This year was a light year for the Smart Information Retrieval Project at SabIR Research and Cornell. We oÆcially participated in only the Ad-hoc Task and the Query Track. In the Ad-hoc Task, we made minor modi cations to our document weighting schemes to emphasize high-precision searches on shorter queries. This proved only mildly successful; the top relevant document was retrieved higher, but...

Feedback with Carry Shift Registers (FCSR) were introduced by M. Goresky and A. Klapper in 1993. They are very similar to classical Linear Feedback Shift Registers (LFSR) used in many pseudorandom generators. The main difference is the fact that the elementary additions are not additions modulo 2 but with propagation of carries. In this paper we propose a new generator designed from a FCSR auto...

Real constrained problems often demand specific answers to meet requirements like bounded computation time, user preferences or data changes. In the framework of Constraint Satisfaction Problems, sets of solutions which are maximal cartesian products of sub-domains provide a large amount of information in a synthetic and exploitable fashion. In this paper, standard Forward-Checking is extended ...

We discuss currently available observational constraints on the reionization history of the intergalactic medium (IGM), and the extent to which accreting black holes (BHs) can help explain these observations. We show new evidence, based on the combined statistics of Lyman α and β absorption in quasar spectra, that the IGM contains a significant amount of neutral hydrogen, and is experiencing ra...

versions of the immediate consequence operators that we will introduce canbe used for bottom-up abstract interpretation (i.e. xpoint computation of the ab-stract model). Abstract interpretation of CLP programs has been considered in adenotational semantics framework in [38], while we can generalize the bottom-up ap-proach in [3]. More interestingly, the compositional semantics c...