In this paper we investigate the rapid deployment of a twoway Afrikaans to English Speech-to-Speech Translation system. We discuss the approaches and amount of work involved to port a system to a new language pair, i.e. the steps required to rapidly adapt ASR, MT and TTS component to Afrikaans under limited time and data constraints. The resulting system represents the first prototype built for Afrikaans to English speech translation. 1.

We demonstrate that automated, architecture-independent gadget search is possible. Gadgets are code fragments which can be used to build unintended programs from existing code in memory. Our contribution is a framework of algorithms capable of locating a Turing-complete gadget set. Translating machine code into an intermediate language allows our framework to be used for many different CPU architectures with minimal architecture-dependent adjustments. We define the paradigm of free-branch instructions to succinctly capture which gadgets will be found by our framework and investigate side effects of the gadgets produced. Furthermore we discuss architectural idiosyncrasies for several widely spread CPU architectures and how they need to be taken into account by the generic algorithms when locating gadgets.

Tahoe is a system for secure, distributed storage. It uses capabilities for access control, cryptography for confidentiality and integrity, and erasure coding for fault-tolerance. It has been deployed in a commercial backup service and is currently operational. The implementation is Open Source.

Abstract—Smart Home, this term comprises various approaches, engaged in living and working now and in the future. The objectives of the various approaches range from enhancing comfort in daily life to enabling a more independent life for elderly and handicapped people. The term Ubiquitous Computing, coined by Mark Weiser describes the ubiquity of computer and information technology. The task of Smart Objects, implanted into everyday items, is to sense the immediate environment using various types of sensors, and to process these information. This functionality assigns a kind of artificial intelligence to common, well known objects and enables comprehensive information-processing and interconnection of almost any kind of everyday object. The (preferably) transparent and hidden technology ranges from Wearable Computers and Smart Clothes to ”intelligent ” artificial replacements. It supports the user in almost every part of his life by extending his cognition and information processing capacity and tries to compensate for certain handicaps. The challenge regarding smart homes, especially for supporting the elderly and handicapped, is to compensate for handicaps and support the individual in order to give them a more independent life for as long as possible. In this paper, a common architecture for smart home environments is developed, mapped to an experimental setup, and finally evaluated. I.

In this article we propose a method that can deal with certain combinatorial reinforcement learning tasks. We demonstrate the approach in the popular Ms. Pac-Man game. We de ne a set of high-level observation and action modules, from which rule-based policies are constructed automatically. In these policies, actions are temporally extended, and may work concurrently. The policy of the agent is encoded by a compact decision list. The components of the list are selected from a large pool of rules, which can be either hand-crafted or generated automatically. A suitable selection of rules is learnt by the cross-entropy method, a recent global optimization algorithm that ts our framework smoothly. Crossentropy-optimized policies perform better than our hand-crafted policy, and reach the score of average human players. We argue that learning is successful mainly because (i) policies may apply concurrent actions and thus the policy space is su ciently rich, (ii) the search is biased towards low-complexity policies and therefore, solutions with a compact description can be found quickly if they exist. 1.

The growth in computing power has enabled the storage and analysis of large volumes of data. Monitoring the Internet access profiles of millions of users has become feasible and also economically lucrative. The interesting thing here is that it is not only the crooks who are interested in privacy intrusion, but government agencies also have vested interest in profiling the population mass. This paper describes 4 design patterns that can aide the decision making process for the designers of privacy protecting systems. These design patterns are applicable to the design of anonymity systems for various types of online communication, online data sharing, location monitoring, voting and electronic cash management.

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Submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for Bachelor of Information Technology. Entity-association queries are an important class of database query. These queries return instances of an entity-type which satisfy some constraint involving participation in relationships with other entities. EAV (Entity-Attribute-Value) storage is a data modeling technique to cope with sparse, multi-valued or user-defined data. SQL is poorly suited to expressing entity-association queries and queries involving EAV attributes because the queries must be nested and involve complex join conditions. This report provides a declarative language and prototype interpreter for specifying entity-association queries, with seamless support for

Version control systems have been used to help groups of people working at the same or distributed sites to cooperatively create documents. In particular, these systems are very popular in distributed collaborative software development. However, even using these systems, users often perform concurrent changes that require manual conflict resolution. Important causes for this situation are the lack of mutual awareness and coordination, among developers, and reluctance to commit unstable modifications. The paper addresses this problem by providing a tool that integrates with offthe-shelf version control systems and monitors filesystem accesses to relevant files in order to enhance the awareness among developers. With V C2 users can be aware of uncommitted changes made by remote users; receive request to commit their own changes; be advised to update their local versions. While the final decision is always under user control, the team is made aware of the level of risk when delaying commits and updates.

According to Marr’s paradigm [27], vision involves extraction of meaningful representations from input images,