237 research outputs found
Soft Contract Verification
Behavioral software contracts are a widely used mechanism for governing the
flow of values between components. However, run-time monitoring and enforcement
of contracts imposes significant overhead and delays discovery of faulty
components to run-time.
To overcome these issues, we present soft contract verification, which aims
to statically prove either complete or partial contract correctness of
components, written in an untyped, higher-order language with first-class
contracts. Our approach uses higher-order symbolic execution, leveraging
contracts as a source of symbolic values including unknown behavioral values,
and employs an updatable heap of contract invariants to reason about
flow-sensitive facts. We prove the symbolic execution soundly approximates the
dynamic semantics and that verified programs can't be blamed.
The approach is able to analyze first-class contracts, recursive data
structures, unknown functions, and control-flow-sensitive refinements of
values, which are all idiomatic in dynamic languages. It makes effective use of
an off-the-shelf solver to decide problems without heavy encodings. The
approach is competitive with a wide range of existing tools---including type
systems, flow analyzers, and model checkers---on their own benchmarks.Comment: ICFP '14, September 1-6, 2014, Gothenburg, Swede
Size-Change Termination as a Contract
Termination is an important but undecidable program property, which has led
to a large body of work on static methods for conservatively predicting or
enforcing termination. One such method is the size-change termination approach
of Lee, Jones, and Ben-Amram, which operates in two phases: (1) abstract
programs into "size-change graphs," and (2) check these graphs for the
size-change property: the existence of paths that lead to infinite decreasing
sequences.
We transpose these two phases with an operational semantics that accounts for
the run-time enforcement of the size-change property, postponing (or entirely
avoiding) program abstraction. This choice has two key consequences: (1)
size-change termination can be checked at run-time and (2) termination can be
rephrased as a safety property analyzed using existing methods for systematic
abstraction.
We formulate run-time size-change checks as contracts in the style of Findler
and Felleisen. The result compliments existing contracts that enforce partial
correctness specifications to obtain contracts for total correctness. Our
approach combines the robustness of the size-change principle for termination
with the precise information available at run-time. It has tunable overhead and
can check for nontermination without the conservativeness necessary in static
checking. To obtain a sound and computable termination analysis, we apply
existing abstract interpretation techniques directly to the operational
semantics, avoiding the need for custom abstractions for termination. The
resulting analyzer is competitive with with existing, purpose-built analyzers
Effects of thermal and quantum fluctuations on the phase diagram of a spin-1 87Rb Bose-Einstein condensate
We investigate effects of thermal and quantum fluctuations on the phase
diagram of a spin-1 87Rb Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) under a quadratic
Zeeman effect. Due to the large ratio of spinindependent to spin-dependent
interactions of 87Rb atoms, the effect of noncondensed atoms on the condensate
is much more significant than that in scalar BECs. We find that the condensate
and spontaneous magnetization emerge at different temperatures when the ground
state is in the brokenaxisymmetry phase. In this phase, a magnetized condensate
induces spin coherence of noncondensed atoms in different magnetic sublevels,
resulting in temperature-dependent magnetization of the noncondensate. We also
examine the effect of quantum fluctuations on the order parameter at absolute
zero, and find that the ground-state phase diagram is significantly altered by
quantum depletion.Comment: Comment: 21 pages, 7 figures Comment: 20 pages, 7 figures, paper
reconstructed, nomenclature changed, references added, grammatical errors
correcte
LARES Satellite Thermal Forces and a Test of General Relativity
We summarize a laser-ranged satellite test of frame-dragging, a prediction of
General Relativity, and then concentrate on the estimate of thermal thrust, an
important perturbation affecting the accuracy of the test. The frame dragging
study analysed 3.5 years of data from the LARES satellite and a longer period
of time for the two LAGEOS satellites. Using the gravity field GGM05S obtained
via the Grace mission, which measures the Earth's gravitational field, the
prediction of General Relativity is confirmed with a 1- formal error of
0.002, and a systematic error of 0.05. The result for the value of the frame
dragging around the Earth is = 0.994, compared to = 1 predicted by
General Relativity. The thermal force model assumes heat flow from the sun
(visual) and from Earth (IR) to the satellite core and to the fused silica
reflectors on the satellite, and reradiation into space. For a roughly current
epoch (days 1460 - 1580 after launch) we calculate an average along-track drag
of -0.50 .Comment: 6 pages, multiple figures in Proceedings of Metrology for Aerospace
(MetroAeroSpace), 2016 IEE
TextANIMAR: Text-based 3D Animal Fine-Grained Retrieval
3D object retrieval is an important yet challenging task, which has drawn
more and more attention in recent years. While existing approaches have made
strides in addressing this issue, they are often limited to restricted settings
such as image and sketch queries, which are often unfriendly interactions for
common users. In order to overcome these limitations, this paper presents a
novel SHREC challenge track focusing on text-based fine-grained retrieval of 3D
animal models. Unlike previous SHREC challenge tracks, the proposed task is
considerably more challenging, requiring participants to develop innovative
approaches to tackle the problem of text-based retrieval. Despite the increased
difficulty, we believe that this task has the potential to drive useful
applications in practice and facilitate more intuitive interactions with 3D
objects. Five groups participated in our competition, submitting a total of 114
runs. While the results obtained in our competition are satisfactory, we note
that the challenges presented by this task are far from being fully solved. As
such, we provide insights into potential areas for future research and
improvements. We believe that we can help push the boundaries of 3D object
retrieval and facilitate more user-friendly interactions via vision-language
technologies.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2304.0573
Lack of knowledge about sexually transmitted infections among women in North rural Vietnam
<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>The serious long-term complications of sexually transmitted infections (STI) in women and newborns are well-documented. Particularly, STI imply considerable social consequences for women. Low STI knowledge has been shown to be associated with unsafe sex. In Vietnam, misconceptions regarding STI exist, and rural women delay seeking care for STI. The aim of the study was to investigate knowledge of STI among women aged 15 to 49 years in a rural district of Vietnam and to evaluate possible associations between socioeconomic factors and STI knowledge.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>A cross-sectional population-based study using face-to-face interviews was carried out between March and May 2006 in a demographic surveillance site in rural Vietnam. In total, 1805 women aged 15–49 years were randomly selected to participate in the study. The interviews were based on a structured questionnaire including questions on sociodemographic characteristics of the women and their knowledge about STI. Each correct answer was scored 1, incorrect or do not know answer was scored 0. Multivariate analyses were applied to examine associations between socio-economic conditions and STI knowledge. Intra-cluster correlation was calculated to examine similarities of STI knowledge within clusters.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Of the 1,805 respondents, 78% (73% married vs. 93% unmarried, p < 0.001) did not know any symptoms of STI, 50% could not identify any cause of STI, 59% (54% married vs. 76% unmarried, p < 0.001) did not know that STI can be prevented. Only 31% of the respondents (36% married vs. 14% unmarried, p < 0.001) answered that condom use could protect against STI, and 56% considered partner treatment necessary. Of 40 possible correct answers, the mean knowledge score was 6.5 (range 0–26, median 6). Young, unmarried women and women who lived in the highlands or mountainous areas demonstrated very low levels of STI knowledge (regression coefficients -1.3 and -2.5, respectively, p < 0.001). Experience of an induced abortion was significantly associated with a higher level of knowledge.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>The low levels of STI knowledge found among women of reproductive age in a rural district of Vietnam indicate an urgent need of health education interventions, of which, young and unmarried women should be specifically targeted.</p
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