From international land deals to local informal agreements: regulations of and local reactions to agricultural investments in Madagascar

In 2009, the 1.3 million hectare agricultural project planned in Madagascar by Daewoo Logistics exemplified the paradoxical position of the Malagasy state; simultaneously encouraging the development of large-scale acquisition and implementing a land reform to secure local land rights. Opposition to the project was successful mainly thanks to the efforts of international NGOs and to the rhetorical value of the land issue in national political debate. Despite this well publicised victory against large scale foreign land investment in Madagascar, the trend of large scale land acquisition continues and raises a number of questions of interest to this article. On the ground, what are the dynamics of local politics within the framework of the ongoing farmland acquisition projects? Furthermore, what are the impacts of the recent land reform on investors' land access modalities? The article attempts to provide a snapshot of the numerous and complicated interactions, and overlapping of land rights which exist in areas targeted by investors. Whereas legal procedures to access land do not guarantee local and legal land rights due to the imperfect implementation of laws, informal land deals seem to take into account a broader spectrum of rights, legitimated on the basis either of local land access practices or of positive law. This paper also shows that for the moment, local protests to important land-related investments are rather limited in Madagascar and analyses the reasons why they are so (most plantations are just starting, available information is scarce, private agribusiness look very much like international development project...). (Résumé d'auteur

CU2CL: A CUDA-to-OpenCL Translator for Multi- and Many-core Architectures

The use of graphics processing units (GPUs) in high-performance parallel computing continues to become more prevalent, often as part of a heterogeneous system. For years, CUDA has been the de facto programming environment for nearly all general-purpose GPU (GPGPU) applications. In spite of this, the framework is available only on NVIDIA GPUs, traditionally requiring reimplementation in other frameworks in order to utilize additional multi- or many-core devices. On the other hand, OpenCL provides an open and vendorneutral programming environment and runtime system. With implementations available for CPUs, GPUs, and other types of accelerators, OpenCL therefore holds the promise of a “write once, run anywhere” ecosystem for heterogeneous computing. Given the many similarities between CUDA and OpenCL, manually porting a CUDA application to OpenCL is typically straightforward, albeit tedious and error-prone. In response to this issue, we created CU2CL, an automated CUDA-to- OpenCL source-to-source translator that possesses a novel design and clever reuse of the Clang compiler framework. Currently, the CU2CL translator covers the primary constructs found in CUDA runtime API, and we have successfully translated many applications from the CUDA SDK and Rodinia benchmark suite. The performance of our automatically translated applications via CU2CL is on par with their manually ported countparts

Maintaining an expert system for the Hubble Space Telescope ground support

The transformation portion of the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) Proposal Entry Processor System converts astronomer-oriented description of a scientific observing program into a detailed description of the parameters needed for planning and scheduling. The transformation system is one of a very few rulebased expert systems that has ever entered an operational phase. The day to day operations of the system and its rulebase are no longer the responsibility of the original developer. As a result, software engineering properties of the rulebased approach become more important. Maintenance issues associated with the coupling of rules within a rulebased system are discussed and a method is offered for partitioning a rulebase so that the amount of knowledge needed to modify the rulebase is minimized. This method is also used to develop a measure of the coupling strength of the rulebase

A Programming Environment Evaluation Methodology for Object-Oriented Systems

The object-oriented design strategy as both a problem decomposition and system development paradigm has made impressive inroads into the various areas of the computing sciences. Substantial development productivity improvements have been demonstrated in areas ranging from artificial intelligence to user interface design. However, there has been very little progress in the formal characterization of these productivity improvements and in the identification of the underlying cognitive mechanisms. The development and validation of models and metrics of this sort require large amounts of systematically-gathered structural and productivity data. There has, however, been a notable lack of systematically-gathered information on these development environments. A large part of this problem is attributable to the lack of a systematic programming environment evaluation methodology that is appropriate to the evaluation of object-oriented systems