The Active XML project: an overview

This paper provides an overview of the Active XML project developed at INRIA over the past five years. Active XML (AXML, for short), is a declarative framework that harnesses Web services for distributed data management, and is put to work in a peer-to-peer architecture. The model is based on AXML documents, which are XML documents that may contain embedded calls to Web services, and on AXML services, which are Web services capable of exchanging AXML documents. An AXML peer is a repository of AXML documents that acts both as a client by invoking the embedded service calls, and as a server by providing AXML services, which are generally defined as queries or updates over the persistent AXML documents. The approach gracefully combines stored information with data defined in an intensional manner as well as dynamic information. This simple, rather classical idea leads to a number of technically challenging problems, both theoretical and practical. In this paper, we describe and motivate the AXML model and language, overview the research results obtained in the course of the project, and show how all the pieces come together in our implementation. The first and third authors were partially funded by the European Project Edos. Work done when the second and third authors were at INRIA. Work done when the second and third authors were at INRIA.     

Risk management in ERP project introduction: Review of the literature

In recent years ERP systems have received much attention. However, ERP projects have often been found to be complex and risky to implement in business enterprises. The organizational relevance and risk of ERP projects make it important for organizations to focus on ways to make ERP implementation successful.     

The solution of euclidean norm trust region SQP subproblems via second-order cone programs: an overview and elementary introduction

It is well known that convex sequential quadratic programming (SQP) subproblems with an Euclidean norm trust region constraint can be reduced to second-order cone programs for which the theory of Euclidean Jordan algebras leads to efficient interior-point algorithms. Here, a brief and self-contained outline of the principles of such an implementation is given and the application to SQP subproblems as well as to cubic regularization problems is discussed. All identities relevant for the implementation are derived from scratch and are compared to interior-point methods for linear programs (LPs). Sparsity of the data of the SQP subproblem can be maintained essentially in the same way as for interior-point methods for LPs. The presentation is intended as an introduction for students and for colleagues who may have heard about Jordan algebras but did not yet find the time to get involved with them. A simple Matlab implementation is made available and the discussion of implementational aspects addresses a scaling property that is critical for SQP subproblems.     

Skeletons for parallel image processing: an overview of the SKIPPER project

This paper is a general overview of the S project, run at Blaise Pascal University between 1996 and 2002. The main goal of the S project was to demonstrate the applicability of skeleton-based parallel programming techniques to the fast prototyping of reactive vision applications. This project has produced several versions of a full-fledged integrated parallel programming environment (PPE). These PPEs have been used to implement realistic vision applications, such as road following or vehicle tracking for assisted driving, on embedded parallel platforms embarked on semi-autonomous vehicles. All versions of S share a common front-end and repertoire of skeletons––presented in previous papers––but differ in the techniques used for implementing skeletons. This paper focuses on these implementation issues, by making a comparative survey, according to a set of four criteria (efficiency, expressivity, portability, predictability), of these implementation techniques. It also gives an account of the lessons we have learned, both when dealing with these implementation issues and when using the resulting tools for prototyping vision applications.     

Calvin Mooers, the NOL computer project, and John VincentAtanasoff: an introduction

In 1974 Theodor Nelson authored Computer Lib (T.H. Nelson, 1974), likely the first anti-establishment work on computing. It contained cartoons and snippets of information, often irreverent, on almost every aspect of computing. While briefly describing languages such as Fortran, Algol, Cobol, and Lisp in a couple of paragraphs, it devoted four full pages to Calvin Mooers' TRAC language. Mooers obtained his BSc from the University of Minnesota. In 1941, while still an undergraduate, he worked for the Naval Ordnance Laboratory (NOL) on magnetic-field analysis in anti-mine projects. In 1945, he joined the electronic computer project at the NOL, which was headed by John Atanasoff     

The Pentium Chronicles: introduction

An excerpt from The Pentium Chronicles: The People, Passion, and Politics Behind the Landmark Chips offers a project manager's firsthand account of the technical and management challenges facing the team that conceived Intel's P6 microarchitecture.     

