excitability and refractoriness, and qualitatively resembles Bonhoeffer's theoretical model for the iron wire model of nerve. This BVP model serves as a simple representative of a class of excitable-oscillatory systems including the Hodgkin-Huxley (HH) model of the squid giant axon. The BVP phase plane

Reading this text on the application of game theory to two-sided matching problems, I relived an experience shared by many readers of this journal-the process known as &dquo;resident match.&dquo; At a prescribed moment, over 90 % of sen-ior medical students frantically tear open an envelope that holds the name of the hospital at which they will train. Some go into the resident match kicking and screaming. Others are so trusting of the process (or so weak of conviction) that they let it decide whether they will be internists or surgeons. Fighting off the vivid image of the great mechanical maw chewing up our preference lists and spitting out one of the more crucial decisions in our lives, some of us sought as-surances that the algorithm, named NIMP (the National In-tern Matching Program), was fair and just. We were told, or maybe we rationalized, that it was of no use to lie to NIMP.

An information-theoretic model for steganography with passive adversaries is proposed. The adversary's task of distinguishing between an innocentcover message C and a modified message S containing a secret part is interpreted as a hypothesis testing problem. The security of a steganographic

Abstract not found

Similarity is an important and widely used concept. Previous definitions of similarity are tied to a particular application or a form of knowledge representation. We present an informationtheoretic definition of similarity that is applicable as long as there is a probabilistic model. We demonstrate

that are interesting from a theoretical point of view. This document presents on overview of the material to be presented in a tutorial on data integration. The tutorial is focused on some of the theoretical issues that are relevant for data integration. Special attention will be devoted to the following aspects

, inadequate atten-tion given to questions of definition and to the development of theoretical models that seek to explain, not simply to describe, the processes that bring individuals to leave institutions of higher education. With regard to the former, inadequate attention given to definition has often led

and perspectives adopted in these areas often differ in substantial ways, many planning problems of interest to researchers in these fields can be modeled as Markov decision processes (MDPs) and analyzed using the techniques of decision theory. This paper presents an overview and synthesis of MDP

Abstract-SPIN is an efficient verification system for models of distributed software systems. It has been used to detect design errors in applications ranging from high-level descriptions of distributed algorithms to detailed code for controlling telephone exchanges. This paper gives an overview

-frequency models, we find that our simple Gaussian VAR forecasts generally produce superior forecasts. Furthermore, we show that, given the theoretically motivated and empirically plausible assumption of normally distributed returns conditional on the realized volatilities, the resulting lognormal-normal mixture