Professional non-neutrality: criticising the third party in psychotherapy

Using audio-recorded data from cognitive-constructivist psychotherapy, the article shows a particular institutional context in which successful professional action does not adhere to the pattern of affective neutrality which Parsons saw as an inherent component of medicine and psychotherapy. In our data, the professional’s non-neutrality functions as a tool for achieving institutional goals. The analysis focuses on the psychotherapist’s actions that convey a critical stance towards a third party with whom the patient has experienced problems. The data analysis revealed two practices of this kind of critique: (1) the therapist can confirm the critique that the patient has expressed or (2) return to the critique from which the patient has focused away. These actions are shown to build grounds for the therapist’s further actions that challenge the patient’s dysfunctional beliefs. The article suggests that in the case of psychotherapy, actions that as such might be seen as apparent lapses from the neutral professional role can in their specific context perform the task of the institution at hand.

Automatic verification of distributed logic specifications

Formal specification is vital to the development of distributed real-time systems as these systems are inherently complex and safety-critical. It is widely acknowledged that formal specification and automatic analysis of specifications can significantly increase system reliability. Although a number of specification techniques for real-time systems have been reported in the literature, most of these formalisms do not adequately address to the constraints that the aspects of 'distribution' and 'real-time' impose on specifications. Further, an automatic verification tool is necessary to reduce human errors in the reasoning process. In this regard, this paper is an attempt towards the development of a novel executable specification language for distributed real-time systems. First, we give a precise characterization of the syntax and semantics of DL. Subsequently, we discuss the problems of model checking, automatic verification of satisfiability of DL specifications, and testing conformance of event traces with DL specifications. Effective solutions to these problems are presented as extensions to the classical first-order tableau algorithm. The use of the proposed framework is illustrated by specifying a sample problem.

WOMM: A Weak Operational Memory Model

Memory models of shared memory concurrent programs define the values a read of a shared memory location is allowed to see. Such memory models are typically weaker than the intuitive sequential consistency semantics to allow efficient execution. In this paper, we present WOMM (abbreviation for Weak Operational Memory Model) that formally unifies two sources of weak behavior in hardware memory models: reordering of instructions and weakly consistent memory. We show that a large number of optimizations are allowed by WOMM. We also show that WOMM is weaker than a number of hardware memory models. Consequently, if a program behaves correctly under WOMM, it will be correct with respect to those hardware memory models. Hence, WOMM can be used as a formally specified abstraction of the hardware memory models. Moreover; unlike most weak memory models, WOMM is described using operational semantics, making it easy to integrate into a model checker for concurrent programs. We further show that WOMM has an important property - it has sequential consistency semantics for datarace-free programs.

Discovery of Application Workloads from Network File Traces

An understanding of application I/O access patterns is useful in several situations. First, gaining insight into what applications are doing with their data at a semantic level helps in designing efficient storage systems. Second, it helps create benchmarks that mimic realistic application behavior closely. Third, it enables autonomic systems as the information obtained can be used to adapt the system in a closed loop.All these use cases require the ability to extract the application-level semantics of I/O operations. Methods such as modifying application code to associate I/O operations with semantic tags are intrusive. It is well known that network file system traces are an important source of information that can be obtained non-intrusively and analyzed either online or offline. These traces are a sequence of primitive file system operations and their parameters. Simple counting, statistical analysis or deterministic search techniques are inadequate for discovering application-level semantics in the general case, because of the inherent variation and noise in realistic traces.In this paper, we describe a trace analysis methodology based on Profile Hidden Markov Models. We show that the methodology has powerful discriminatory capabilities that enable it to recognize applications based on the patterns in the traces, and to mark out regions in a long trace that encapsulate sets of primitive operations that represent higher-level application actions. It is robust enough that it can work around discrepancies between training and target traces such as in length and interleaving with other operations. We demonstrate the feasibility of recognizing patterns based on a small sampling of the trace, enabling faster trace analysis. Preliminary experiments show that the method is capable of learning accurate profile models on live traces in an online setting. We present a detailed evaluation of this methodology in a UNIX environment using NFS traces of selected commonly used applications such as compilations as well as on industrial strength benchmarks such as TPC-C and Postmark, and discuss its capabilities and limitations in the context of the use cases mentioned above.

Java Memory Model aware Software validation

The Java Memory Model (JMM) provides a semantics of Java multithreading for any implementation platform. The JMM is defined in a declarative fashion with an allowed program execution being defined in terms of existence of "commit sequences" (roughly, the order in which actions in the execution are committed). In this work, we develop OpMM, an operational under-approximation of the JMM. The immediate motivation of this work lies in integrating a formal specification of the JMM with software model checkers. We show how our operational memory model description can be integrated into a Java Path Finder (JPF) style model checker for Java programs.

