Type inference for unboxed types and first class mutability

Systems programs rely on fine-grain control of data representa-tion and use of state to achieve performance, conformance to hard-ware specification, and temporal predictability. The robustness and checkability of these programs could be greatly improved if mod-ern type systems and programming language ideas, such as poly-morphism and type inference, could be applied to these programs. BitC is a higher-order programming language in the tradition of ML and Haskell, extended to incorporate both state and the expres-sion of unboxed and low-level datatypes. State and unboxed value types interact in subtle ways with polymorphic type-inference. Un-less handled with care in the language design, interactions of these features can lead to unsoundness or results that are counter-intuitive to the programmer. Because instances of value types may have mu-table components, a decision must be made concerning their com-patibility at copy boundaries: should structurally equivalent types that differ only in their mutability be considered compatible. The choice impacts both the amount of polymorphism that the language can preserve and the burden of type annotation imposed on the pro-grammer. This paper presents some of these challenges and our design for how to address these issues

SMART INDOOR VERTICAL FARMING MONITORING USING IoT

 The population of the world is expected to reach around 9.7 billion by the end of the year 2050. Currently, around 56% of the world‟s population lives in the urban areas, putting a lot of pressure on the maintenance of the air quality and the greenery in these areas. But the issue is that there is lack of space for cultivation in urban areas where urban gardening comes into picture. Human labour is involved in traditional methods of monitoring and farming and is it is time consuming. Vertical farming is the practice of growing plants in the vertically inclined surfaces or in vertically stacked layers. Here, plants are grown in a controlled environment. The proposed system uses the concepts of artificial photosynthesis, vertical and zone-wise crops production and the Internet of Things. This increases the productivity. By using the various sensor networks, the environmental parameters can be noted. The retrieved data is stored and displayed on a customized webpage which can be accessed through mobile app. Thus, the indoor vertical farm can be monitored and controlled even without direct presence of the cultivator at the plant environment. The variations in the individual sensor‟s data with respect to time can be graphically plotted for the improved analysis and monitoring of the system. Increasing population demands increase in food production by the next decade. Internet of things is implemented in vertical and indoor farming to establish a smart way of cultivation. Basic functions like monitoring the soil moisture, temperature, humidity are performed. Artificial photosynthesis for the plants using grow-lamps and drip irrigation is implemented to maintain the urban gardens. Using GSM technology systematic alerts regarding the status of garden to the user at regular intervals of time is delivered. An android app interface is also implemented in the proposed system to remotely control the garden functioning hence enhancing the smart way of agriculture

Does Development Assistance for Health Really Displace Government Health Spending? Reassessing the Evidence

Rajaie Batniji and Eran Bendavid dispute recent suggestions that health aid to developing countries leads to a displacement of government spending and instead argue that current evidence about aid displacement cannot be used to guide policy

Electronic Voting- A Survey

As the world watched the electoral drama unfold in Florida at the end of 2000, people started wondering, “Wouldn’t all our problems be solved if they just used Internet Voting?”. People all over the world soon started taking a hard look at their voting equipment and procedures, and trying to figure out how to improve them [1]. There is a strong inclination towards moving to Remote Internet Voting – at least among the politicians – in order to enhance voter convenience, increase voter confidence and voter turnout. However, as will be seen later in this paper, there are serious technological and social aspects that make Remote Internet Voting infeasible in the visible future. Therefore, many technologists have suggested that remote poll-site electronic voting, where the voter can vote at any poll-site (not only his home county poll-site), seems to be the best step forward as it provides better voter convenience, but at the same time, does not compromise security. This paper presents a survey of the state of the art in Electronic Voting, including the various works done in Internet Voting (and the arguments against its use), as well as in electronic poll-site voting. Electronic voting refers to the use of computers or computerized voting equipment to cast ballots in an election. Sometimes, this term is used more specifically to refer to voting that take

A Poll-Free, Low-Latency Approach to Process State Capture/Recovery in Heterogeneous Computing Systems

heterogeneous computing systems is that it cannot simply be initiated instantaneously, once a request for capture has been received. This is because the capture can be initiated only at certain points -- at points which have equivalent points in the other instances of the computation on different architectures -- so that the process can be restarted at exactly the same point at which it was paused. For ensuring minimum latency, the state capture should be initiated at the very next point of equivalence encountered, once requested. At the same time, it should be ensured that the performance overhead incurred during normal execution should be kept at acceptable levels. This paper proposes a fundamentally new approach to process state capture and recovery which achieves the above objectives

Hdtrans: A low-overhead dynamic translator

Dynamic translation is a general purpose tool used for instrumenting programs at run time. Many current translators perform substantial rewriting during translation in an attempt to reduce execution time. When dynamic translation is used as a ubiquitous policy enforcement mechanism, the majority of program executions have no dominating inner loop that can be used to amortize the cost of translation. Even under more favorable usage assumptions, our measurements show that such optimizations offer no significant benefit in most cases. A simpler, more maintainable, adaptable, and smaller translator may be preferable to more complicated designs. In this paper, we present HDTrans, a light-weight IA-32 to IA-32 binary translation system that uses some simple and effective translation techniques in combination with established trace linearization and code caching optimizations. We also present an evaluation of translation overhead under non-ideal conditions, showing that conventional benchmarks do not provide a good prediction of translation overhead when used pervasively. A further contribution of this paper is an analysis of the effectiveness of post-compile static pre-translation techniques for overhead reduction. Our results indicate that static pre-translation is effective only when expensive instrumentation or optimization is performed, and that efficient reload of pre-translated code incurs a substantial execution-time penalty.

Abstract HDTrans: An Open Source, Low-Level Dynamic Instrumentation System

Dynamic translation is a general purpose tool used for instrumenting programs at run time. Performance of translated execution relies on balancing the cost of translation against the benefits of any optimizations achieved, and many current translators perform substantial rewriting during translation in an attempt to reduce execution time. Our results show that these optimizations offer no significant benefit even when the translated program has a small, hot working set. When used in a broader range of applications, such as ubiquitous policy enforcement or penetration detection, translator performance cannot rely on the presence of a hot working set to amortize the cost of translation. A simpler, more maintainable, adaptable, and smaller translator appears preferable to more complicated designs in most cases. HDTrans is a light-weight dynamic instrumentation system for the IA-32 architecture that uses some simple and effective translation techniques in combination with established trace linearization and code caching optimizations. We present an evaluation of translation overhead under both benchmark and less idealized conditions, showing that conventional benchmarks do not provide a good prediction of translation overhead when used pervasively. A further contribution of this paper is an analysis of the effectiveness of post-link static pre-translation techniques for overhead reduction. Our results indicate that static pre-translation is effective only when expensive instrumentation or optimization is performed