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The article focuses on the evolution of paperless office as an inevitable result of technology advances. The introduction of new technologies has often stimulated dynamic interactions between old and new. New technologies are commonly misperceived as total replacements for old ones, when in fact the introduction of a new technology can stimulate a synergy between old and new. Electronic media and printed media complement, and in some ways even reinforce each other. Today, paper remains the most popular document medium because of its credibility, tangibility, and ease of use, portability and compatibility with all imaging devices, such as facsimile units, copiers, printers, and scanners. Despite the enormous popularity of computers and personal digital assistants, along with the improvements in screen technology, mobile computing technology and navigational and input tools, paper usage in the U.S. continues to increase. While paper will not become obsolete any time soon, a shift is occurring in how it is being used.

The article focuses on the Electronic Colloquium on Computational Complexity (ECCC), a digital library founded in 1994. A group of top researchers in the field of computational complexity, which later formed the ECCC scientific board, discussed the possibility of using the Internet for creating an online meeting place for their research community to exchange recent results. As a result of these discussions, the ECCC was designed and founded. ECCC builds a compromise between the traditional publication methods. The standards for publications in ECCC are high due to the involved board members. Successfully screened submissions are published in the series of ECCC reports, which usually occurs within a few days after submission. All the accepted ECCC reports are freely available via the Web. ECCC modified the acceptation and filtering process and also made use of further potential of the new electronic media. Thus ECCC provides a portal for the computational complexity community, where books, online lectures, lecture notes, survey papers, theses and other related links are provided.

This article presents information about last date of paper submission to the various conferences related to computer industry. Symposium on Moving Boundary Problems will be organized during September 26-28, 1977, at Riverside Motor Lodge, Gatlinburg, Tennessee. Researchers can submit their papers till June 15, 1977. The symposium is sponsored by the U.S. Army Research Office and Union Carbide Corp. Fifth Annual ACM (Association for computing Machinery) SIGACT- SIGPLAN Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages will be organized from January 23-25, 1978, at Tucson, Arizona. It is sponsored by ACM SIGACT-SIGPLAN. The last date of paper submission is August 19, 1977. Fourth International Conference on Computer Communication will be organized at Kyoto, Japan, during September 26-29, 1978. It will be sponsored by International Council for Computer Communication. Papers for the conference can be submitted till November 30, 1977. Lawrence Symposium on Systems and Decision Sciences is to be held at Lawrence Hall of Science, Berkeley, California, during October 3-4, 1977. Researchers can submit their papers till June 15, 1977.

The article focuses on the research behind hiding secrets within computer programs, also known as program obfuscation. The author discusses how program obfuscation could revolutionize cryptography, examines how it could impact reverse engineering with a proposed virtual black box (VBB), and explores the alternate security of so-called indistinguishability obfuscation (iO)

Discusses several factors that influence the behavior of users as they read and write with computers. Development of the Andrew system; Comparison of paper against computer as a medium for reading and writing; Directly observable attributes of hardware and software design.

Optimizing programs to run efficiently on modern parallel hardware is hard but crucial for many applications. The predominantly used imperative languages force the programmer to intertwine the code describing functionality and optimizations. This results in a portability nightmare that is particularly problematic given the accelerating trend toward specialized hardware devices to further increase efficiency. Many emerging domain-specific languages (DSLs) used in performance-demanding domains such as deep learning attempt to simplify or even fully automate the optimization process. Using a high-level--often functional--language, programmers focus on describing functionality in a declarative way. In some systems such as Halide or TVM, a separate schedule specifies how the program should be optimized. Unfortunately, these schedules are not written in well-defined programming languages. Instead, they are implemented as a set of ad hoc predefined APIs that the compiler writers have exposed. In this paper, we show how to employ functional programming techniques to solve this challenge with elegance. We present two functional languages that work together--each addressing a separate concern. RISE is a functional language for expressing computations using well-known data-parallel patterns. ELEVATE is a functional language for describing optimization strategies. A high-level RISE program is transformed into a low-level form using optimization strategies written in ELEVATE. From the rewritten low-level program, high-performance parallel code is automatically generated. In contrast to existing high-performance domain-specific systems with scheduling APIs, in our approach programmers are not restricted to a set of built-in operations and optimizations but freely define their own computational patterns in RISE and optimization strategies in ELEVATE in a composable and reusable way. We show how our holistic functional approach achieves competitive performance with the state-of-the-art imperative systems such as Halide and TVM. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents several letters to the editor. Discussion on problems related to programming languages and semantics; Views on control flow and data structure documentation; Reference to the article "Are Operating Systems Obsolete?," which was published in the April 1982 issue.