Counter-free input-determined timed automata

We identify a class of timed automata, which we call counter-free input-determined automata, which characterize the class of timed languages definable by several timed temporal logics in the literature, including MTL. We make use of this characterization to show that MTL+Past satisfies an “ultimate stability” property with respect to periodic sequences of timed words. Our results hold for both the pointwise and continuous semantics. Along the way we generalize the result of McNaughton-Papert to show a counter-free automata characterization of FO-definable finitely varying functions.

Dataflow analysis for data-race free programs

Memory models for shared-memory concurrent programming languages typically guarantee sequential consistency (SC) semantics for datarace-free (DRF) programs, while providing very weak or no guarantees for non-DRF programs. In effect programmers are expected to write only DRF programs, which are then executed with SC semantics. With this in mind, we propose a novel scalable solution for dataflow analysis of concurrent programs, which is proved to be sound for DRF programs with SC semantics. We use the synchronization structure of the program to propagate dataflow information among threads without requiring to consider all interleavings explicitly. Given a dataflow analysis that is sound for sequential programs and meets certain criteria, our technique automatically converts it to an analysis for concurrent programs.

Loop transformations: convexity, pruning, and optimization

High-level loop transformations are a key instrument in mapping computational kernels to effectively exploit the resources in modern processor architectures. Nevertheless, selecting required compositions of loop transformations to achieve this remains a significantly challenging task; current compilers may be off by orders of magnitude in performance compared to hand-optimized programs. To address this fundamental challenge, we first present a convex characterization of all distinct, semantics-preserving, multidimensional affine transformations. We then bring together algebraic, algorithmic, and performance analysis results to design a tractable optimization algorithm over this highly expressive space. Our framework has been implemented and validated experimentally on a representative set of benchmarks running on state-of-the-art multi-core platforms.

An adaptive reliable transport protocol based on automatic reSend reQuest(ASQ) technique for wireless sensor networks

There are many wireless sensor network(WSN) applications which require reliable data transfer between the nodes. Several techniques including link level retransmission, error correction methods and hybrid Automatic Repeat re- Quest(ARQ) were introduced into the wireless sensor networks for ensuring reliability. In this paper, we use Automatic reSend request(ASQ) technique with regular acknowledgement to design reliable end-to-end communication protocol, called Adaptive Reliable Transport(ARTP) protocol, for WSNs. Besides ensuring reliability, objective of ARTP protocol is to ensure message stream FIFO at the receiver side instead of the byte stream FIFO used in TCP/IP protocol suite. To realize this objective, a new protocol stack has been used in the ARTP protocol. The ARTP protocol saves energy without affecting the throughput by sending three different types of acknowledgements, viz. ACK, NACK and FNACK with semantics different from that existing in the literature currently and adapting to the network conditions. Additionally, the protocol controls flow based on the receiver's feedback and congestion by holding ACK messages. To the best of our knowledge, there has been little or no attempt to build a receiver controlled regularly acknowledged reliable communication protocol. We have carried out extensive simulation studies of our protocol using Castalia simulator, and the study shows that our protocol performs better than related protocols in wireless/wire line networks, in terms of throughput and energy efficiency.

Efficient classification using phrases generated by topic models

There are many popular models available for classification of documents like Naïve Bayes Classifier, k-Nearest Neighbors and Support Vector Machine. In all these cases, the representation is based on the “Bag of words” model. This model doesn't capture the actual semantic meaning of a word in a particular document. Semantics are better captured by proximity of words and their occurrence in the document. We propose a new “Bag of Phrases” model to capture this discriminative power of phrases for text classification. We present a novel algorithm to extract phrases from the corpus using the well known topic model, Latent Dirichlet Allocation(LDA), and to integrate them in vector space model for classification. Experiments show a better performance of classifiers with the new Bag of Phrases model against related representation models.

PolyGLoT: A Polyhedral Loop Transformation Framework for a Graphical Dataflow Language

Polyhedral techniques for program transformation are now used in several proprietary and open source compilers. However, most of the research on polyhedral compilation has focused on imperative languages such as C, where the computation is specified in terms of statements with zero or more nested loops and other control structures around them. Graphical dataflow languages, where there is no notion of statements or a schedule specifying their relative execution order, have so far not been studied using a powerful transformation or optimization approach. The execution semantics and referential transparency of dataflow languages impose a different set of challenges. In this paper, we attempt to bridge this gap by presenting techniques that can be used to extract polyhedral representation from dataflow programs and to synthesize them from their equivalent polyhedral representation. We then describe PolyGLoT, a framework for automatic transformation of dataflow programs which we built using our techniques and other popular research tools such as Clan and Pluto. For the purpose of experimental evaluation, we used our tools to compile LabVIEW, one of the most widely used dataflow programming languages. Results show that dataflow programs transformed using our framework are able to outperform those compiled otherwise by up to a factor of seventeen, with a mean speed-up of 2.30x while running on an 8-core Intel system.