By S. Massoud Amin and Anthony M. Giacomoni T THE EXISTING POWER DELIVERY system is vulnerable to both natural disasters and intentional attack. A successful terrorist attempt to disrupt the power delivery system could have adverse effects on national security, the economy, and the lives of every citizen. Secure and reliable operation of the electric system is fundamental to national and intern...

Welcome to Software Engineering Risk Management (SERIM). As a professional associated with the development of software, you are well aware that the software development process can truly be a jungle, filled with hazards that lie in wait to sabotage your projects. These hazards (risks) are numerous and often complex. The purpose of this application is to help you find a safer path through this j...

In formal approaches to inductive learning, the ability to learn is understood as the ability to single out a correct hypothesis from a range of possibilities. Although most of the existing research focuses on the characteristics of the learner, in many paradigms the significance of the teacher’s abilities and strategies is in fact undeniable. Motivated by this observation, in this paper we hig...

any designers expect processor performance to keep improving at the current rate indefinitely as feature sizes shrink. However, as wire delays become a larger percentage of overall signal delay and as clock speeds grow faster than transistor speed, I believe performance increases will ultimately fall off. These delays are inevitable simply because wires are not keeping pace with the scaling of ...

Characterizing many species interactions as mutualisms can be misleading because some members of the interaction derive greater fitness benefits at the expense of other members. We provide detailed natural history data on a suspected bird-plant mutualism in South Africa where many species of birds use fluffy Eriocephalus seed material to construct their nests, potentially dispersing seeds for t...

In this paper, we address the new problem of protecting volunteer computing systems from malicious volunteers who submit erroneous results by presenting sabotagetolerance mechanisms that work without depending on checksums or cryptographic techniques. We first analyze the traditional technique of voting, and show how it reduces error rates exponentially with redundancy, but requires all work to...