The article outlines the professional activities of the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM). The ACM SIGUCCS Users Conference XII is planned for November 11-14, 1984 in Reno, Nevada. ACM SIGMETRICS Conference on Measurement and Modeling of Computer Systems will be held in Boston, Massachusetts on August 2-24, 1984. The 13th Annual Conference on Parallel Processing will be held on August 21-24, 1984 in Bellaire, Michigan. The Third International Conference on Systems Documentation will be held on May 16-18, 1984 in Mexico City.

Most results in the field of algorithm design are single algorithms that solve single problems. In this paper we discuss multidimensional divide-anti-conquer, an algorithmic paradigm that can be instantiated in many different ways to yield a number of algorithms and data structures for multidimensional problems. We use this paradigm to give best-known solutions to such problems as the ECDF, maximal range searching, closest pair, and all nearest neighbor problems The contributions of the paper are on two levels. On the first level are the particular algorithms and data structures given by applying the paradigm. On the second level is the more novel contribution of this paper a detailed study of an algorithmic paradigm that is specific enough to be described precisely yet general enough to solve a wide variety of problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on several conferences related to Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) to be held in 2102 including fourth annual Conference on the Management of Data in San Jose, California on May 14-16, International Computing Symposium (ICS) in Antibes, France on June 2-4, and Annual Symposium on Theory of Computing in Albuquerque, New Mexico on May 5-7.

This article offers information on the Computing Practices section of the magazine "Communications of the ACM." The section focuses on articles with a message about general ideas and techniques that can be transferred from one place to another. Instead of technical papers, the section concentrates on discussions of how, what, why and when to use the computing methods and systems. Topics that cover areas of interest to readers of the section include improvement of the systems design process, future of computing, and implication of new theory to application systems.

The article presents a schedule of various conferences related to computer science research. Twenty-seven Professional Development Seminars covering computing and data processing topics are to be offered at the 1985 National Computer Conference, which will be held from July 15-18, 1985, in Chicago, Illinois. ACM's 16th North American Computer Chess Championship is to be held from October 13-15, 1985, at the 1985 ACM Annual Conference, which will take place from October 14-16, 1985, in Denver, Colorado. Papers on computer networks are solicited for the Pacific Computer Communication Symposium to be held from October 22-24, 1985, in Seoul, Republic of Korea. Some of the areas of interest include network protocols, international and regional computer networks, gateway architecture and internetworking, metropolitan area networks and local area networks. Original research contributions are solicited for the Sixth International Conference on Information Systems to be held from December 16-18, 1985, in Indianapolis, Indiana.

