We address the problem of computing critical area for opens in a circuit layout in the presence of loops and redundant interconnects. The extraction of critical area is the main computational problem in VLSI yield prediction for random manufacturing defects. Our approach first models the problem as a graph problem and solves it efficiently by exploiting its geometric nature. The approach expand...

Are recent donor approaches compatible with a political understanding of policy processes in partner or recipient countries? This question is given increased urgency with the recent calls for and commitment to increasing financial flows, scaling-up of aid, and promoting donor coordination. Do these commitments sharpen the potential dilemma between increased aid and the political processes, and ...

This conference shows the impressive rate of advances in the observations and theoretical interpretations of large-scale structure. But to explain my feeling that we may still have a lot to learn I offer some comments on our sociology, informed by social construction, in adopting lines of thought that tend not to follow straightforward readings of what is observed. Thus galaxies are thought to ...

Agents are rapidly emerging as a new paradigm for developing software applications. They are being used in an increasing variety of applications, ranging from relatively small systems such as assistants to large, open, mission-critical systems like electronic marketplaces. One of the most promising areas of applications for agent technology is e-business. In this chapter, we describe a group of...

Recently, an approach using the discrete event paradigm for the simulation of continuous systems has been developed. This approach is based on the use of piecewise-linear approximations for the representation of continuous, time-varying quantities. The focus of this paper is to show how this new technique can be implemented on a multiprocessor. Our hypothesis is that the Time Warp algorithm is ...

This article introduces a fully automated verification technique that permits to analyze real-time systems described using a continuous notion of time and a mixture of operational (i.e., automata-based) and descriptive (i.e., logic-based) formalisms. The technique relies on the reduction, under reasonable assumptions, of the continuous-time verification problem to its discrete-time counterpart....

The Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) raises a number of issues when required to work in a wireless environment. In particular, within an ad hoc network, where changes can happen somewhat quickly and unpredictably, it has to deal with new tough challenges such as high probability of both network partition and route failures due to mobility. In order to adapt TCP to this demanding paradigm, so...

The background and development of the new production philosophy are presented. The conceptual basis of the traditional and the new production philosophies, as applied in manufacturing, are examined. The traditional conceptual basis of construction is criticized, and an initial new interpretation of construction is given based on the new philosophy. Finally, the challenges of implementing the ne...

A common and important feature of many safety critical interactive devices is number entry. In hospitals, number entry takes the form of setting drug parameters such as doses, volumes, etc. There are several ways a number entry interface can be designed with different consequences for error and speed. Nurses and healthcare practitioners usually have to interact with different interfaces often u...

Fast remote procedure call (RPC) is a major concern for distributed systems. Many studies aimed at efficient RPC consist of either new implementations of the RPC paradigm or manual optimization of critical sections of the code. This paper presents an experiment that achieves automatic optimization of an existing, commercial RPC implementation, namely the Sun RPC. The optimized Sun RPC is obtain...