Many practical recommendation systems have been studied, and also the services based on such recommendation systems have been opened in real world. The main research questions of this work are i) how these recommendation services provide users with useful information, and ii) how different the results from the systems are from each other. In this paper, we propose a black-box evaluation framewo...

Leakage resilience and black-box impossibility results in cryptography Ali Juma Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Department of Computer Science University of Toronto 2011 In this thesis, we present constructions of leakage-resilient cryptographic primitives, and we give black-box impossibility results for certain classes of constructions of pseudo-random

This paper presents a methodology for automating the evaluation of partial designs using black-box testing techniques. The methodology generates black-box evaluation testsets using a novel semantic graph data model which maintains the relationships between design and requirements data. The testset is used to simulate the design module and the related requirements, thus generating a set of expec...

In the recent past, architectural languages have begun to introduce so-called connec-tors. Connectors separate communication code from the application-speciic components so that it can be easily exchanged. Unfortunately, however, communication code is usually deeply woven into the components and often has to be replaced when the component is reused in a diierent context. In this paper we show t...

Bringing transparency to black-box decision making systems (DMS) has been a topic of increasing research interest in recent years. Traditional active and passive approaches to make these systems transparent are often limited by scalability and/or feasibility issues. In this paper, we propose a new notion of black-box DMS transparency, named, temporal transparency, whose goal is to detect if/whe...

Testing a black-box system without recourse to a specification is difficult, because there is no basis for estimating how many tests will be required, or to assess how complete a given test set is. Several researchers have noted that there is a duality between these testing problems and the problem of inductive inference (learning a model of a hidden system from a given set of examples). It is ...

We consider a fixpoint expressions μy.νx. f (x,y) over the lattice {0,1}n, where f : {0,1}2n → {0,1}n is any monotone function. We study only algorithms for calculating these expressions using f only as a black-box: they may only ask for the value of f for given arguments. We show that any such algorithm has to do at least about n2 queries to the function f , namely Ω ( n2 logn ) queries.

One of the less studied aspects in human voice processing is how the transition articulations between phonemes occur in fluent speech. Often, lack of information pushes us to deal with them using black-box approach. This is especially true in the field of voice synthesis. In this article the transitions from nasal consonant to every possible vocalic allophone of Spanish language is analyzed usi...

New technologies have led to an “explosion” of data available to document states and processes in very many fields. Tools of data mining are being used to extract relevant information. If this information is used in decision making, analytical statistics can provide formal tests comparing the outcomes of different scenarios. Statistics has traditionally dealt with limited information, both in t...

The provenance, or lineage, of a workflow data product can be reconstructed by keeping a complete trace of one workflow execution. This lineage information, however, is likely to be both imprecise, because of the black-box nature of the services that compose the workflow, and noisy, because of the many trivial data transformations that obscure the intended purpose of the workflow. In this paper...