Sorting extremely large datasets is a frequently occurring task in practice. These datasets are usually much larger than the computer's main memory; thus, external memory sorting algorithms, first introduced by Aggarwal and Vitter, are often used. The complexity of comparison-based external memory sorting has been understood for decades by now; however, the situation remains elusive if we assume the keys to be sorted are integers. In internal memory, one can sort a set of n integer keys of Θ(lg n) bits each in O(n) time using the classic Radix Sort algorithm; however, in external memory, there are no faster integer sorting algorithms known than the simple comparison-based ones. Whether such algorithms exist has remained a central open problem in external memory algorithms for more than three decades. In this paper, we present a tight conditional lower bound on the complexity of external memory sorting of integers. Our lower bound is based on a famous conjecture in network coding by Li and Li, who conjectured that network coding cannot help anything beyond the standard multicommodity flow rate in undirected graphs. The only previous work connecting the Li and Li conjecture to lower bounds for algorithms is due to Adler et al. Adler et al. indeed obtain relatively simple lower bounds for oblivious algorithms (the memory access pattern is fixed and independent of the input data). Unfortunately, obliviousness is a strong limitation, especially for integer sorting: we show that the Li and Li conjecture implies an (n lg n) lower bound for internal memory oblivious sorting when the keys are Θ(lg n) bits. This is in sharp contrast to the classic (nonoblivious) Radix Sort algorithm. Indeed, going beyond obliviousness is highly nontrivial; we need to introduce several new methods and involved techniques, which are of their own interest, to obtain our tight lower bound for external memory integer sorting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Monitoring and troubleshooting distributed systems are notoriously difficult; potential problems are complex, varied, and unpredictable. The monitoring and diagnosis tools commonly used today—logs, counters, and metrics—have two important limitations: what gets recorded is defined a priori, and the information is recorded in a component- or machine-centric way, making it extremely hard to correlate events that cross these boundaries. This paper presents Pivot Tracing, a monitoring framework for distributed systems that addresses both limitations by combining dynamic instrumentation with a novel relational operator: the happened-before join. Pivot Tracing gives users, at runtime, the ability to define arbitrary metrics at one point of the system, while being able to select, filter, and group by events meaningful at other parts of the system, even when crossing component or machine boundaries. Pivot Tracing does not correlate cross-component events using expensive global aggregations, nor does it perform offline analysis. Instead, Pivot Tracing directly correlates events as they happen by piggybacking metadata alongside requests as they execute. This gives Pivot Tracing low runtime overhead—less than 1% for many cross-component monitoring queries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors look at the development of machine learning (ML) models, explaining their view that research studies on the training of ML models should report the quantity of computer usage, or compute, and discussing the need for standardization in the measurement of compute. They cite the number of floating point operations (FLOP) as a basic measurement of compute. They offer reasons for the importance of measuring compute including enabling reproducibility of ML research and aiding in the forecasting of new artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities.

This paper introduces architectural and interaction patterns for integrating crowdsourced human contributions directly into user interfaces. We focus on writing and editing, complex endeavors that span many levels of conceptual and pragmatic activity. Authoring tools offer help with pragmatics, but for higher-level help, writers commonly turn to other people. We thus present Soylent, a word processing interface that enables writers to call on Mechanical Turk workers to shorten, proofread, and otherwise edit parts of their documents on demand. To improve worker quality, we introduce the Find-Fix-Verify crowd programming pattern, which splits tasks into a series of generation and review stages. Evaluation studies demonstrate the feasibility of crowdsourced editing and investigate questions of reliability, cost, wait time, and work time for edits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on a list of conferences related to computer systems. The ACM SIGACT-SIGMOD Conference on Principles of Database Systems is planned for March 29-31, 1982 in Los Angeles, California; The Symposium on Reliability in Distributed Software and Database Systems, to be held July 21-22, 1981, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, will have sessions on robust concurrency control in distributed database management systems; language issues for reliability in distributed systems; The Annual Conference of the Association for the Development of Computer- Based Instructional Systems is designed to provide a setting for both formal and informal sharing of CBI experience, research findings. This meeting is to be held May 10-14, 1982, in Vancouver, British Columbia. An international conference. The Impact of Computerization on Social Science Research, is scheduled for September 14-18. 1981, in Grenoble, France.

This article lists open computer science meetings that will be held henceforth on a no-for-profit basis. All these meeting will be sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). Some of the events listed out here are: "Computers in Elementary Education," on March 20-21, 1980; "Conference on Mathematical Models for Energy and Public Policy," on May 19-23, 1980; "12th Annual Conference of the Society for Management Information Systems," on September 22-25, 1980; "Eighteenth Annual Allerton Conference on Communication, Control, and Computing," on October 8-10, 1980.

In this paper an axiomatic, fundamental metamodel of data flow is constructed. The components of the metamodel are the states along the flow of data: physical events, language (data), stored data, human data processing, and decision making. Transfers front one state to another are performed by functions: coding, keying, processing, perception, and human acting. The entire flow is evaluated by a value function. Each of the states and functions is rigorously described by means of definitions, axioms, and theorems. The main purpose of the meta model is to provide a common framework for various models in MIS and consequently to remedy the "Tower of Babel" syndrome prevailing in this area. The way the metamodel can he used to develop other models in MIS is explained in the last part of the paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on security issues related to computerized transaction systems. As more communication travels in electromagnetic and digital form, it becomes easier to learn more about individuals from their communication. Exposure of message content is one obvious danger that is already addressed by well-known cryptographic coding techniques. A more subtle and difficult problem with current communication systems, however, is the exposure of "tracing information." Individuals' addresses, which are often required by organizations and are commonly sold freely by them as mailing lists, are one kind of tracing information. The trend is towards greater use of such information. The other side of the issue is that current transaction systems provide inadequate protection against individuals who forge messages, or falsely disavow having sent or received messages. With paper communication, handwritten signatures are easily forged well enough to pass routine checking against signature samples and cannot be verified with certainty, even by expert witnesses. Also, paper receipts for delivery are too costly for most transactions, are often based only on handwritten signatures, and usually do not indicate message content.

