Computing Science

Testing is an important part of application development hardware engineers, in particular, have a long established history of testing for the obvious reason that it's awfully hard to rebuild a microprocessor every time a bug pops up in the design stage-not to mention the enormous headaches such bugs generate on the software side. In this installment of Scientific Programming, we'll discuss the role of testing in the software development process and examine ways to leverage automated unit testing in your projects

Network slicing has become a fundamental property for next-generation networks, especially because an inherent part of 5G standardisation is the ability for service providers to migrate some or all of their network services to a virtual network infrastructure, thereby reducing both capital and operational costs. With network function virtualisation (NFV), network functions (NFs) such as firewalls, traffic load balancers, content filters, and intrusion detection systems (IDS) are either instantiated on virtual machines (VMs) or lightweight containers, often chained together to create a service function chain (SFC). In this work, we review the state-of-the-art NFV and SFC implementation frameworks and present a taxonomy of the current proposals. Our taxonomy comprises three major categories based on the primary objectives of each of the surveyed frameworks: (1) resource allocation and service orchestration, (2) performance tuning, and (3) resilience and fault recovery. We also identify some key open research challenges that require further exploration by the research community to achieve scalable, resilient, and high-performance NFV/SFC deployments in next-generation networks

MesoCalc is a Mesopotamian calculator created by Baptiste Mélès. It computes in sexagesimal place-value notation, operates on measures, and converts dates.
MesoCalc automates the basic operations that were performed routinely in mathematical and economic activities in Mesopotamia. The numerical and metrological systems adopted in MesoCalc reflect the standard of Old Babylonian scribal schools (see ‘Numbers and Metrology’ in cdli:wiki). Most of the operations attested in other documentations (for example, third or first millennium texts) can be performed with MesoCalc, with some adaptations (see §3.5). However, calculations with special metrologies are not possible right now. MesoCalc is also able to convert Neo-Babylonian dates into modern date.
This tutorial helps the user to explores the features of MesoCalc through examples extracted from cuneiform texts, most of them being school exercises.
The current version of MesoCalc and this tutorial (May 2017) will be updated soon with new features, notably iterative addition of measures and reciprocal of non-regular numbers. The tutorial is a part of cdli:wiki http://cdli.ox.ac.uk/wiki/doku.php?id=numbers_metrology.

The nearshore area between USP?s Lower Campus and the Suva Bowling Club was investigated with regard to sabellariid worm colonies which are common on exposed bedrock, boulders and mangrove roots along that coastline. Polychaetous worms of the family SABELLARIIDAE build reef-like structures made of clusters of vertically oriented tubes composed of sand grains and cemented together by a proteinaceous substance. The structures reach considerable sizes of up to 1 m across and 30 cm height. They are indicative of sites along the coast where erosion is occurring and a combination of exposed bedrock and minor sand provides the worms with hard substrate to attach themselves and building material to construct their tubes. Their original habitat are the roots of mangroves most of which have been cleared from this stretch of the coast. Some findings about the habitat, morphology and biology of the sandbuilder worms are documented. Their regional significance and contribution to coast line deve...

Opinion mining on Twitter recently attracted research interest in politics using Information Retrieval (IR) and Natural Language Processing (NLP). However, getting domain-specific annotated data still remains a costly manual step. In addition, the amount and quality of these annotation may be critical regarding the performance
of machine learning (ML) based systems. An alternative solution is to use cross-language and cross-domain sets to simulate training data. This paper describe a ML approach to automatically annotate Spanish tweets dealing with the online-reputation of politicians. Our main finding is that a simple statistical NLP classifier without in-domain training can
provide as reliable annotation as humans annotators and outperform more specific resources such as lexicon or in-domain data.

Abstract. The creation of industrial networks represents a value-added strategy to foster the individual competencies of Small & Medium Enterprises (SME). These networks require the support of e-services to enable the coordination and cooperation among different companies to integrate their capabilities in the configuration of virtual organizations. This paper present the integration of five e-services in an open technological platform named e-HUB. The technical design of its software architecture, the results of its implementation in ...

