There is, I think, something ethereal about i —the square root of minus one. I remember first hearing about it at school. It seemed an odd beast at that time—an intruder hovering on the edge of reality.

Usually familiarity dulls this sense of the bizarre, but in the case of i it was the reverse: over the years the sense of its surreal nature intensified. It seemed that it was impossible to write mathematics that described the real world in …

I and i

Preface to the Princeton Landmarks in Biology Edition vii Preface xi Symbols Used xiii 1. The Importance of Islands 3 2. Area and Number of Speicies 8 3. Further Explanations of the Area-Diversity Pattern 19 4. The Strategy of Colonization 68 5. Invasibility and the Variable Niche 94 6. Stepping Stones and Biotic Exchange 123 7. Evolutionary Changes Following Colonization 145 8. Prospect 181 Glossary 185 References 193 Index 201

The Theory of Island Biogeography

Statistics for Spatial Data.

In the Hamadryas baboon, males are substantially larger than females. A troop of baboons is subdivided into a number of ‘one-male groups’, consisting of one adult male and one or more females with their young. The male prevents any of ‘his’ females from moving too far from him. Kummer (1971) performed the following experiment. Two males, A and B, previously unknown to each other, were placed in a large enclosure. Male A was free to move about the enclosure, but male B was shut in a small cage, from which he could observe A but not interfere. A female, unknown to both males, was then placed in the enclosure. Within 20 minutes male A had persuaded the female to accept his ownership. Male B was then released into the open enclosure. Instead of challenging male A , B avoided any contact, accepting A’s ownership.

Evolution and the Theory of Games

Survival Analysis: Techniques for Censored and Truncated Data (2nd ed.) (Book)

We introduce a new layered modeling architecture consisting of dynamic hybrid fault modeling and extended evolutionary game theory for reliability, survivability, and fault tolerance analyses The architecture extends traditional hybrid fault models and their relevant constraints in the Agreement algorithms with survival analysis, and evolutionary game theory The dynamic hybrid fault modeling (i) transforms hybrid fault models into time- and covariate-dependent models; (ii) makes real-time prediction of reliability more realistic, and allows for real-time prediction of fault-tolerance; (iii) sets the foundation for integrating hybrid fault models with reliability and survivability analyses by integrating them with evolutionary game modeling; and (iv) extends evolutionary game theory by stochastically modeling the survival (or fitness) and behavior of `game players' To analyse survivability, we extend dynamic hybrid fault modeling with a third-layer, operational level modeling, to develop the three-layer survivability analysis approach (dynamic hybrid fault modeling constitutes the tactical and strategic levels) From the perspective of evolutionary game modeling, the two mathematical fields, ie, survival analysis and agreement algorithms, which we applied for developing dynamic hybrid fault modeling, can also be utilized to extend the power of evolutionary game theory in modeling complex engineering, biological (ecological), and social systems Indeed, a common property of the areas where our extensions to evolutionary game theory can be advantageous is that the risk analysis and management are a core issue Survival analysis (including competing risks analysis, and multivariate survival analysis) offers powerful modeling tools to analyse time-, space-, and/or covariate-dependent uncertainty, vulnerability, and/or frailty which `game players' may experience The agreement algorithms, which are not limited to the agreement algorithms from distributed computing, when applied to extend evolutionary game modeling, can be any problem (game system) specific rules (algorithms or models) that can be utilized to dynamically check the consensus among game players We expect that the modeling architecture and approaches discussed in the study should be implemented as a software environment to deal with the necessary sophistication Evolutionary computing should be particularly convenient to serve as the core optimization engine, and should simplify the implementation Accordingly, a brief discussion on the software architecture is presented

Dynamic Hybrid Fault Modeling and Extended Evolutionary Game Theory for Reliability, Survivability and Fault Tolerance Analyses

Insects are the most successful group of living things in terms of the number of species, the biomass and their distribution. Entomological research has revealed that the insect sensory systems are crucial for their success. Compared to human brains, the insect central nerve systems are extremely primitive and simple, both structurally and functionally, and are of minimal learning ability. Faced with these constraints, insects have evolved a set of extremely effective sensory systems that are structurally simple, functionally versatile and powerful, and highly distributed, as well as noise and fault tolerant. As a result, in recent years insect sensory systems have been inspirational to new communications and computing paradigms, which have lead to significant advances. However, we believe that the potential for insect-inspired solutions for communications and computing is far from being fully recognized. In particular, the contrasting similarity between the ubiquitous existences of insect sensory networks in nature and the idea of pervasive computing has received little attention. For example, the chemosensory communication systems in many of the moth, ant and beetle populations are essentially ''wireless'' sensory networks. The difference between the ''wireless'' network of an insect population and an engineered wireless sensor network is that insects encode messages with semiochemicals (also known as infochemicals) rather than with radio frequencies; in addition, the computing node is the individual insect powered by its brain, sensory and neuromotor systems, rather than a microchip-powered sensor. The objectives of this paper are threefold: (1) to introduce the state-of-the art research in insect sensory systems from entomological perspectives; (2) to propose potential new research problems inspired by insect sensory system with focusing on unexplored fields; and (3) to justify how and why insect sensory systems may inspire novel computing and communications paradigms.

