This paper examines land tenancy systems and tenant contracts in Rwanda, with respect to socioeconomic contexts. Our research in southern and eastern Rwanda produced data suggesting that land borrowing with fixed rents has been generally practiced, and that rent levels have been low in comparison to expected revenues from field production. In the western areas of coffee production, however, the...

FPGAs (Field Programmable Gate arrays) have gained massive popularity today as accelerators for a variety of workloads, including big data analytics, and parallel and distributed computing. This has fueled the study of mechanisms to provision FPGAs among multiple tenants as general purpose computing resources on the cloud. Such mechanisms offer new challenges, such as ensuring IP protection and...

Proofs of Retrievability (POR) are cryptographic proofs which provide assurance to a single tenant (who creates tags using his secret material) that his files can be retrieved in their entirety. However, POR schemes completely ignore storage-efficiency concepts, such as multi-tenancy and data deduplication, which are being widely utilized by existing cloud storage providers. Namely, in deduplic...

The wide adoption of smart devices and Internet-of-Things (IoT) sensors has led to massive growth in data generation at the edge Internet over past decade. Intelligent real-time analysis such a high volume data, particularly leveraging highly accurate deep learning (DL) models, often requires be processed as close sources (or Internet) minimize network processing latency. advent specialized, lo...

This paper introduces a new transactional “database-as-a-service” (DBaaS) called Relational Cloud. A DBaaS promises to move much of the operational burden of provisioning, configuration, scaling, performance tuning, backup, privacy, and access control from the database users to the service operator, offering lower overall costs to users. Early DBaaS efforts include Amazon RDS and Microsoft SQL ...

Software Defined Networks (SDNs) have been recognized as the next-generation networking paradigm that decouples the network control plane from the data forwarding plane. A logically centralized controller is responsible for all the control decisions and communication among the forwarding switches. However, current traffic engineering techniques and state-of-the-art routing algorithms do not eff...

We argue that the trend toward international investment agreements (IIAs) with stricter investment rules is driven by competitive diffusion, namely defensive moves of developing countries concerned about foreign direct investment (FDI) diversion in favor of competing host countries. Accounting for spatial dependence in the formation of bilateral investment treaties (BITs) and preferential trade...

Banks and other depository institutions have signed more than 300 community reinvestment agreements valued at $350 billion in the two decades since the passage of the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA). This article examines the effectiveness of negotiating CRA agreements in Chicago, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and New Jersey. After describing the agreements and the procedures by which they are enforc...

We use detailed trade, tariff, and income data for countries involved in 91 trade agreements negotiated since 1980 to test for reciprocity in free trade agreements. The results offer strong evidence of reciprocity in North-North and South-South free trade agreements, but there is little empirical support for reciprocity in North-South trade agreements. In particular, after controlling for other...