This paper discusses a family of algorithms for computing the volume, moments of inertia, and other integral properties of geometrically complex solids, e.g. typical mechanical parts. The algorithms produce approximate decompositions of solids into cuboid cells whose integral properties are easy to compute. The paper focuses on versions of the algorithms which operate on solids represented by Constructive Solid Geometry (CSG), i.e., as set-theoretical combinations of primitive solid "building blocks." Two known algorithms are summarized and a new algorithm is presented. The efficiencies and accuracies of the three algorithms are analyzed theoretically and compared experimentally. The new algorithm uses recursive subdivision to convert CSG representations of complex solids into approximate cellular decompositions based on variably sized blocks. Experimental data show that the new algorithm is efficient and has predictable accuracy. It also has other potential applications, e.g., in producing approximate octree representations of complex solids and in robot navigation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a model of an I/O subsystem in which devices can be accessed from multiple CPUs and/or via alternative channel and control unit paths. The model estimates access response times, given access rates for all CPU-device combinations. Central to the model's algorithm is the estimation of the rotational position sensing (RPS) miss probabilities by means of the maximum entropy principle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses a model for finding an efficient implementation of a business application system whose logical specifications have been determined in advance. The model views file and program design as a problem of systematically coordinating the configurations of datasets and computations. It uses a straightforward search technique to determine aggregations of computations, aggregations of datasets, device, organization, and key order for each dataset, key order for each computation, and access method for each dataset-computation pair. Although computational results are presented for a sample problem involving 54 computations and 49 datasets, the main point of the paper is that the underlying model works computationally and is simple enough to be adapted to many file design situations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Computers and electronic data processing are a major technological innovation in the operations of American local government. This paper establishes that there is substantial variation among the larger local governments in the rate at which they adopt computer technology, In the level of financial support they provide for EDP, and in the extensiveness and sophistication of their automated applications. The central question addressed is: What might explain the differences between governments in the extent to which they adopt and use computers? Hypotheses are tested for several streams of explanatory factors, using data from more than 500 city and county governments. The findings identify certain local government milieus which are particularly conducive to higher levels of computer innovation. Somewhat unexpected findings reveal the significant impact of the distribution of control over EDP decisions and the dominant political values within the government. Other Important factors include the measured need for computer applications and the presence of external funding support for computing. Finally, the paper suggests a framework for identifying the key determinants of other technological innovations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents information on the Ninth Triennial Meeting of the International Federation for Information Processing. It is an organization whose membership includes several national information-processing organizations. The array of dignitaries addressing the opening session was impressive. The technical program consisted of forty invited paper sessions, forty-seven submitted paper sessions and sixty-two panel sessions. There was a system whose purpose was to provide real-time information on the unfolding of events at the Congress and to assure that contacts between participants are facilitated. Chairman Ugo Montanari had position papers from the panelists available for distribution, which helped the audience keep the various points of view in focus. Whether requirements specification should be data-oriented or procedure-oriented was worked over, and the sense in which a model of reality must be formulated was discussed. The prescribes methodologies of information system development consists mostly of tools.

The article focuses on PL/I, which stands for Programming Language 1, and how its ambitious goals as a programming language. The author discusses the design of PL/I by International Business Machines (IBM) and explains how it brings together their three programming languages FORTRAN (1954), ALGOL (1958), and COBOL (1959).

Focuses on the use of paperless direct recording electronic (DRE) voting machines in the U.S. Ability of DRE voting machines to hide the internal mechanics of voting to the voters; Improve in integrity of elections; Protection of DRE voting machines.

The article focuses on the auto-active approach for co-developing programs and their proof of correctness, specifically the open source SPARK technology. The authors discuss the key design and technological choices for SPARK, which made it successful within the industry, and explore the possible future of SPARK and other analyzers of the same family.