Living the dream - an overview of the Mars exploration project

The twin Mars exploration rover vehicles began in early April 2000 as the dream of a young Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) engineer. After two disappointing failures of the Mars Climate Orbiter and the Mars Polar Lander, NASA and the JPL were interested in determining a new course to invigorate the Mars Program. The objective of this article is to set out a chronology of the events of this exciting project in order to provide the context and background for the other articles. Within a month of the approval, the project was also asked to develop not one but two rovers, both to be sent during the same launch period to two distinct sites on Mars. Their ultimate goal was to study the history of water on Mars, in line with the basic Mars Program goal "to follow the water".     

The Eurotra linguistic specifications: An overview

In this article, we outline the contents of the linguistic specifications of the Eurotra machine translation system. We start in sections 1 and 2 from some of the requirements placed by multilingual MT on the overall design of the linguistic components. We then move on to a characterization of the Eurotra interface structure (section 3), the nature of transfer (section 4), and trends towards more interlingual representations within the project (section 5). Thereafter, we concentrate on the contents of the various levels beside the interface structure (section 6) before giving a brief survey of word structure (section 7) and outlining some areas for further research (section 8).

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The cybernetics of viability: an overview

A three-level approach to viability is developed, considering (1) living systems, (2) a niche, understood as the area within the reach of their actions, and (3) an environment. A systematic analysis of the interrelations between these levels shows that living systems emerge with matter/energy processing systems. These can add controller structures when producing excess energy. A three-sensor controller structure enables a living system to deal with unfavourable and scarce environments. Further evolution of these controller structures offers improved ways to act on niches. Maintaining niches in scarce environments can require technology or economy. So social systems emerge, which are understood as aggregates of living systems. Basic patterns of interactions within social systems are analysed. So the introduction of the notion of the niche into the discussion of viability allows us to explain phenomena ranging from properties of single living systems to societal organization.     

The Programmer's Apprentice: a research overview

The long-term goal of the Programmer's Apprentice project is to develop a theory of how expert programmers analyze, synthesize, modify, explain, specify, verify, and document programs. The authors present their vision of the Programmer's Apprentice, the principles and techniques underlying it, and their progress toward it. The primary vehicle for this exposition is three scenarios illustrating the use of the Apprentice in three phases of the programming task: implementation, design, and requirements. The first scenario is taken from a completed working prototype. The second and third scenarios are the targets for prototype systems currently under construction     

The pure parsimony haplotyping problem: overview and computational advances

Haplotyping estimation from aligned single-nucleotide polymorphism fragments has attracted more and more attention in recent years due to its importance in analysis of many fine-scale genetic data. Its application fields range from mapping of complex disease genes to inferring population histories, passing through designing drugs, functional genomics, and pharmacogenetics. The literature proposes a number of estimation criteria to select a set of haplotypes among possible alternatives. Usually, such criteria can be expressed under the form of objective functions, and the sets of haplotypes that optimize them are referred to as optimal. One of the most important estimation criteria is the pure parsimony, which states that the optimal set of haplotypes for a given set of genotypes is that having minimal cardinality. Finding the minimal number of haplotypes necessary to explain a given set of genotypes involves solving an optimization problem, called the pure parsimony haplotyping (PPH) estimation problem, which is notoriously     -hard. This article provides an overview of PPH, and discusses the different approaches to solution that occur in the literature.     