Insect sensory systems inspired computing and communications

As our dependence on the cyber infrastructure grows ever larger, more complex and more distributed, the systems that compose it become more prone to failures and/or exploitation. Intelligence is information valued for its currency and relevance rather than its detail or accuracy. Information explosion describes the pervasive abundance of (public/private) information and the effects of such. Gathering, analyzing, and making use of information constitutes a business- / sociopolitical- / military-intelligence gathering activity and ultimately poses significant advantages and liabilities to the survivability of "our" society. The combination of increased vulnerability, increased stakes and increased threats make cyber security and information intelligence (CSII) one of the most important emerging challenges in the evolution of modern cyberspace "mechanization."

The goal of the workshop was to challenge, establish and debate a far-reaching agenda that broadly and comprehensively outlined a strategy for cyber security and information intelligence that is founded on sound principles and technologies. We aimed to discuss novel theoretical and applied research focused on different aspects of software security/dependability, as software is at the heart of the cyber infrastructure.

/pdf/proceedings-of-the-4th-annual-workshop-on-cyber-security-and-3i8rnty2p9.pdf

Proceedings of the 4th annual workshop on Cyber security and information intelligence research: developing strategies to meet the cyber security and information intelligence challenges ahead

Competing risks analysis is a field of applied statistics with research dating back to the eighteenth century. Starting in the 1980s, the interaction with survival analysis has lead to significant advances in competing risks analysis, especially in dealing with the dependency and identifiability issues, both of which are often intermingled with each other and have been the focus of the controversy surrounding classical competing risks analysis. The usefulness of competing risks analysis in engineering reliability has been recognized since the 1960s, and several important models in competing risks analysis were developed in the context of reliability modeling [e.g., Marshall-Olkin (1967) model]. However, the interaction between competing risks analysis and reliability has gradually withered during the period when significant advances were made in competing risks analysis. Consequently, it seems that the application of competing risks analysis in engineering reliability has fallen behind the theory of competing risks analysis. In particular, the advances in dependence and identifiability research are of extremely important significance in reliability field. We hope that this review article will contribute to the reestablishment of the connections between competing risks analysis and engineering reliability. In perspective, we suggest that the competing risks analysis has great potential in other fields of computer science and engineering, besides engineering reliability. In particular, network reliability and survivability, software reliability and test measurements, prognostics and health management, stand out as fields with very compelling reasons for further exploring.

Competing Risks Analysis of Reliability, Survivability, and Prognostics and Health Management (PHM)

Large applications executing on Grid or cluster architectures consisting of hundreds or thousands of computational nodes create problems with respect to reliability. The source of the problems are node failures and the need for dynamic configuration over extensive run-time. This paper presents two fault-tolerance mechanisms called theft induced checkpointing and systematic event logging. These are transparent protocols capable of overcoming problems associated with both, benign faults, i.e., crash faults, and node or subnet volatility. Specifically, the protocols base the state of the execution on a dataflow graph, allowing for efficient recovery in dynamic heterogeneous systems as well as multi-threaded applications. By allowing recovery even under different numbers of processors, the approaches are especially suitable for applications with need for adaptive or reactionary configuration control. The low-cost protocols offer the capability of controlling or bounding the overhead. A formal cost model is presented, followed by an experimental evaluation. It is shown that the overhead of the protocol is very small and the maximum work lost by a crashed process is small and bounded.

Axel Krings

Papers

Dynamic Hybrid Fault Modeling and Extended Evolutionary Game Theory for Reliability, Survivability and Fault Tolerance Analyses

Insect sensory systems inspired computing and communications

Proceedings of the 4th annual workshop on Cyber security and information intelligence research: developing strategies to meet the cyber security and information intelligence challenges ahead

Competing Risks Analysis of Reliability, Survivability, and Prognostics and Health Management (PHM)

Flexible Rollback Recovery in Dynamic Heterogeneous Grid Computing