'Objective' evaluation means evaluation using numbers (metrics) which can be calculated without intervention by humans. An obvious advantage is that human eeort is reduced. It is also claimed that it is less biased by human opinion, but in this text it is shown that there are a lot of choices to be made when applying these methods, which introduces bias at a diierent level. Two objective evalua...

Testing a black-box system without recourse to a specification is difficult, because there is no basis for estimating how many tests will be required, or to assess how complete a given test set is. Several researchers have noted that there is a duality between these testing problems and the problem of inductive inference (learning a model of a hidden system from a given set of examples). It is ...

We consider a fixpoint expressions μy.νx. f (x,y) over the lattice {0,1}n, where f : {0,1}2n → {0,1}n is any monotone function. We study only algorithms for calculating these expressions using f only as a black-box: they may only ask for the value of f for given arguments. We show that any such algorithm has to do at least about n2 queries to the function f , namely Ω ( n2 logn ) queries.

One of the less studied aspects in human voice processing is how the transition articulations between phonemes occur in fluent speech. Often, lack of information pushes us to deal with them using black-box approach. This is especially true in the field of voice synthesis. In this article the transitions from nasal consonant to every possible vocalic allophone of Spanish language is analyzed usi...

Black-box transformations have been extensively studied in algorithmic mechanism design as a generic tool for converting algorithms into truthful mechanisms without degrading the approximation guarantees. While such transformations have been designed for a variety of settings, Chawla et al. showed that no fully general black-box transformation exists for single-parameter environments. In this p...

We present an algorithm which, for any given black box group G isomorphic to Sp(d, q), constructs explicit inverse isomorphisms between G and the standard copy of Sp(d, q). We also report on the performance of an implementation of this algorithm in the group theory system GAP.

We construct a constant-round resettably-sound zero-knowledge argument of knowledge based on black-box use of any one-way function. Resettable-soundness was introduced by Barak, Goldreich, Goldwasser and Lindell [FOCS 01] and is a strengthening of the soundness requirement in interactive proofs demanding that soundness should hold even if the malicious prover is allowed to “reset” and “restart”...

In order to allow for a transition of the current central market and network structure of todays electricity grid to a decentralized smart grid, an efficient management of numerous distributed energy resources will become more and more indispensable. The integration of controllable but distributed and individually configured small devices entails new challenges for the design of future control ...

The formal language LOTOS [1] describes distributed systems by the temporal ordering of interactions between architectural components named “process”. LOTOS supports composition operators for architectural design and process refinement, rendezvous communication, and a black-box d escription style. With its verification and testing framework based on Labelled Transition Systems, LOTOS helps buil...