Stochastic programs are usually hard to solve when applied to real-world problems; a common approach is to consider the simpler deterministic program in which random parameters are replaced by their expected values, with a loss in terms of quality of the solution. The Value of the Stochastic Solution—VSS—is normally used to measure the importance of using a stochastic model. But what if VSS is ...

Safety standards (e.g., ISO 26262) define safety life-cycles to be adopted for the development of safety-critical systems. Professionals (i.e., safety engineers, safety managers, and, more broadly safety cultureaware personnel) who are responsible of the development of such systems can be, in turn, considered as safety-critical systems. Coursemodules aimed at forming such professionals are crit...

Sample size calculations require specification of the treatment effect, but what if this is not known? Two-stage tests use the first stage to estimate the treatment effect and modify the sample size accordingly. The purpose of this paper is to unify the theory of two-stage testing based on treatment effect. The conditional error function approach of Proschan and Hunsberger (1995) is shown to be...

Ramsey’s theorem says that for every clique H1 and for every graph H2 with no edges, all graphs containing neither of H1,H2 as induced subgraphs have bounded order. What if, instead, we exclude a graph H1 with a vertex whose deletion gives a clique, and the complement H2 of another such graph? This no longer implies bounded order, but it implies tightly restricted structure that we describe. Th...

These days, it is becoming increasingly difficult to browse a newspaper, magazine, or business technology news segment on television without seeing some reference to the Internet, and the new information services available on it that offer some sort of access to "cyberspace" or "the information superhighway." Furthermore, it seems that in some cases, these terms are used interchangably describi...

Information has no value unless it is accessible. With physical books, most people rely on the table of contents and subject index to find what they want. But what if they are reading a book in a digital library and have access to a full­text search tool? The paper describes a search interface to Realistic Books, and investigates the influ­ ence of document format and search result presentation...

In many real-life situations, we know the probability distribution of two random variables x1 and x2, but we have no information about the correlation between x1 and x2; what are the possible probability distributions for the sum x1 + x2? This question was originally raised by A. N. Kolmogorov. Algorithms exist that provide best-possible bounds for the distribution of x1 +x2; these algorithms h...

Given a stream of data, a typical approach in streaming algorithms is to design a sophisticated algorithm with small memory that computes a specific statistic over the streaming data. Usually, if one wants to compute a different statistic after the stream is gone, it is impossible. But what if we want to compute a different statistic after the fact? In this paper, we consider the following fasc...