Cloud storage systems play a key role in many cloud services. To tolerate multiple simultaneous disk failures and reduce the storage overhead, today cloud storage systems often employ erasure coding schemes. To simplify implementations, existing systems, such as Microsoft Azure and EMCAtmos, only support file appending operations. However, this feature leads to a nontrivial and increasing porti...

The cloud model’s dependence on massive parallelism and resource sharing exacerbates the security challenge of timing side-channels. Timing Information Flow Control (TIFC) is a novel adaptation of IFC techniques that may offer a way to reason about, and ultimately control, the flow of sensitive information through systems via timing channels. With TIFC, objects such as files, messages, and proc...

Code Bubbles is an attempt to redefine the user interface for an integrated programming environment. As it represents a whole new user interface, implementing it as a plug-in is inherently difficult. We get around this difficulty by combining two different plug-in architectures, a standard one based on registrations and callbacks, and a message-based one that puts the plug-in at arm’s length an...

Microbial plugging has been proposed as an effective low cost method of improving sweep efficiency by reducing permeability of water-swept regions of a reservoir. To optimize the field implementation of this method, better mechanistic and volumetric understanding of biofilm growth within a porous medium is needed. In particular, the engineering design hinges upon a quantitative relationship bet...

In this paper we present a cognitively inspired system for the representation of conceptual information in an ontology-based environment. It builds on the heterogeneous notion of concepts in Cognitive Science and on the so-called dual process theories of reasoning and rationality, and it provides a twofold view on the same artificial concept, combining a classical symbolic component (grounded o...

Interspecies exchange of electrons enables a diversity of microbial communities to gain energy from reactions that no one microbe can catalyze. The first recognized strategies for interspecies electron transfer were those that relied on chemical intermediates that are recycled through oxidized and reduced forms. Well-studied examples are interspecies H2 transfer and the cycling of sulfur interm...

Abstract Hundreds of thousands documented and undocumented orphaned oil gas wells exist in the United States (U.S.). These have potential to contaminate water supplies, degrade ecosystems, emit methane other air pollutants. Thus, present risks climate stability environmental human health, which can be reduced by plugging. To quantify opportunities well plugging at national level, we analyze dat...