This commentary addresses Bowen et al’s empirical study of perspectives of Canadian healthcare staff towards research and their call for multi-faceted action to improve misalignments in the system. This commentary argues that tensions and misalignments between research and service are inherent and can never be eradicated. Building on previous work by Lanham et al, I pro...

We show how standard IPC mechanisms can be used with the fork() system call to perform explicit state model checking on all interleavings of a multithreaded application. We specifically show how to check for deadlock and race conditions in programs with two threads. Our techniques are easy to apply to other languages, and require only the most rudimentary parsing of the target language. Our fun...

The paper addresses the problem of emulating a regular register in a synchronous distributed system where clients invoking read() and write() operations are anonymous while server processes maintaining the state of the register may be compromised by rational adversaries (i.e., a server might behave as rational malicious Byzantine process). We first model our problem as a Bayesian game between a...

Fill-in-the-blank items are commonly featured in computer-assisted language learning (CALL) systems. An item displays a sentence with a blank, and often proposes a number of choices for filling it. These choices should include one correct answer and several plausible distractors. We describe a system that, given an English corpus, automatically generates distractors to produce items for preposi...

We present a syscall-based approach to automatically diagnose performance problems, server-to-client propagated errors, and server crash/hang problems in PVFS. Our approach compares the statistical and semantic attributes of syscalls across PVFS servers in order to diagnose the culprit server, under these problems, for different file-system benchmarks—dd, PostMark and IOzone—in a PVFS cluster.

The search for patterns or motifs in data represents an area of key interest to many researchers. In this paper we present the Motif Tracking Algorithm, a novel immune inspired pattern identification tool that is able to identify unknown motifs which repeat within time series data. The power of the algorithm is derived from its use of a small number of parameters with minimal assumptions. The a...