Stochastic variational inference (SVI) employs stochastic optimization to scale up Bayesian computation to massive data. Since SVI is at its core a stochastic gradient-based algorithm, horizontal parallelism can be harnessed to allow larger scale inference. We propose a lock-free parallel implementation for SVI which allows distributed computations over multiple slaves in an asynchronous style....

We use slave voyage data from 18th century Great Britain and France to answer two questions: 1) How important was the managerial quality of owners and captains in slave trading? and 2) What explains the substantial variation in managerial quality? Utilizing the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, in which we observe the performance of owners and captains in each of their voyages, we follow the...

This paper addresses the adversities of a slave in 19th century Cuba who was considered dangerous because his education; suspicious claim owner; slave’s arrest between Cuba, Spain, and Puerto Rico, defence rights to which he entitled. The scant but interesting documentation on misfortune José Rufino Parra raises many issues regarding daily relationships masters slaves; unheard-of relationship b...

After the emancipation of African slaves in the Caribbean, the labor void left by out-migrating former slaves was filled by in-migrating indentured servants from prepartition India and China. In some areas of the Caribbean such as Trinidad, Suriname, and Guyana, the East-Indian migrants formed large communities. In this article, we report a study based on mtDNA and Y-chromosomal markers of a sm...

PvmJobs is a general bag-of-jobs library for PVM that works with any user created job structure in a master/slave paradigm. A master can spawn slave processes, schedule and dispatch jobs to slaves, coordinate and synchronize the activities. A slave process obtains a job from the master, performs a set of prescribed tasks, returns results to the master, and obtains the next job. Slaves are organ...

Clock synchronisation is a mature and important aspect of distributed computing systems. Despite the importance of accurate timing in music, there are relatively few widely applicable synchronisation solutions available to computer music practitioners. In this paper we present a simple OSC-based synchronisation method for wired and wireless applications, which is designed to be easy to apply an...

A flexible bandwidth management scheme namely Bandwidth-based Polling (BBP) for Bluetooth is proposed. A framing structure of time is defined in BBP, and the master allocates proper number of slots for each active slave in a frame. BBP allows the master to poll a slave more than once to achieve high flexibility for bandwidth allocation. The calculation of the polling time as well as the payload...

In this paper we propose a parallel approach for the Kmeans Vector Quantization (VQ) algorithm used in a twostage Hidden Markov Model (HMM)-based system for recognizing handwritten numeral strings. With this parallel algorithm, based on the master/slave paradigm, we overcome two drawbacks of the sequential version: a) the time taken to create the codebook; and b) the amount of memory necessary ...

Can part of Africa’s current underdevelopment be explained by its slave trades? To explore this question empirically, I combined data from ship records with data from various historical documents reporting slave ethnicities, and construct estimates of the number of slaves exported from each country during Africa’s slave trades between 1400 and 1900. I find a strong robust negative correlation b...

This research has two components, both involving the CASEsim framework. First, we must handle a few practical concerns, such as increasing the framework’s usability and implementing the ability to distribute computation. To achieve this, we use XML configuration files for usability and the Java RMI library for distributed computing. Second, we will study load balancing techniques for 0-dimensio...