The article offers information on several conferences of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) including the Sigmetrics Conference on Measurement and Modeling of Computer Systems to be held on August 30- September 1, 1982, the Northwest Conference to be held on June 23-26, 1982, and the International Conference on Management of Distribution Data Processing to be held on June 23-26, 1982.

The combinatorial complexity of most floor plan design problems makes it practically impossible to obtain a systematic knowledge of possible solutions using pencil and paper. The objective of this paper is to contribute to the development of computer methods providing such knowledge for the designer. The paper describes an algorithm which generates all possible rectangular plans on modular grids with congruent cells, subject to constraints on total area, room areas, wall lengths, room adjacencies, and room orientations. To make room sizes regular and limit the solution set only such grids are used which minimize the number of cells in the smallest room. The description is sufficiently detailed to serve as a basis for programming. Test results for a Pascal implementation of the algorithm are reported. Realistic problems of up to ten rooms have been solved in modest lengths of computer time The results indicate that the approach of exhaustive generation may prove to be more fruitful than generally assumed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents letters to the editor referencing articles and topics published in earlier issues of the journal "Communications of the ACM." Focuses on issues relating updating of master files; Information on algorithms used in updating process; Introduction on structured programming in everyday activities; Alternatives used in processing the different file records.

Several principles are identified from work on the verification of parallel programs. Concrete examples of the ways these principles can be applied, even when formal verification is not the goal, are then described. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate ways in which the concepts of program verification yield insight into the programming process, programming languages, and program properties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Consistency control has to be enforced in database management systems (DBMS) where several transactions may concurrently access the database. This control is usually achieved by dividing the database into locking units or granules, and by specifying a locking policy which ensures integrity of the information. However, a drawback of integrity enforcement through locking policies is the degradation of the global system performance. This is mainly due to the restriction imposed by the locking policies to the access of transactions to the database, and to the overheads involved with the management of locks. A framework for the quantitative analysis of the impact of these factors on the performance of DBMS is presented in this paper. In a first step, the main factors which determine the behavior of these systems are pointed out and analyzed independently. The results hereby obtained are aggregated in a second step to yield a global performance evaluation. Throughout this hierarchical modeling approach various analytical techniques are used and the results are illustrated by numerical examples. The paper concludes by pointing out the final results' sensitivity to some basic assumptions concerning transaction behavior and the need for more experimental studies in this area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we describe a practical method of partial-match retrieval in very large data files. A binary code word, called a descriptor, is associated with each record of the file. These record descriptors are then used to form a derived descriptor for a block of several records, which will serve as an index for the block as a whole; hence, the name "indexed descriptor files." First the structure of these files is described and a simple, efficient retrieval algorithm is presented. Then its expected behavior, in terms of storage accesses, is analyzed in detail. Two different tile creation procedures are sketched, and a number of ways in which the file organization can be "tuned" to a particular application are suggested. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a calendar of conferences. The 23rd Annual Symposium on Distributed Processing," would be held in Columbia, Ohio, from May 10-11, 1979. The Eighth Mid-Year Meeting of the American Society for Information science," would be held in Banff, Canada, from May 16-20, 1979. The "Software Engineering Workshop," was scheduled to be held New York State Capital District from May 30 to June 1, 1979. The conference on "Impact of Mini and Microcomputers on Bibliographic Databases" would be held in Ottawa, Canada, from June 3-5, 1979.

The article discusses the possibility of selecting a key over open communications channels in such a fashion that communications security is maintained. People have been communicating with each other for many millennia. They often wish to communicate secretly. People have employed a number of ciphers and codes in attempts to keep their correspondence secret. The modern digital computer has made it possible to create ciphers which are, in practical terms, unbreakable. Underlying this success has been a very definite paradigm, which makes very definite assumptions about the nature of the encryption process, and the conditions under which secret communications can take place. It is the purpose of this paper to consider this paradigm, and to question the assumptions which underlie it. The body of the paper begins with an explanation of the traditional paradigm and then develops a new paradigm, which differs significantly from the traditional one. The new paradigm has implications for network security. In a computer network, with many users with diverse needs, security is difficult to maintain.

