For user-friendliness purposes, many modern software systems provide progress indicators for longrunning tasks. These progress indicators continuously estimate the percentage of the task that has been completed and when the task will finish. However, none of the existing program compilation tools provide a non-trivial progress indicator, although it often takes minutes or hours to build a large...

In this article we review the 2011 International Planning Competition. We give an overview of the history of the competition, discussing how it has developed since its first edition in 1998. The 2011 competition was run in three main separate tracks: the Deterministic (Classical) Track; the Learning Track; and the Uncertainty Track. Each track proposed its own distinct set of new challenges and...

Telecommunications privatization, competition, liberalization, and regulatory independence in several countries have been embarked with the goals of maximizing universal access to telecommunications services as a developmental goal, promoting efficiency through competition and establishment of world class telecommunications networks. Using interview data from India and China –the two countrie...

This paper describes the Tenjinno Machine Translation Competition held as part of the International Colloquium on Grammatical Inference 2006. The competition aimed to promote the development of new and better practical grammatical inference algorithms used in machine translation. Tenjinno focuses on formal models used in machine translation. We discuss design issues and decisions made when crea...

The chords of a twisted cubic in PG(3, q) are mapped via their Plucker coordinates to the points of a Veronese surface lying on the Klein quadric in PG(5, q). This correspondence over a finite field gives a cap in PG(5, q), that is, a set of points no three of which are collinear. The dual structure, namely the axes of the osculating developable, is also mapped to a Veronese surface. The two su...

The concept of spin models was introduced by V.F. Jones in 1989. K. Kawagoe, A. Munemasa and Y. Watatani generalized it by removing the condition of symmetry. Recently E. Bannai and E. Bannai further generalized the concept of spin models, to give four-weight spin models or generalized spin models. Before this, F. Jaeger first pointed out the relation between spin models and association schemes...

The growth of e-learning, and subsequently, of blended learning in recent years in response to the global demand for increased productivity in education and training has been astounding! While the commercial response, including that of universities, to this rapid increase in demand and to the associated potential of communications technologies to provide global access has been impressive, signi...

The role of competition in healthcare is much debated. Despite a wealth of international experience in relation to competition, evidence is mixed and contested and the debate about the potential role for competition is often polarised. This paper considers briefly some of the reasons for this, focusing on what is meant by “competition in healthcare” and why it is more valuable to think about th...