Many peer-assisted content-distribution systems reward a peer based on the amount of data that this peer serves to others. However, validating that a peer did so is, to our knowledge, an open problem; e.g., a group of colluding attackers can earn rewards by claiming to have served content to one another, when they have not. We propose a puzzle mechanism to make contribution-aware peer-assisted ...

Pushback is a mechanism for defending against Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks. DDoS attacks are treated as a congestion-control problem, but because most such congestion is caused by malicious hosts not obeying traditional end-to-end congestion control, the problem must be handled by the routers. Functionality is added to each router to detect and preferentially drop packets that p...

Tne paper discusses some issues related to model checking utility and reliability: (1) utility of model checking and games for solving puzzles, and (2) importance of games and puzzles for validation of model checkers.

This paper describes an algorithm that pieces together 2D fragments of an object. Matching fragments of an object is useful for solving puzzles or reassembling archaeological fragments. Many factors, such as the number of pieces and the complex shapes of pieces make this a difficult problem. Various approaches to this problem exist. This paper presents an approach on corner detection and curve ...

This is the era of big-data: high-volume, high-velocity and high-variety information assets are being collected, demanding cost-effective information processing. Analytic techniques primarily based on statistical methods are showing astonishing results, but exhibit also limited reasoning capabilities. On the other end of the spectrum the era of bigreasoning is emerging with next-generation cogn...

Developmental dyslexia, or specific learning difficulties, is the most common neurobehavioral disorder affecting school-aged children, with a prevalence rate of 5-17.5%. Family and twin studies have pointed to a genetic component in the etiology of dyslexia. However, dyslexia is a complex disorder at both the genetic and environmental levels, and its nature so far remains unclear. Dyslexia is t...

Solving logic puzzles has become a very popular past-time, particularly since the Sudoku puzzle started appearing in newspapers all over the world. We have developed a puzzle generator for a modification of Sudoku, called Jidoku, in which clues are binary disequalities between cells on a 9× 9 grid. Our generator guarantees that puzzles have unique solutions, have graded difficulty, and can be s...

Logic puzzle games like Sudoku are getting popular for they are flexible in playing time and space and are useful in education. For puzzles, difficulty is arguably one of the most important factors in problem design. A problem too easy is boring, yet a problem too hard is frustrating. Providing problems with adequate difficulty to avoid boredom or anxiety is thus an important issue. In this pap...

This paper reports on a new undergraduate course at Florida Atlantic University titled: “Introduction to Inventive Problem Solving in Engineering”. The goal is to enhance inventive thinking abilities of undergraduate students resulting in skills that can be used in science, math, engineering and technology. The course is focused on developing thinking skills that stay with the students, and is ...

Jigsaw puzzle solving has recently become an emerging research area. The developed techniques have been widely used in applications beyond solving. This paper focuses on Puzzles with Large Eroded Gaps (JPwLEG). We formulate the reassembly as a combinatorial optimization problem and propose Siamese-Discriminant Deep Reinforcement Learning (SD2RL) to solve it. A Q-network (DQN) is designed visual...