do not represent an overwhelming motivation for their adoption, the creation of a pervasive agent framework facilitates a very large number of network services and applications. 2 Introduction The idea of performing client-server computing by the transmission of executable programs between clients

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Introduction Many individuals and businesses now rely on the Web for promulgating and finding information, and in particular, rely on centralised search databases. The extent to which these databases reflect the "contents" of the Web in an accurate and timely manner is now under considerable doubt, and in any event, it is apparent that the methods used by the search engines for finding new and modified Web documents are not scaling well. To ameliorate these problems, we have been exploring the use of a "data push" model for notifying Web changes, to replace the current "data pull" model, which uses aglets (aka servlets or peerlets) to distribute the indexing task. Aglets are objects with a thread of control, that can migrate autonomously between processors in a distributed environment. As currently proposed and implemented, aglets have very few of the properties of Persistence. But as they inhabit a similar conceptual space, their properties and applications pr

Introduction Many individuals and businesses now rely on the Web for promulgating and finding information, and in particular, rely on centralised search databases. The extent to which these databases reflect the "contents" of the Web in an accurate and timely manner is now under considerable doubt, and in any event, it is apparent that the methods used by the search engines for finding new and modified Web documents are not scaling well. To ameliorate these problems, we have been exploring the use of a "data push" model for notifying Web changes, to replace the current "data pull" model, which uses aglets (aka servlets or peerlets) to distribute the indexing task. Aglets are objects with a thread of control, that can migrate autonomously between processors in a distributed environment. As currently proposed and implemented, aglets have very few of the properties of Persistence. But as they inhabit a similar conceptual space, their properties and applications pr

Alarge amount of effort is expended every year on finding and patching security holes. The underlying rationale for this activity is that it increases welfare by decreasing the number of vulnerabilities available for discovery and exploitation by bad guys, thus reducing the total cost of intrusions. Given the amount of effort expended, we would expect to see noticeable results in terms of improved software quality. However, our investigation provides a mixed answer: the data does not allow us to exclude the possibility that the rate of vulnerability finding in any given piece of software is constant over long periods of time. Ifthere islittle or no quality improvement, then we have no reason to believe that that the disclosure of vulnerabilities reduces the overall cost of intrusions. 1

What would happen if we wrote an Abstract that was the exact opposite of what the paper described? This is a bad idea, but it makes us think more carefully than usual about properties of Abstracts. This paper describes BadIdeas, a collection of techniques that uses ‘bad ’ or ‘silly ’ ideas

Resilience has gained significant prominence following the re-examination of the performance of the humanitarian and development aid systems in light of the two major food security crises in East and West Africa over the last two years, coupled with ongoing ‘post-2015 ’ negotiations on key global disaster risk reduction, climate change and development policy and resourcing. Resilience has largely been communicated by donor and other key actors as a political agenda, devoid of clear technical guidance as to its added value and how it changes programming on the ground. As a result, country staff are either cynical of its value, are confused as to what it means, or use it as another opportunity to attract funding or to justify their narrow institutional mandate. There are relatively few actors who engage with resilience armed with specific technical guidance informed by comprehensive risk and vulnerability analyses. The continued ‘improper ’ application of resilience reinforces some views that this is another ‘buzzword ’ or ‘fad’, devoid of real meaning for programming, and will mean that the approach will be eventually dropped from policy and programming when ‘the next big thing ’ comes along. This study argues that resilience has sufficient technical added-value (distinct from resilience as a political agenda) and outlines how it can be applied to programming, and, in response to challenges on the ground

Research suggests humans treat computers in social ways. We understandably have an interest in building interfaces that use embodiment and natural language to conform to these social roles. However, we must be careful how and when we embed these agents so they actually improve on existing interfaces, rather than simply making them more social.

, not only to test the and far between. Any review of the psychologi- ideas presented here, but also to build other new cal literature on emotions will show that models that might illuminate the nature and psychologists have typically favored negative value of positive emotions. Psychology sorely emotions

System on a chip (SoC) designs penetrate in an increasing rate the embedded systems market. This a#ects the consumer market as well as other areas, like automotive or aerospace. As the computational power of CPU cores on such SoC increases, the use of operating systems (OS) as basis for the application becomes more and more an issue. This paper investigates the specific requirements of SoCs and analyses to what degree microkernel based OSes have any advantage over standard embedded real-time operating systems. It concludes that temporal and functional verification of OSes are of fundamental importance and that so far no embedded OS fulfills these criteria. However, it seems microkernels seem to support this better that other embedded OSes.