This paper introduces an alternative lo context-free grammars called regular right part (RRP) grammars, which resemble PASCAL syntax diagrams. Formally, RRP grammars have production right parts, which are nondeterministic finite state machines (FSMs), and, as a special case, regular expressions, since these can be converted to FSMs. RRP grammars describe the syntax of programming languages more concisely and more understandably than is possible with CF grammars. Also introduced is a class of parsers, RRP LR(m, k) parsers, which includes the CF LR(k) parsers and provides the same advantages. Informally, an RRP LR(m, k) parser can determine the right end of each handle by considering at most k symbols to the right of the handle and the left end, after the right end has been found, by considering at most m symbols to the left of the handle. A mechanism for determining the left end is required because there is no bound on the length of the handle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The global data relationships in a program can be exposed and codified by the static analysis methods described in this paper. A procedure is given which determines all the definitions which can possibly "reach" each node of the control flow graph of the program and all the definitions that are "live" on each edge of the graph. The procedure uses an "Interval" ordered edge listing data structure and handles reducible and irreducible graphs indistinguishably. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes a simple, efficient algorithm to locate all occurrences of any of a finite number of keywords in a string of text. The algorithm consists of constructing a finite state pattern matching machine from the keywords and then using the pattern matching machine to process the text string in a single pass. Construction of the pattern matching machine takes time proportional to the sum of the lengths of the keywords. The number of state transitions made by the pattern matching machine in processing the text string is independent of the number of keywords. The algorithm has been used to Improve the speed of a library bibliographic search program by a factor of 5 to 10. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents information on several forthcoming events related to the computing machinery industry. The Second National Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Student Programming Championship Contest in connection with the 1978 ACM Computer Science Conference February 21-23, in Detroit; The First Annual SIGIR Conference from May 11-12, 1978, at the Holiday Inn Downtown, Rochester, New York; The Fourth International Conference on Very Large Data Bases, to be held in Berlin September 13-15, 1978, scheduled to coincide with the International Congress of Data Processing.

This article offers information on the Computing Practices section of the magazine "Communications of the ACM." The section was initiated as a part of an effort of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) to publish more material of direct and immediate interest to computing practitioners. The general scope of the section includes the design and construction of application systems, discussion of computer systems, tools and techniques as they relate application systems to the larger computing environment, and methodologies for the management of the data processing function.

Presents information about several events related to the computer industry. Fourth Symposium on Machine Processing of Remotely Sensed Data during June 21-23, 1997, at Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana; Conference on Computers in the Undergraduate Curricula from June 19-22, 1977, at Michigan State University, Michigan; Third National Symposium on the Management of Data Elements in Information Processing September 28-30, 1977, at Gaithersburg, Maryland; Others.

In the past decades, advances in speed of commodity CPUs have far outpaced advances in RAM latency. Main-memory access has therefore become a performance bottleneck for many computer applications; a phenomenon that is widely known as the "memory wall." In this paper, we report how research around the MonetDB database system has led to a redesign of database architecture in order to take advantage of modern hardware, and in particular to avoid hitting the memory wall. This encompasses (i) a redesign of the query execution model to better exploit pipelined CPU architectures and CPU instruction caches; (ii) the use of columnar rather than row-wise data storage to better exploit CPU data caches; (iii) the design of new cache-conscious query processing algorithms; and (iv) the design and automatic calibration of memory cost models to choose and tune these cache-conscious algorithms in the query optimizer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on consumers' behavior on Internet shopping, convenience and assessing risk associated with it. The article attempts to determine why certain consumers are drawn to the Internet and why others are not. The past century experienced a proliferation of retail formats in the marketplace. However, as a new century begins, these retail formats are being threatened by the emergence of a new kind of store, the online or Internet store. Internet stores allow consumers to shop from the convenience of remote locations. These risks may arise because consumers are concerned about the security of transmitting credit card information over the Internet. Consumers may also be apprehensive about buying something without touching or feeling it and being unable to return it if it fails to meet their approval. The risk associated with shopping on the Internet is low or is overshadowed by its relative convenience. The consumer makes his choices under conditions of uncertainty and therefore maximizes his or her expected benefit. A large number of papers in marketing deal with decision-making under conditions of uncertainty.

