156293
An efficient and backwards-compatible transformation to ensure memory safety of C programs
Memory-related errors, such as buffer overflows and dangling pointers, remain one of the principal reasons for failures of C programs. As a result, a number of recent research efforts have focused on the problem of dynamic detection of memory errors in C programs. However, existing approaches suffer from one or more of the following problems: inability to detect all memory errors (e.g., Purify), requiring non-trivial modifications to existing C programs (e.g., Cyclone), changing the memory management model of C to use garbage collection (e.g., CCured), and excessive performance overheads. In this paper, we present a new approach that addresses these problems. Our approach operates via source code transformation and combines efficient data-structures with simple, localized optimizations to obtain good performance.
1723065
An approach for realizing privacy-preserving web-based services
The past decade has witnessed a phenomenal growth in the number of users who routinely use the web to obtain information, conduct research, or carry out financial transactions. While the ability of the web to provide customized information and financial services has boosted personal and business productivity, it has raised significant concerns regarding an individual’s privacy. The privacy concerns are exacerbated further with the advent of more complex services that involve multiple service providers, as it raises the potential of personal information being shared across these providers in ways that weren’t intended by the owner of the information. To illustrate the increased privacy concerns raised by composite web-based services, consider a web-based service that allows an individual to research and order over-the-counter medication (or health supplements) at a low cost, while ensuring that there are no adverse interactions based on the individuals current prescription. Such a service will require access to the individual’s personal medical history, and will also require interaction with other entities such as web-based medical references, discount pharmacies and creditcard companies. Users may not want their personal health histories to be shared with discount pharmacies or credit card companies. Similarly, they may not want their credit card information to be shared with providers of free on-line information. Web-based service providers have long recognized the importance of addressing user privacy concerns, and taken steps to state their policies regarding the storage and use of personal user information. Unfortunately, since these policies are stated in English, they are imprecise and ambiguous, posing problems in accountability and enforceability, as well as in checking compatibility between consumer and provider policies. Indeed, the verbose nature of these policies discourage most users from even reading them! To address the above problem, we present a new approach where the consumers as well as providers can express their privacy concerns in a formal way. Specifically, consumers express their requirements in the form of policies, while providers specify their use of consumer data using models. Our approach automates compatibility checking between policies and models. If there is an incompatibility, the consumer is informed how she can refine her policies in order to use the service. If she does not want to change her policies in any way, the approach passes on additional privacy requirements to the provider. Service access can continue in case
45173906
New Travel Demand Models with Back-Propagation Network
This paper explores the application of back-propagation network (BPN) to travel demand analysis. Models are developed to simulate travelers' inner-city behaviors and all of them adopt BPNs as main paradigm, for its virtue in non-linear analysis and prediction. Compared to the past researches, which were generally based on aggregate data, the models here are more comprehensive and developed based on disaggregate survey data. At first, three categories of models using BPNs are established to respectively realize trip generation, OD estimation and mode choice analysis-the first three steps in classical "four-step" models for travel demand forecasting. Furthermore, the integrated models are researched in two ways. One method is to use a simple combination of the former separate BPN models, and the other is to create a multilayer back-propagation network (MLBPN). Results show that BPN can be a feasible tool for travel demand analysis.
206821455
Compositional dependence of wetting and contact angles in solid-liquid-liquid systems under realistic environments
The wetting and contact angles in porous media are important for the characterization of multi-phase flow behavior. The polar components such as asphaltenes in the oil-phase, which have been widely believed to be a major source of oil-wetting characteristics. The effect of light gaseous ends in crude oil on wetting is studied by depleting the pressure at regular intervals. The variation of contact angles observed with the pressure during the pressure depletion clearly showed the influence of light ends on wetting. The water-advancing contact angle of live crude oil gradually increased from 55/spl deg/ at bubble point pressure to 154/spl deg/ at ambient pressure. The de-asphaltened and the deresined crude oils showed strong oil-wet characteristics as stocktank crude oil. The light gaseous ends in oil phase appear to peptize the asphaltene molecules by surrounding them, thereby preventing their agglomeration and migration to the interface. The differences observed in the behavior of dynamic interfacial tensions between live and stocktank crude oils further substantiates the influence of light gaseous ends on the activity of polar components in live oil. The influence of solid surface roughness, mineralogy of rock substrates as well as the brine composition on wetting and contact angles have also been investigated. For highly smooth substrates, carbonate and silica showed relatively similar high water-advancing contact angles, while for rough substrates, the advancing contact angles on silica were much lower compared to the carbonates.
47184510
Fast exact maximum likelihood estimation for mixture of language model
Language modeling is an effective and theoretically attractive probabilistic framework for text information retrieval. The basic idea of this approach is to estimate a language model of a given document (or document set), and then do retrieval or classification based on this model. A common language modeling approach assumes the data D is generated from a mixture of several language models. The core problem is to find the maximum likelihood estimation of one language model mixture, given the fixed mixture weights and the other language model mixture. The EM algorithm is usually used to find the solution. In this paper, we proof that an exact maximum likelihood estimation of the unknown mixture component exists and can be calculated using the new algorithm we proposed. We further improve the algorithm and provide an efficient algorithm of O(k) complexity to find the exact solution, where k is the number of words occurring at least once in data D. Furthermore, we proof the probabilities of many words are exactly zeros, and the MLE estimation is implemented as a feature selection technique explicitly.
15326279
GCS-MA: A group communication system for mobile agents
Reliable messaging is a key component necessary for mobile agent systems. Current researches focus on reliable one-to-one message delivery to mobile agents. But how to implement a group communication system for mobile agents remains an open issue, which is a powerful block that facilitates the development of fault-tolerant mobile agent systems. In this paper, we propose a group communication system for mobile agents (GCS-MA), which includes totally ordered multicast and membership management functions. We divide a group of mobile agents into several agent clusters, and each agent cluster consists of all mobile agents residing in the same sub-network and is managed by a special module, named coordinator. Then, all coordinators form a ring-based overlay for interchanging messages between clusters. We present a token-based algorithm, an intra-cluster messaging algorithm and an inter-cluster migration algorithm to achieve atomicity and total ordering properties of multicast messages, by building a membership protocol on top of the clustering and failure detection mechanisms. Performance issues of the proposed system have been analysed through simulations. We also describe the application of the proposed system in the context of the service cooperation middleware (SCM) project.
8176507
Research and Application of Spatio-temporal Data Mining Based on Ontology
In this paper, the spatio-temporal data mining is studied by adopting the ontology theory. The method of spatio-temporal data mining based on ontology is presented and a new spatio-temporal forecasting model based on ontology is designed. The model uses two measures of spatio-temporal autocorrelation: spatio-temporal adjacency matrix and spatio-temporal contiguity measure. We use this model in the forecast about medium and long term coarse granularity in the railway passenger flow, and the results show that using the method of spatio-temporal forecasting based on ontology can obtain a good forecasting precision