Description: In this article, the authors explore computational approaches' applicability to the recognition and use of verbally expressed humor. Particularly, the authors focus on three important research questions related to this problem: Can we automatically gather large collections of humorous texts? Can we automatically recognize humor in text? And can we automatically insert humorous add-ons into existing applications?

Description: This article discusses text and structural data mining of influenza mentions in web and social media. Text and structural data mining of web and social media (WSM) provides a novel disease surveillance resource and can identify online communities for targeted public health communications (PHC) to assure wide dissemination of pertinent information. WSM that mention influenza are harvested over a 24-week period, 5 October 2008 to 21 March 2009. Link analysis reveals communities for targeted PHC. Text mining is shown to identify trends in flu posts that correlate to real-world influenza-like illness patient report data. The authors also bring to bear a graph-based data mining technique to detect anomalies among flu blogs connected by publisher type, links, and user-tags.

Description: This article discusses UMTS capacity and throughput maximization for different spreading factors. An analytical model for calculating capacity in multi-cell UMTS networks is presented. Capacity is maximized for different spreading factors and for perfect and imperfect power control. The authors also design and implement a local call admission control (CAC) algorithm which allows for the simulation of network throughput for different spreading factors and various mobility scenarios. The design of the CAC algorithm uses global information ; it incorporates the call arrival rates and the user mobilities across the network and guarantees the users' quality of service as well as pre-specified blocking probabilities. On the other hand, its implementation in each cell uses local information; it only requires the number of calls currently active in that cell. The capacity and network throughput were determined for signal-to-interference threshold from 5 dB to 10 dB and spreading factor values of 256, 64, 16, and 4.

Description: This article discusses virtualization based secure execution and testing. Computer security aims at protecting confidentiality, integrity, and availability of sensitive information that are processed, used, or stored by computing systems. Computer scientists working in the field of computer security have successfully designed and developed software and hardware mechanisms to provide security in modern day computing devices. As compared to hardware security mechanisms, software-only security mechanisms are easy to implement and patch. But software-only security mechanisms cannot ensure protection against hardware-based attacks, thus rendering them vulnerable to such attacks. Hardware mechanism such as secure architectures aim to root the trust of the security solution in the hardware architecture. These security architectures typically deploy security mechanisms like encryption/decryption to protect confidentiality and hashing to protect data integrity. Though the security provided by hardware secure architectures is reliably high, they require modifications to the processor micro-architecture. Any changes to the micro-architecture is an extremely costly and time consuming process. Also, testing these hardware secure architectures is difficult as it requires testing the complete system including hardware, software and applications. Recently, virtualization has emerged to be an efficient and cost effective technology that allows emulating hardware mechanisms. It also enables emulating new hardware features ...