The evolution of video surveillance: an overview

Over the past 10 years, computer vision research has matured significantly. Although some of the core problems, such as object recognition and shape estimation are far from solved, many applications have made considerable progress. Video Surveillance is a thriving example of such an application. On the one hand, worldwide the number of cameras is expected to continue to grow exponentially and security budgets for governments, corporations and the private sector are increasing accordingly. On the other hand, technological advances in target detection, tracking, classification, and behavior analysis improve accuracy and reliability. Simple video surveillance systems that connect cameras via wireless video servers to Home PCs offer simple motion detection capabilities and are on sale at hardware and consumer electronics stores for under $300. The impact of these advances in video surveillance is pervasive. Progress is reported in technical and security publications, abilities are hyped and exaggerated by industry and media, benefits are glamorized and dangers dramatized in movies and politics. This exposure, in turn, enables the expansion of the vocabulary of video surveillance systems paving the way for more general automated video analysis.     

Knowledge systems and the law: The JURICAS project

There has been worldwide interest in looking at using artificial intelligence technology for legal applications. At Erasmus University in Rotterdam, The Netherlands, a JURICAS “Advice System Shell” has been created to allow lawyers to develop their own advisory systems. This paper describes the JURICAS project, and describes a Social Security Legal advisory system that has been created as a derivative of this project.     

The Haplotyping problem: An overview of computational models and solutions

The investigation of genetic differences among humans has given evidence that mutations in DNA sequences are responsible for some genetic diseases.The most common mutation is the one that involves only a single nucleotide of the DNA sequence,which is called a single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP).As a consequence,computing a complete map of all SNPs occurring in the human populations is one of the primary goals of recent studies in human genomics.The construction of such a map requires to determine the DNA sequences that from allchromosomes.In diploid organisms like humans,each chromosome consists of two sequences called haplotypes.Distinguishing the information contained in both haplotypes when analyzing chromosome sequences poses several new computational issues which collectively form a new emergingtopic of Computational Biology known as Haplotyping.This paper is a comprehensive study of some new combinatorial approaches proposed in thisresearch area and it mainly focuses on the formulations and algorithmic solutions of some basic biological problems.Three statistical approaches are briefly discussed at the end of the paper.     

Electronic portfolios revisited: The efolios project

Electronic portfolios show considerable pedagogical, student-outcomes, and program assessment promise but have been plagued by numerous logistical and implementation problems caused by the software and by students having to learn a great deal about electronic writing to put together a viable electronic portfolio. This article describes using an efolios project to solve these problems, enabling students to concentrate on writing rather than on technology and to create an electronic environment conducive to student-outcomes and program assessment.     

The Globus project: a status report

The Globus project is a multi-institutional research effort that seeks to enable the construction of computational grids providing pervasive, dependable, and consistent access to high-performance computational resources, despite geographical distribution of both resources and users. Computational grid technology is being viewed as a critical element of future high-performance computing environments that will enable entirely new classes of computation-oriented applications, much as the World Wide Web fostered the development of new classes of information-oriented applications. In this paper, we report on the status of the Globus project as of early 1998. We describe the progress that has been achieved to date in the development of the Globus toolkit, a set of core services for constructing grid tools and applications. We also discuss the Globus Ubiquitous Supercomputing Testbed Organization (GUSTO) that we have constructed to enable large-scale evaluation of Globus technologies, and we review early experiences with the development of large-scale grid applications on the GUSTO testbed.     

The TAME project: towards improvement-oriented softwareenvironments

Experience from a dozen years of analyzing software engineering processes and products is summarized as a set of software engineering and measurement principles that argue for software engineering process models that integrate sound planning and analysis into the construction process. In the TAME (Tailoring A Measurement Environment) project at the University of Maryland, such an improvement-oriented software engineering process model was developed that uses the goal/question/metric paradigm to integrate the constructive and analytic aspects of software development. The model provides a mechanism for formalizing the characterization and planning tasks, controlling and improving projects based on quantitative analysis, learning in a deeper and more systematic way about the software process and product, and feeding the appropriate experience back into the current and future projects. The TAME system is an instantiation of the TAME software engineering process model as an ISEE (integrated software engineering environment). The first in a series of TAME system prototypes has been developed. An assessment of experience with this first limited prototype is presented including a reassessment of its initial architecture