Probability Distributions.- Linear Models for Regression.- Linear Models for Classification.- Neural Networks.- Kernel Methods.- Sparse Kernel Machines.- Graphical Models.- Mixture Models and EM.- Approximate Inference.- Sampling Methods.- Continuous Latent Variables.- Sequential Data.- Combining Models.

Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning

According to W. Edwards Deming, American companies require nothing less than a transformation of management style and of governmental relations with industry. In Out of the Crisis, originally published in 1982, Deming offers a theory of management based on his famous 14 Points for Management. Management's failure to plan for the future, he claims, brings about loss of market, which brings about loss of jobs. Management must be judged not only by the quarterly dividend, but by innovative plans to stay in business, protect investment, ensure future dividends, and provide more jobs through improved product and service. In simple, direct language, he explains the principles of management transformation and how to apply them.

Out of the Crisis

The concept of an agent has become important in both Artificial Intelligence (AI) and mainstream computer science. Our aim in this paper is to point the reader at what we perceive to be the most important theoretical and practical issues associated with the design and construction of intelligent agents. For convenience, we divide these issues into three areas (though as the reader will see, the divisions are at times somewhat arbitrary). Agent theory is concerned with the question of what an agent is, and the use of mathematical formalisms for representing and reasoning about the properties of agents. Agent architectures can be thought of as software engineering models of agents;researchers in this area are primarily concerned with the problem of designing software or hardware systems that will satisfy the properties specified by agent theorists. Finally, agent languages are software systems for programming and experimenting with agents; these languages may embody principles proposed by theorists. The paper is not intended to serve as a tutorial introduction to all the issues mentioned; we hope instead simply to identify the most important issues, and point to work that elaborates on them. The article includes a short review of current and potential applications of agent technology.

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Intelligent Agents: Theory and Practice

物件導向軟體之架構(Object-Oriented Software Construction)探討

From the Publisher: 
The accessible presentation of this book gives both a general view of the entire computer vision enterprise and also offers sufficient detail to be able to build useful applications. Users learn techniques that have proven to be useful by first-hand experience and a wide range of mathematical methods. A CD-ROM with every copy of the text contains source code for programming practice, color images, and illustrative movies. Comprehensive and up-to-date, this book includes essential topics that either reflect practical significance or are of theoretical importance. Topics are discussed in substantial and increasing depth. Application surveys describe numerous important application areas such as image based rendering and digital libraries. Many important algorithms broken down and illustrated in pseudo code. Appropriate for use by engineers as a comprehensive reference to the computer vision enterprise.

Computer vision : a modern approach = 计算机视觉 : 一种现代的方法

We present a new technique for helping developers understand heap properties of object-oriented programs and how the actions of the program affect these properties. Our dynamic analysis uses the aliasing properties of objects to synthesize a set of roles; each role represents an abstract object state intended to be of interest to the developer. We allow the developer to customize the analysis to explore the object states and behavior of the program at multiple different and potentially complementary levels of abstraction. The analysis uses roles as the basis for three abstractions: role transition diagrams, which present the observed transitions between roles and the methods responsible for the transitions; role relationship diagrams, which present the observed referencing relationships between objects playing different roles; and enhanced method interfaces, which present the observed roles of method parameters. Together, these abstractions provide useful information about important object and data structure properties and how the actions of the program affect these properties. We have used our implemented role analysis to explore the behavior of several Java programs. Our experience indicates that, when combined with a powerful graphical user interface, roles are a useful abstraction for helping developers explore and understand the behavior of object-oriented programs.

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Role-based exploration of object-oriented programs

Atomic operations are a key primitive in parallel computing systems. The standard implementation mechanism for atomic operations uses mutual exclusion locks. In an object-based programming system the natural granularity is to give each object its own lock. Each operation can then make its execution atomic by acquiring and releasing the lock for the object that it accesses. But this fine lock granularity may have high synchronization overhead. To achieve good performance it may be necessary to reduce the overhead by coarsening the granularity at which the computation locks objects.

Lock Coarsening: Eliminating Lock Overhead in Automatically Parallelized Object-Based Programs

Software errors and hardware failures can cause data structures in running programs to violate key data structure consistency properties. As a result of this violation, the program may produce unacceptable results or even fail. We present a new data structure repair system. This system accepts a specification of data structure consistency properties stated in terms of an abstract set-and relation-based model of the data structures in the running program. It then automatically generates a repair algorithm that, during the execution of the program, detects and repairs any violations of these constraints. The goal is to enable the program to continue to execute acceptably in the face of otherwise crippling data structure corruption errors. We have applied our system to repair inconsistent data structures in five applications: CTAS (an air traffic control system), AbiWord (an open source word processing program), Freeciv (an interactive multiplayer game), a parallel x86 emulator, and a simplified Linux file system. Our results indicate that the generated repair algorithms can effectively repair inconsistent data structures in these applications to enable the applications to continue to operate successfully in cases where the original application would have failed. Without repair, all of the applications fail

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Goal-Directed Reasoning for Specification-Based Data Structure Repair

We present a method for automatically generating input parsers from English specifications of input file formats. We use a Bayesian generative model to capture relevant natural language phenomena and translate the English specification into a specification tree, which is then translated into a C++ input parser. We model the problem as a joint dependency parsing and semantic role labeling task. Our method is based on two sources of information: (1) the correlation between the text and the specification tree and (2) noisy supervision as determined by the success of the generated C++ parser in reading input examples. Our results show that our approach achieves 80.0% F-Score accuracy compared to an F-Score of 66.7% produced by a state-of-the-art semantic parser on a dataset of input format specifications from the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest (which were written in English for humans with no intention of providing support for automated processing). 1

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From Natural Language Specifications to Program Input Parsers

We introduce field constraint analysis, a new technique for verifying data structure invariants. A field constraint for a field is a formula specifying a set of objects to which the field can point. Field constraints enable the application of decidable logics to data structures which were originally beyond the scope of these logics, by verifying the backbone of the data structure and then verifying constraints on fields that cross-cut the backbone in arbitrary ways. Previously, such cross-cutting fields could only be verified when they were uniquely determined by the backbone, which significantly limits the range of analyzable data structures.

Field constraint analysis permits non-deterministic field constraints on cross-cutting fields, which allows the verificiation of invariants for data structures such as skip lists. Non-deterministic field constraints also enable the verification of invariants between data structures, yielding an expressive generalization of static type declarations.

The generality of our field constraints requires new techniques. We present one such technique and prove its soundness. We have implemented this technique as part of a symbolic shape analysis deployed in the context of the Hob system for verifying data structure consistency. Using this implementation we were able to verify data structures that were previously beyond the reach of similar techniques.

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Martin Rinard

Papers

Role-based exploration of object-oriented programs

Lock Coarsening: Eliminating Lock Overhead in Automatically Parallelized Object-Based Programs

Goal-Directed Reasoning for Specification-Based Data Structure Repair

From Natural Language Specifications to Program Input Parsers

Field constraint analysis