The CAP theorem and the PACELC model have described the existence of direct trade-offs between consistency and availability as well as consistency and latency in distributed systems. Cloud storage services and NoSQL systems, both optimized for the web with high availability and low latency requirements, hence, typically opt to relax consistency guarantees. In particular, these systems usually o...

Commodity exchange-traded funds (ETFs) are a significant part of the rapidly growing ETF market. They have become popular in recent years as they provide investors access to a great variety of commodities, ranging from precious metals to building materials, and from oil and gas to agricultural products. In this article, we analyze the tracking performance of commodity leveraged ETFs and discuss...

Rotation Forest is a recently proposed method for building classifier ensembles using independently trained decision trees. It was found to be more accurate than bagging, AdaBoost and Random Forest ensembles across a collection of benchmark data sets. This paper carries out a lesion study on Rotation Forest in order to find out which of the parameters and the randomization heuristics are respon...

Schema mappings are fundamental building blocks in many information integration applications. Designing mappings is a timeconsuming process and for that reason many mapping systems have been developed to assist in the task of designing mappings. However, to the best of our knowledge, a benchmark for comparing and evaluating these systems has not yet been developed. We demonstrate STBenchmark, a...

In this paper, we evaluated the performance of key exchange protocols on mobile devices. The wide usage of low power mobile phones causes mobile computing to spread rapidly and an increasing number of networked applications are developed for these devices. One important consideration in this scenario is data security. This is particularly important in secure groupware, collaborative or multiuse...

We develop and implement a portfolio optimization method for building investment portfolios that dominate a given benchmark index in terms of third-degree stochastic dominance. Our approach relies on the properties of the semi-variance function, a re nement of an existing `superconvex' dominance condition and quadratic constrained programming. To reduce the computational burden in large-scale a...

Breast ultrasound (BUS) image segmentation is challenging and critical for BUS Computer-Aided Diagnosis (CAD) systems. Many BUS segmentation approaches have been proposed in the last two decades, but the performances of most approaches have been assessed using relatively small private datasets with differ-ent quantitative metrics, which result in discrepancy in performance comparison. Therefore...

With rapid urbanization, highly accurate and semantically rich virtualization of building assets in 3D become more critical for supporting various applications, including urban planning, emergency response and location-based services. Many research efforts have been conducted to automatically reconstruct building models at city-scale from remotely sensed data. However, developing a fully-automa...