A private information retrieval (PIR) protocol allows a user to retrieve one of N records from a database while hiding the identity of the record from the database server. With the initially proposed PIR protocols to process a query, the server has to process the entire database, resulting in an unacceptable response time for large databases. Later solutions make use of some preprocessing and o...

This paper proposes a comprehensive suite of measures to quantify the level of class coupling during the design of object-oriented systems. This suite takes into account the different OO design mechanisms provided by the C++ language (e.g., friendship between classes, specialization, and aggregation) but it can be tailored to other OO languages. The different measures in our suite thus reflect ...

In 1994 the author was commissioned by a European telecommunications company to perform an economic analysis of both procedural and object-oriented programming languages used for telecommunications software. It is appropriate to revisit this study in 1997 using several years of additional data. The expansion of object-oriented (OO) programming languages and methodologies has brought with it a n...

The object oriented (OO) paradigm suffers from several inadequacies which are widely recognised, eg. lack of a formal foundation, general disagreement in interpreting OO concepts, lack of a declarative query language, use of a navigational interface, inheritance conflicts in class hierarchies etc. In this paper, a representative list of these inadequacies is presented. Some proposals that have ...

In this paper we introduce an object-oriented coordination language for multi-agents systems. The beliefs and reasoning capabilities of an agent are specified in terms of a corresponding abstract data type. Agents interact via an extension of the usual object-oriented message passing mechanism. This extension provides the autonomy that is required of agents but which objects in most object-orie...

In this paper we address the problem of autonomous navigation in very large unstructured environments. A new hybrid metric map (HYMM) structure is presented that combines feature maps with other metric representations in a consistent manner. The global feature map is partitioned into a set of connected local triangular regions (LTRs), which provide a reference for a detailed multidimensional de...

Maternal obesity is increasingly prevalent and may affect the long-term health of the child. We investigated the effects of maternal diet-induced obesity in mice on offspring metabolic and cardiovascular function. Female C57BL/6J mice were fed either a standard chow (3% fat, 7% sugar) or a palatable obesogenic diet (16% fat, 33% sugar) for 6 weeks before mating and throughout pregnancy and lact...

Experimental analysis of the sedimentation velocity of Cryptosporidium parvum oocysts and Giardia lamblia cysts was compared with mathematical description of their sedimentation velocities by using measurements of (oo)cyst size and density and the density and viscosity of the sedimentation medium to determine if the sedimentation kinetics of freely suspended oocysts of C. parvum and cysts of G....

For fixed ƒ and r this mean modulus Mt(r;f) as a function of / is continuous, nonnegative, nondecreasing, and is bounded above by the maximum modulus of ƒ on C(r) [l, 2 ] . 1 Therefore the limit of Mt(r;f) exists as /—>0 and /—» oo. This limit is defined to be the mean modulus of ƒ on C(r) of order 0 and of order oo respectively. I t may be shown that the mean modulus of order 0 is the geometri...