Fundamentals of Java Programming

This book was born from the desire of having an introductory Java programming textbook whose contents can be covered in one semester. The book was written with two types of audience in mind: those who intend to major in computer science and those who want to get a glimpse of computer programming. The book does not cover graphical user interfaces or the materials that are taught in a data structure course. The book very quickly surveys the Java Collection Framework and the generics in the penultimate chapter. The book also covers the concepts of online and recursive algorithms in the last chapter. The instructors who choose to use this textbook are free to skip these chapters if there is no sufficient time. Except for the code examples that receive parameters from the command line, the code examples can be compiled and run in a command-line environment as well as in IDEs. To execute those code examples in an IDE, the user must follow the step of provide args before execution. The code examples appearing in the book have very few comments, since the actions of the code are explained in the prose. The code examples with extensive comments are available for the publisher. There are PDF lecture slides accompanying the book. They are prepared using the Beamer environment of LATEX. The source codes of the lecture slides may be available through the publisher

NextOne Player: A Music Recommendation System Based on User Behavior.

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Foreword: a Commemorative Issue for Alan L. Selman

Alan L. Selman (1941 - 2021) was a former Editor-in-Chief of the journal Theory of Computing Systems. To commemorate his extraordinary contributions to theoretical computer science, we solicited papers from the theory community. Nine groups responded to the call, which we present in this issue..

Generalized Predecessor Existence Problems for Boolean Finite Dynamical Systems

A Boolean Finite Synchronous Dynamical System (BFDS, for short) consists of a finite number of objects that each maintains a boolean state, where after individually receiving state assignments, the objects update their state with respect to object-specific time-independent boolean functions synchronously in discrete time steps. The present paper studies the computational complexity of determining, given a boolean finite synchronous dynamical system, a configuration, which is a boolean vector representing the states of the objects, and a positive integer t, whether there exists another configuration from which the given configuration can be reached in t steps. It was previously shown that this problem, which we call the t-Predecessor Problem, is NP-complete even for t = 1 if the update function of an object is either the conjunction of arbitrary fan-in or the disjunction of arbitrary fan-in. This paper studies the computational complexity of the t-Predecessor Problem for a variety of sets of permissible update functions as well as for polynomially bounded t. It also studies the t-Garden-Of-Eden Problem, a variant of the t-Predecessor Problem that asks whether a configuration has a t-predecessor, which itself has no predecessor. The paper obtains complexity theoretical characterizations of all but one of these problems

Reducing the Number of Solutions of NP Functions

AbstractWe study whether one can prune solutions from NP functions. Though it is known that, unless surprising complexity class collapses occur, one cannot reduce the number of accepting paths of NP machines, we nonetheless show that it often is possible to reduce the number of solutions of NP functions. For finite cardinality types, we give a sufficient condition for such solution reduction. We also give absolute and conditional necessary conditions for solution reduction, and in particular we show that in many cases solution reduction is impossible unless the polynomial hierarchy collapses

Detecting Emotion in Music

Detection of emotion in music sounds is an important problem in music indexing. This paper studies the problem of identifying emotion in music by sound signal processing. The problem is cast as a multiclass classification problem, decomposed as a multiple binary classification problem, and is resolved with the use of Support Vector Machines trained on the timbral textures, rhythmic contents, and pitch contents extracted from the sound data. Experiments were carried out on a data set consisting of 499 30-second long music sounds over ambient, classical, fusion, and jazz. Classification into the ten adjective groups of Farnsworth (plus three additional groups) as well as classification into six supergroups that are formed by combining these basic groups was attempted. For some groups and supergroups reasonably accurate performance was achieved

On Efficient Range-Summability of IID Random Variables in Two or Higher Dimensions

d-dimensional (for d > 1) efficient range-summability (dD-ERS) of random variables (RVs) is a fundamental algorithmic problem that has applications to two important families of database problems, namely, fast approximate wavelet tracking (FAWT) on data streams and approximately answering range-sum queries over a data cube. Whether there are efficient solutions to the dD-ERS problem, or to the latter database problem, have been two long-standing open problems. Both are solved in this work. Specifically, we propose a novel solution framework to dD-ERS on RVs that have Gaussian or Poisson distribution. Our dD-ERS solutions are the first ones that have polylogarithmic time complexities. Furthermore, we develop a novel k-wise independence theory that allows our dD-ERS solutions to have both high computational efficiencies and strong provable independence guarantees. Finally, we show that under a sufficient and likely necessary condition, certain existing solutions for 1D-ERS can be generalized to higher dimensions