The emerging cloud computing paradigm is rapidly gaining momentum as an alterna-tive to traditional IT. However, contemporary cloud computing offerings are mostly geared towards Web 2.0 style applications and only recently have begun to address the needs of enterprise-grade solutions, such as support for infrastructure-level SLAs. To address the challenges and deficiencies in the current state of the art, we propose a modular, extensible cloud architecture with intrinsic support for Business Service Man-agement (BSM) and federation of clouds. Our goal is to facilitate an open, service-based, on-line economy, where resources and services are transparently provisioned and managed across clouds on an on-demand basis at competitive costs with high quality of service. We present the vision driving the RESERVOIR project- an architecture that allows providers of cloud infrastructure to dynamically partner with each other to create a seem-ingly infinite pool of IT resources while fully pres...

This is the second article in an occasional series on Web application development. The first installment, published in the September/October 2005 issue ("A Hike through Post-EJB J2EE Web Application Architecture," vol. 7, no. 5, pp. 80-88), focused on the upper tiers that comprise the user interface; here, the author focuses on the lower tiers. He started with a blueprint of a typical post-Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) Web application architecture. Several functional and nonfunctional requirements drive such architectures, and they've become relatively standard. Within this architecture, we looked at the core functionality of our running example - linear regression over a persistent set of points - and then hiked our way upward through successive user interface layers, including dynamic behavior, presentation, internationalization, navigation, layout, and visual styles. During the hike, we looked at typical technologies for each layer. In this article, we descend into our application's invisible innards. Specifically, the author examines business service objects, object-relational mappings, lightweight containers (for painlessly connecting the various pieces), security, and concurrency. Our ultimate goal is to facilitate the development of reliable, flexible, and efficient server-based Web applications

Generally, sample surveys are multivariate in nature where multiple response are obtained on every unit selected in a sample, that is, more than one characteristics are defined on each and every unit of the population. While dealing with a multivariate stratified population, to workout an allocation that is optimum for all characteristics is almost impossible unless the characteristics are highly correlated. Some compromise must be allowed to obtain an allocation that is optimum, in some sense, for all the characteristics. Since such allocations are based on some compromise criteria they are known as compromise allocations. This paper deals with the problem of obtaining an optimum allocation in multivariate stratified sampling design.

Current cloning technologies based on site-specific recombination are efficient, simple to use, and flexible. With the recent availability of complete genomic sequences of many organisms and plants, high-throughput and cost-efficient systems for gene cloning ...

The suitability of the algorithms for recognition and classification of entities (NERC) is evaluated through competitions such as MUC, CONLL or ACE. In general, these competitions are limited to the recognition of predefinedentity types in certain languages. In addition, the evaluation of free applicationsand commercial systems that do not attend the competitions has been lightlystudied. Shallowly studied have also been the causes of erroneous results. Inthis study a set of NERC tools are assessed. The assessment of the tools hasconsisted of: 1) the elaboration of a test corpus with typical and marginal typesof entities; 2) the elaboration of a brief technical specification for the toolsevaluated; 3) the assessment of the quality of the tools for the developed corpus by means of precision-recall ratios; 4) the analysis of the most frequent errors.The sufficiency of the technical characteristics of the tools and their evaluationratios, presents an objective perspective of the quality...

The question exists can ‘machine vision’ provide a way in which the images, of rock art sites can yield some of their ‘secrets’? Computer scientists have long considered this possibility. Naturally the question stands of whose perception is under discussion here, where ‘seeing’ and ‘perception’ are crucial. In this case reference should be made to Berger’s book “Ways of Seeing’ (1973). Attributing them automatically implies they were made by someone, even might be owned by someone: person or corporate entity. Computing tools that utilize AI, which is a cover-all term, apparently offer a way forward not merely  to assist attribution, but to offer the  entrancing potential – of linking Rock Art firmly a large story, finding out what paintings ‘mean’, even debating the origins of human  species – so the stakes are high.

https://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/hse-network/tag/petroglyphs/