The article focuses on practicalities of telemedicine as a viable method of health-care delivery. Telemedicine can be broadly defined as the use of telecommunications technologies to provide medical information and services. It involves the practice of delivering health care over a distance using telecommunications equipment such as telephones, fax machines, personal computers and full-motion interactive multimedia. Telemedicine consists of both real-time interactive consults as well as batch processing of patient data and information for diagnosis at a later time. With the anticipated use of managed-care incentives to provide accessible, low-cost health care, the health-care industry is forced to look at alternative methods for providing services. Telemedicine has a number of challenges to overcome before it can be integrated into the overall fabric of health care. Cost might be the single largest nontechnical issue to be addressed. To be fully integrated at its highest level, telemedicine will also require the filly functioning conversion of the standard paper-based medical record into an electronic format, an area wrought with its own set of challenges.

The article presents information on conferences related to computer science and operations research. The Second Annual Conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques will present papers on current developments and research in the areas of computer theory and techniques, hardware and software systems, and applications of computer graphics. The conference will be held from June 25-27, 1975 at the Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green, Ohio. The Information Processing Association of Israel will hold its 10th National Data Processing Conference at the Binyanei Ha'ooma in Jerusalem on October 13-14, 1975. The conference will discuss on the developments in the field of data processing in Israel over the past years.

This paper describes the design and implementation of a system for typesetting mathematics. The language has been designed to be easy to learn and to use by people (for example, secretaries and mathematical typists) who know neither mathematics nor typesetting. Experience indicates that the language can be learned in an hour or so, for it has few rules and fewer exceptions. For typical expressions, the size and font changes, positioning, line drawing, and the like necessary to print according to mathematical conventions are all done automatically. For example, the input sum from 1=0 to infinity x sub i = pi over 2 produces ... The syntax of the language is specified by a small context-free grammar; a compiler-compiler is used to make a compiler that translates this language into typesetting commands. Output may be produced on either a phototypesetter or on a terminal with forward and reverse half-line motions. The system interfaces directly with text formatting programs, so mixtures of text and mathematics may be handled simply. This paper was typeset by the authors using the system described. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a critique of the programming language C* and remarks on a data encryption scheme of Tong Lai Yu. Authors Walter F. Tichy, Michael Philippsen and Phil Hatcher feel that standardization of C* is premature at this time, since the language contains a number of unproven constructs and obvious flaws. The authors convey the relevant issues to a wider audience and recommend improvement in C*. In response, James L. Frankel welcomes the suggestions. Colin Boyd writes in response to the article "Superimposing Encrypted Data" by Yu and Yu. Colin Boyd finds a way to break the Yu and Yu encryption scheme. They comment, the function used to encrypt foreign exchange in the paper of Yu and Yu can be broken by knowing the ciphertext of just 28 chosen plaintexts. In response, Tong Lai Yu agree that Boyd's method can be used to break their encryption scheme when used in superimposing encrypted data. They suggest that the scheme may be protected from Boyd's suggested attack by making the message block very long.

In this paper, we describe a study that tests the following hypothesis: A programming language construct that has a closer "cognitive fit" with an individual's preferred cognitive strategy will be easier to use effectively. After analyzing Pascal programs that employed loops, we identified two distinct looping strategies, on the ith pass through the loop, the ith element is both read and processed (the READ/ PROCESS strategy); and 2). on the ith pass, the ith element is processed and the next ith element is read (the PROCESS/READ strategy). We argue that the loiter strategy is associated with the appropriate use of the Pascal while construct in contrast, we feel that a construct that allows an exit from the middle of the loop (e.g., loop…leave…again) facilitates the former (READ/PROCESS) strategy Our results indicate that subjects overwhelmingly preferred a READ/PROCESS strategy over a PROCESS/READ strategy. When writing a simple looping program, those using the loop…leave… again construct were more often correct than were those using the standard Pascal loop constructs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Applications of distributed processing networks are proliferating rapidly. It is expected that by the year 2000, distributed networks will be one of the most significant developments to evolve from the computer revolution. Distributed networks are unique in that they bring together concepts of communication, engineering, and computing. From an audit standpoint, the complexities involved in control design and testing are challenging. The auditor needs to be knowledgeable concerning these complexities in order to apply the proper audit tools, particularly since some of these tools are in need of improvement or development. This paper provides a summary of important areas of audit concern in distributed processing systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]