Discretized landscapes can be mapped onto ranked surfaces, where every element (site or bond) has a unique rank associated with its corresponding relative height. By sequentially allocating these elements according to their ranks and systematically preventing the occupation of bridges, namely elements that, if occupied, would provide global connectivity, we disclose that bridges hide a new tric...

Ranked set sampling was introduced by McIntyre (1952, Australian Journal of Agricultural Research, 3, 385-390) as a cost-effective method of selecting data if observations are much more cheaply ranked than measured. He proposed its use for estimating the population mean when the distribution of the data was unknown. In this paper, we examine the advantage, if any, that this method of sampling h...

Publish/subscribe systems offer an attractive alternative to classic search methods by allowing users to specify their interests once and be notified whenever new interesting information becomes available. All relevant information for a user is considered equally important. This can result in large amounts of notifications being delivered to users. In this PhD thesis, we consider the problem of...

Personalized recommendation modules have become an integral part of most consumer information systems. Whether you are looking for a movie to watch, a restaurant to dine, or a news article to read, the number of available option has exploded significantly. Furthermore, the commensurate growth in data collection and processing has created a unique opportunity, where the successful identification...

We present a type-and-effect system that derives an exceptionannotated type signature for a given term of a simply typed nonstrict functional language with general recursion and a list data type. This signature declares the set of exceptional values that may be present among the values of the term, or produced by terms of function type. Higher-ranked effect polymorphism and effect operators rem...

A plethora of data sources contain data entities that could be ordered according to a variety of attributes associated with the entities. Such orderings result effectively in a ranking of the entities according to the values in the attribute domain. Commonly, users correlate such sources for query processing purposes through join operations. In query processing, it is desirable to incorporate u...