6458022
Representing the Zoo World and the Traffic World in the language of the Causal Calculator
The work described in this report is motivated by the desire to test the expressive possibilities of action language C+. The Causal Calculator (CCALC) is a system that answers queries about action domains described in a fragment of that language. The Zoo World and the Traffic World have been proposed by Erik Sandewall in his Logic Modelling Workshop--an environment for communicating axiomatizations of action domains of nontrivial size.The Zoo World consists of several cages and the exterior, gates between them, and animals of several species, including humans. Actions in this domain include moving within and between cages, opening and closing gates, and mounting and riding animals. The Traffic World includes vehicles moving continuously between road crossings subject to a number of restrictions, such as speed limits and keeping a fixed safety distance away from other vehicles on the road. We show how to represent the two domains in the input language of CCALC, and how to use CCALC to test these representations.
6731652
Nonmonotonic causal theories
The nonmonotonic causal logic defined in this paper can be used to represent properties of actions, including actions with conditional and indirect effects, nondeterministic actions, and concurrently executed actions. It has been applied to several challenge problems in the theory of commonsense knowledge. We study the relationship between this formalism and other work on nonmonotonic reasoning and knowledge representation, and discuss its implementation, called the Causal Calculator.
16719880
Jikzi - a new framework for security policy, trusted publishing and electronic commerce
In this paper, we will describe a thread of research, which we have followed off and on at Cambridge for about three years. Our topic is the security of electronic documents, in the broad sense: how can we be sure of the authenticity of things that are published electronically? This started off as a relatively small project, which we thought would take only a few weeks. The goal was to help our medical informatics department publish information such as drug formularies and treatment protocols on the hospital LAN or PC diskettes, in an appropriately dependable way. It rapidly became clear that the problem was much larger and more complex; a general solution would not only cope with 'content' - text, audio, video, software, whatever - but also with objects such as public key certificates. If done properly, it would give us a systematic way to deal with security policy on the web. Our goal now is to let people build integrated publishing and e-commerce services using simple, uniform and appropriate mechanisms. Our proposed solution is a single transparent markup language that allows us to support multiple security policies, plus supporting material ranging from a test implementation to an authentication logic.
18817570
Long-term location data management for distributed moving object databases
To handle the extreme situation that must manage positional information of a very large volume, at least millions, of moving objects, a cluster-based scalable distributed computing system architecture, called the GALIS, which consists of multiple data processors, each dedicated to keeping records relevant to a different geographical zone and a different time zone, was proposed. In this paper, we propose a valid time management and time-zone shifting scheme, which are essential in realizing the long-term location data subsystem of GALIS, but missed in our previous prototype development. We explain how to manage valid time of moving objects to avoid ambiguity of location information. We also describe time-zone shifting algorithm, with three variations, such as RT-TZS, B-TZS and TPB-TZS. Through experiments related with query processing time and CPU utilization, we show the efficiency of the proposed time-zone shifting schemes
1514436
Dynamic monitoring of high-performance distributed applications
Developers and users of high-performance distributed systems often observe performance problems such as unexpectedly low throughput or high latency. Determining the source of the performance problems requires detailed end-to-end instrumentation of all components, including the applications, operating systems, hosts, and networks. However, one must be very careful to design the instrumentation to have extremely low overhead, and not affect the system being monitored. In this paper we present a very light-weight instrumentation system that can be dynamically activated to unobtrusively collect and aggregate detailed end-to-end monitoring information from distributed applications. We also show how emerging "web services" can be used to facilitate remote interaction with this system.
17910425
TMO-structured distributed location information system prototype
To realize location-based services, it is essential to handle the extreme situation that must cope with a very large volume, at least millions, of moving items. In this paper, we describe a location information system prototype of GALIS, which is a cluster-based scalable distributed computing system architecture which consists of multiple data processors, each dedicated to keeping records relevant to a different geographical zone and a different time zone. The proposed system contains all of the major computing nodes of GALIS architecture and is developed as a middleware on top of commercial main-memory database engines and spatial database engines, for short-term data and long-term data processing, respectively. To show the usefulness of our system, some experimental results showing clear advantages of distributed computing are also explained.
29667666
Building a distributed asynchronous control unit through automatic derivation of hierarchically decomposed AFSMs from a CDFG
Although there are several successful asynchronous logic synthesis tools, it is still unwieldy for designers to conceive and describe behaviors for a number of controllers constituting an asynchronous control unit of a target system manually. In this paper, building a distributed asynchronous control unit automatically through automatic derivation of hierarchically decomposed AFSMs from a CDFG is suggested. A resulting control unit consists of small asynchronous controllers and has complete separation of 'execution controllers' and 'execution order controllers'. This distributive feature leads to significant improvements in the aspects of area, performance and synthesis time of derived control circuits.