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Distributed computing systems are being built and used more and more frequently. This distributod computing revolution makes the reliability of distributed systems an important concern. It is fairly well-understood how to connect hardware so that most components can continue to work when others

The difficulty of developing reliable distributed softwme is an impediment to applying distributed computing technology in many settings. Expeti _ with the Isis system suggests that a structured approach based on virtually synchronous _ groups yields systems that are substantially easier to develop

the necessary peak computation power in general-purpose systems. However, for a large class of applications in embedded real-time systems like cellular phones and camcorders, the variable operating frequency interferes with their deadline guarantee mechanisms, and DVS in this context, despite its growing

With the significant advances in Information and Communications Technology (ICT) over the last half century, there is an increasingly perceived vision that computing will one day be the 5th utility (after water, electricity, gas, and telephony). This computing utility, like all other four existing

Planning under uncertainty is a central problem in the study of automated sequential decision making, and has been addressed by researchers in many different fields, including AI planning, decision analysis, operations research, control theory and economics. While the assumptions 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-related methods, showing how they provide a unifying framework for modeling many classes of planning problems studied in AI. It also describes structural properties of MDPs that, when exhibited by particular classes of problems, can be exploited in the construction of optimal or approximately optimal policies or plans. Planning problems commonly possess structure in the reward and value functions used to de...

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We introduce a system for sensing complex social systems with data collected from one hundred mobile phones over the course of six months. We demonstrate the ability to use standard Bluetooth-enabled mobile telephones to measure information access and use in different contexts, recognize social

The energy usage of computer systems is becoming an important consideration, especially for batteryoperated systems. Various methods for reducing energy consumption have been investigated, both at the circuit level and at the operating systems level. In this paper, we propose a simple model of job