Abstract

Abstract
This project aims to develop a pen-based software tool that will assist in the process of doing mathematics by providing structured manipulation of handwritten mathematical expressions. The tool will be used to support the teaching of the dynamics of problem solving in a way that combines the advantages of the traditional blackboard style of teaching with the flexibility and accuracy of computer software. It will provide not only a simpler way to input mathematics - by allowing the recognition of handwritten mathematics - but also enhance students' understanding of the calculational techniques and facilitate the process of doing mathematics - by providing structure editing. Some of the most important features of this tool are the accurate selection and copy of expressions, the automatic application of algebraic rules and the use of gestures to apply them, and also the combined writing of mathematics and text. These features will have a major impact on writing, doing, and presenting mathematics. This project includes the required technical developments and also the application and testing of the tool in concrete situations, namely in mathematics and computing science courses. © 2008 IEEE.

Abstract

Abstract
In epidemic or gossip-based multicast protocols, each node simply relays each message to some random neighbors, such that all destinations receive it at least once with high probability. In sharp contrast, structured multicast protocols explicitly build and use a spanning tree to take advantage of efficient paths, and aim at having each message received exactly once. Unfortunately, when failures occur, the tree must be rebuilt. Gossiping thus provides simplicity and resilience at the expense of performance and resource efficiency. In this paper we propose a novel technique that exploits knowledge about the environment to schedide payload transmission when gossiping. The resulting protocol retains the desirable qualities of gossip, but approximates the performance of structured multicast. In some sense, instead of imposing structure by construction, we let it emerge from the operation of the gossip protocol. Experimental evaluation shows that this approach is effective even when knowledge about the environment is only approximate.

Abstract
The Database Management System ( DBMS) used to be a commodity software component, with well known standard interfaces and semantics. However, the performance and reliability expectations being placed on DBMSs have increased the demand for a variety add-ons, that augment the functionality of the database in a wide range of deployment scenarios, offering support for features such as clustering, replication, and self-management, among others. A well known software engineering approach to systems with such requirements is reflection. Unfortunately, standard reflective interfaces in DBMSs are very limited. Some of these limitations may be circumvented by implementing reflective features as a wrapper to the DBMS server. Unfortunately, these solutions comes at the expense of a large development effort and significant performance penalty.

Abstract
In this paper we propose to use Interaction Nets as a formalism for Visual Functional Programming. We consider the use of recursion patterns as a programming idiom, and introduce a suitable archetype/instantiation mechanism for interaction agents, which allows one to define agents whose behaviour is based on recursion patterns. © 2007, Universitatsbibliothek TU Berlin.