D crease pattern is
flat-foldable by any means precisely if it is by a sequence of one-layer simple
folds.
Next we explore simple foldability in two dimensions, and find a surprising
contrast: ``map'' folding and variants are polynomial, but slight
generalizations are NP-complete. Specifically, we develop a linear-time
algorithm for deciding foldability of an orthogonal crease pattern on a
rectangular piece of paper, and prove that it is (weakly) NP-complete to decide
foldability of (1) an orthogonal crease pattern on a orthogonal piece of paper,
(2) a crease pattern of axis-parallel and diagonal (45-degree) creases on a
square piece of paper, and (3) crease patterns without a mountain/valley
assignment.Comment: 24 pages, 19 figures. Version 3 includes several improvements thanks
to referees, including formal definitions of simple folds, more figures,
table summarizing results, new open problems, and additional reference
Numerical Investigation of Graph Spectra and Information Interpretability of Eigenvalues
We undertake an extensive numerical investigation of the graph spectra of
thousands regular graphs, a set of random Erd\"os-R\'enyi graphs, the two most
popular types of complex networks and an evolving genetic network by using
novel conceptual and experimental tools. Our objective in so doing is to
contribute to an understanding of the meaning of the Eigenvalues of a graph
relative to its topological and information-theoretic properties. We introduce
a technique for identifying the most informative Eigenvalues of evolving
networks by comparing graph spectra behavior to their algorithmic complexity.
We suggest that extending techniques can be used to further investigate the
behavior of evolving biological networks. In the extended version of this paper
we apply these techniques to seven tissue specific regulatory networks as
static example and network of a na\"ive pluripotent immune cell in the process
of differentiating towards a Th17 cell as evolving example, finding the most
and least informative Eigenvalues at every stage.Comment: Forthcoming in 3rd International Work-Conference on Bioinformatics
and Biomedical Engineering (IWBBIO), Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics, 201
Analysis of airplane boarding via space-time geometry and random matrix theory
We show that airplane boarding can be asymptotically modeled by 2-dimensional
Lorentzian geometry. Boarding time is given by the maximal proper time among
curves in the model. Discrepancies between the model and simulation results are
closely related to random matrix theory. We then show how such models can be
used to explain why some commonly practiced airline boarding policies are
ineffective and even detrimental.Comment: 4 page
Generating Abstractive Summaries from Meeting Transcripts
Summaries of meetings are very important as they convey the essential content
of discussions in a concise form. Generally, it is time consuming to read and
understand the whole documents. Therefore, summaries play an important role as
the readers are interested in only the important context of discussions. In
this work, we address the task of meeting document summarization. Automatic
summarization systems on meeting conversations developed so far have been
primarily extractive, resulting in unacceptable summaries that are hard to
read. The extracted utterances contain disfluencies that affect the quality of
the extractive summaries. To make summaries much more readable, we propose an
approach to generating abstractive summaries by fusing important content from
several utterances. We first separate meeting transcripts into various topic
segments, and then identify the important utterances in each segment using a
supervised learning approach. The important utterances are then combined
together to generate a one-sentence summary. In the text generation step, the
dependency parses of the utterances in each segment are combined together to
create a directed graph. The most informative and well-formed sub-graph
obtained by integer linear programming (ILP) is selected to generate a
one-sentence summary for each topic segment. The ILP formulation reduces
disfluencies by leveraging grammatical relations that are more prominent in
non-conversational style of text, and therefore generates summaries that is
comparable to human-written abstractive summaries. Experimental results show
that our method can generate more informative summaries than the baselines. In
addition, readability assessments by human judges as well as log-likelihood
estimates obtained from the dependency parser show that our generated summaries
are significantly readable and well-formed.Comment: 10 pages, Proceedings of the 2015 ACM Symposium on Document
Engineering, DocEng' 201
The Lazy Bureaucrat Scheduling Problem
We introduce a new class of scheduling problems in which the optimization is
performed by the worker (single ``machine'') who performs the tasks. A typical
worker's objective is to minimize the amount of work he does (he is ``lazy''),
or more generally, to schedule as inefficiently (in some sense) as possible.
The worker is subject to the constraint that he must be busy when there is work
that he can do; we make this notion precise both in the preemptive and
nonpreemptive settings. The resulting class of ``perverse'' scheduling
problems, which we denote ``Lazy Bureaucrat Problems,'' gives rise to a rich
set of new questions that explore the distinction between maximization and
minimization in computing optimal schedules.Comment: 19 pages, 2 figures, Latex. To appear, Information and Computatio
Optimal Paths in Complex Networks with Correlated Weights: The World-wide Airport Network
We study complex networks with weights, , associated with each link
connecting node and . The weights are chosen to be correlated with the
network topology in the form found in two real world examples, (a) the
world-wide airport network, and (b) the {\it E. Coli} metabolic network. Here
, where and are the degrees of
nodes and , is a random number and represents the
strength of the correlations. The case represents correlation
between weights and degree, while represents anti-correlation and
the case reduces to the case of no correlations. We study the
scaling of the lengths of the optimal paths, , with the system
size in strong disorder for scale-free networks for different . We
calculate the robustness of correlated scale-free networks with different
, and find the networks with to be the most robust
networks when compared to the other values of . We propose an
analytical method to study percolation phenomena on networks with this kind of
correlation. We compare our simulation results with the real world-wide airport
network, and we find good agreement
Transport in weighted networks: Partition into superhighways and roads
Transport in weighted networks is dominated by the minimum spanning tree
(MST), the tree connecting all nodes with the minimum total weight. We find
that the MST can be partitioned into two distinct components, having
significantly different transport properties, characterized by centrality --
number of times a node (or link) is used by transport paths. One component, the
{\it superhighways}, is the infinite incipient percolation cluster; for which
we find that nodes (or links) with high centrality dominate. For the other
component, {\it roads}, which includes the remaining nodes, low centrality
nodes dominate. We find also that the distribution of the centrality for the
infinite incipient percolation cluster satisfies a power law, with an exponent
smaller than that for the entire MST. The significance of this finding is that
one can improve significantly the global transport by improving a tiny fraction
of the network, the superhighways.Comment: 12 pages, 5 figure
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