Publication in the Online First Directory

Recent technological progress has enabled us to meet authors' requirements for shorter publication times. Thus we are pleased to announce that Springer-Verlag is introducing the Online First (OF) publication concept for Acta Informatica. This new facility has been installed by Springer's Internet service (http://www.springerlink.com). From now on papers will be published in electronic form as OF papers shortly after proofs have been corrected by the author and returned to Springer. This means a significant reduction in the publication time. At this stage, OF papers will have no citation line (volume, pages, year) or page numbers but will be marked by an international identification code which can used for citation purposes (see below). A line indicating the exact OF-publication date will be printed beneath the title.For publication in the subsequent print version, the citation line and page numbers will be added, but the content of the article will remain unchanged. Authors will be informed at the proofreading stage that after electronic publication they cannot change the content of a paper, nor can they withdraw it from publication.Each article will be announced by Springer's Alert service. Access to the full papers is restricted to subscribers of the printed version.An OF paper is a genuine publication and not a new form of preprint. It is copyright-protected and it can be cited exactly like any printed paper. An OF paper is citeable by a "Digital Object Identifier" (or DOI), a unique and persistent international identification code, included in both the print and electronic versions. The DOI can also be used to create hyperlinks to OF papers: although files may be moved to other locations on the Springer server after print publication, the DOI is never changed.September 2003     

Material for publication

Abstract

Experimental applications of data from multispectral and other advanced sensors have demonstrated that remote sensing can make a valuable contribution to the monitoring and management of Canada's land resources. More frequent coverage and additional spectral bands on satellites planned for the mid-1980s and beyond will increase the opportunities for regular use of remotely sensed data. To effectively utilize these data in resource management, the remote sensing input must be matched with the resource management systems existing at that time. Thus, it is essential to anticipate the needs of resource management systems of the late 1980s and 1990s, to determine the appropriate role for remotely sensed data and to develop and implement a plan which will yield the remote sensing systems and methodologies necessary to meet the operational resource management requirements

Previous studies of resource information requirements indicate that there will be a need for geocoded remotely sensed data, improved image analysis techniques and better information integration concepts for future resource management systems. To develop a plan for meeting the anticipated requirements, the flow from the recording of the remotely sensed data to the end use of the derived information is considered first. The timeliness and accuracy requirements of different users, the diverse data types and forms for individual applications, the analysis methods/decision models needed and the implications of these factors for the configuration(s) of remote sensing input into the future resource management systems are examined. From this analysis, areas requiring further work (research, development, demonstration, transfer) are identified, and a plan of action is suggested.     

Controlling cryptographic publication

Over the last decade, controversy has simmered over the degree to which the U.S. Federal government should control the publication of cryptographic research. The debate is not particularly heated at the present time; researchers seem to be waiting to see the results of a system of voluntary controls recommended last year by a panel of the American Council on Education.Despite the quiet, however, it is instructive to examine some of the history underlying the debate for several reasons beyond sheer curiosity. In the first place, such controls, whether voluntary or mandatory sanctions, could influence the future directions of civilian cryptographic research. Secondly, controversy or confrontation could still arise were a researcher to disagree with the results of the voluntary review. Finally, a recent speech by Admiral Inman, since retired as Deputy Director of the CIA, to the American Association for the Advancement of Science suggests that some in the U.S. Government would like to extend such controls to a much wider range of computer science and engineering research.This article is a brief and personal discussion of the principal components of the controversy by an author who found himself occasionally watching it from the sidelines and in some instances uncomfortably in the middle as an NSF project director responsible for some of the research under debate.     

On publication Pascal

Having recently read several new Pascal textbooks, I was struck by the multitude of ways in which programs are represented in print. Some of these are more pleasing to the eye than others, and with a typesetting machine, anything is possible. However, several books are being produced these days from typewritten copy and there seems to be no accepted second-best to the italics-and-bold favoured by most publishers. It would also be desirable if the style used by books could correspond more closely to that which is handwritten or computer-produced. This note summarizes the possibilities and makes a call for stability, if not outright standardization.     

Explaining code for publication

The computer science literature discusses code and algorithms extensively, but not always reliably. Tool support can help ensure integrity between code and explanation so that published papers are more reliable. A versatile, lightweight tool to support explaining code for publication is justified, described and compared with alternatives. The tool works with Java, C and similar languages, and provides support for publishing explanations of real code in LATEX, XML, HTML, etc. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Differentially private histogram publication

Differential privacy (DP) is a promising scheme for releasing the results of statistical queries on sensitive data, with strong privacy guarantees against adversaries with arbitrary background knowledge. Existing studies on differential privacy mostly focus on simple aggregations such as counts. This paper investigates the publication of DP-compliant histograms, which is an important analytical tool for showing the distribution of a random variable, e.g., hospital bill size for certain patients. Compared to simple aggregations whose results are purely numerical, a histogram query is inherently more complex, since it must also determine its structure, i.e., the ranges of the bins. As we demonstrate in the paper, a DP-compliant histogram with finer bins may actually lead to significantly lower accuracy than a coarser one, since the former requires stronger perturbations in order to satisfy DP. Moreover, the histogram structure itself may reveal sensitive information, which further complicates the problem. Motivated by this, we propose two novel mechanisms, namely NoiseFirst and StructureFirst, for computing DP-compliant histograms. Their main difference lies in the relative order of the noise injection and the histogram structure computation steps. NoiseFirst has the additional benefit that it can improve the accuracy of an already published DP-compliant histogram computed using a naive method. For each of proposed mechanisms, we design algorithms for computing the optimal histogram structure with two different objectives: minimizing the mean square error and the mean absolute error, respectively. Going one step further, we extend both mechanisms to answer arbitrary range queries. Extensive experiments, using several real datasets, confirm that our two proposals output highly accurate query answers and consistently outperform existing competitors.