Description: This article discusses architecture support for 3D obfuscation. Abstract: Software obfuscation is defined as a transformation of a program P into T(P) such that the whitebox and blackbox behaviors of T(P) are computationally indistinguishable. However, robust obfuscation is impossible to achieve with the existing software only solutions. This results from the power of the adversary model in DRM which is significantly more than in the traditional security scenarios. The adversary has complete control of the computing node - supervisory privileges along with the full physical as well as architectural object observational capabilities. In essence, this makes the operating system (or any other layer around the architecture) untrustworthy. Thus the trust has to be provided by the underlying architecture. In this paper, the authors develop an architecture to support 3-D obfuscation through the use of well known cryptographic methods. The three dimensional obfuscation hides the address sequencing, the contents associated with an address, and the temporal reuse of address sequences such as in loops (or the second order address sequencing). The software is kept as an obfuscated file system image statically. Moreover, its execution traces are also dynamically obfuscated along all the three dimensions of address sequencing, contents and second order ...

Description: This article discusses dynamic intimate contact social networks and epidemic interventions. Abstract: Sexually transmitted diseases and infections are, by definition, transferred among intimate social settings. Although the circumstances under which these social settings are established and maintained may vary, the common prerequisite remains an intimate level of social atmosphere. For this reason, the development of sexually transmitted disease mathematical and computational models must utilize dynamic and evolving social network simulation. This paper presents DynSNIC (Dynamic Social Network of Intimate Contacts), a computational simulator created to embody the intimate dynamic and evolving social networks related to the transmission of sexually transmitted diseases and infections. DynSNIC's utilization by health professionals will facilitate evaluation of targeted intervention strategies and public health policies.

Description: This article discusses the effects of interference on capacity in multi-cell CDMA networks. Abstract: An overwhelming number of models in the literature use average interference for calculation of capacity of a CDMA network. In this paper, we calculate the actual per-user interference and analyze the effect of user-distribution on the capacity of a CDMA network. We show that even though the capacity obtained using average interference is a good approximation to the capacity calculated using actual interference for a uniform user distributions, the deviation can be tremendously large for non-uniform user distributions. We also present an analytical model for approximating the user distributions using 2-dimensional Gaussian distributions by determining the means and the standard deviations of the distributions for every cell. This allows us to calculate the inter-cell interference and the reverse-link capacity of the network. We compare their model with simulation results and show that it is fast and accurate enough to be used efficiently in the planning process of large CDMA networks.

Description: This article discusses motivating and retaining computer science students with a competitive game programming project. The widespread goals of student retention, introduction larger programming projects and fostering collaboration among students in computer science courses has led to the inclusion of group projects in many curricula, with task division and collaboration as motivation for students to complete assignments. This article presents a study in a first-year programming assignment with similar goals, but with methods adopting the contrarian view - having students directly and individually compete with one another in a tournament of their respective software agents. This article presents the results of a year-long experiment in an intra-class competitive assignment in the second C++ programming course at the University of North Texas in Denton. Metrics of student performance on the assignment, correlation with course grade, student surveys of the project, and retention statistics are presented. Results demonstrating overwhelmingly positive response and high levels of effort among students are submitted, along with remarks on application to student recruiting, retention, and curriculum design.

Description: This article discusses networks and natural language processing. Over the last few years, a number of areas of natural language processing have begun applying graph-based techniques. These include, among others, text summarization, syntactic parsing, word-sense disambiguation, ontology construction, sentiment and subjectivity analysis, and text clustering. In this paper, the authors present some of the most successful graph-based representations and algorithms used in language processing and try to explain how and why they work