mechanical way to algorithms for SDP with proofs of convergence and polynomial time complexity also carrying over in a similar fashion. Finally we study the significance of these results in a variety of combinatorial optimization problems including the general 0-1 integer programs, the maximum clique

the solution to a nonlinear programming relaxation. This relaxation can be interpreted both as a semidefinite program and as an eigenvalue minimization problem. The best previously known approximation algorithms for these problems had performance guarantees of ...

. This paper studies a method called convex relaxation, which attempts to recover the ideal sparse signal by solving a convex program. This approach is powerful because the optimization can be completed in polynomial time with standard scientific software. The paper provides general conditions which ensure

Since 1984, the Condor project has enabled ordinary users to do extraordinary computing. Today, the project continues to explore the social and technical problems of cooperative computing on scales ranging from the desktop to the world-wide computational grid. In this chapter, we provide

likelihoods, marginal probabilities and most probable configurations. We describe how a wide varietyof algorithms — among them sum-product, cluster variational methods, expectation-propagation, mean field methods, max-product and linear programming relaxation, as well as conic programming relaxations — can

During the past 20 years there has been a dramatic increase in societal interest in preventing disability and death in the United States by changing individual behaviors linked to the risk of contracting chronic diseases. This renewed interest in health pro-motion and disease prevention has not been without its critics. Some critics have accused proponents of life-style interventions of promoting a victim-blaming ideology by neglecting the importance of social influences on health and disease. This article proposes an ecological model for health promotion which focuses atten-tion on both individual and social environmental factors as targets for health promo-tion interventions. It addresses the importance of interventions directed at changing interpersonal, organizational, community, and public policy, factors which support and maintain unhealthy behaviors. The model assumes that appropriate changes in the social environment will produce changes in individuals, and that the support of individ-uals in the population is essential for implementing environmental changes.

). The aim is to explicate a set of general concepts, of relevance across a wide range of situations and, therefore, helping communication and cooperation among a number of scientific and technical communities, including ones that are concentrating on particular types of system, of system failures

) formulate a unified model that integrates elements across the eight models, and (4) empirically validate the unified model. The eight models reviewed are the theory of reasoned action, the technology acceptance model, the motivational model, the theory of planned behavior, a model combining the technology

We present the Lorel language, designed for querying semistructured data. Semistructured data is becoming more and more prevalent, e.g., in structured documents such as HTML and when performing simple integration of data from multiple sources. Traditional data models and query languages are inappropriate, since semistructured data often is irregular, some data is missing, similar concepts are represented using different types, heterogeneous sets are present, or object structure is not fully known. Lorel is a user-friendly language in the SQL/OQL style for querying such data effectively. For wide applicability, the simple object model underlying Lorel can be viewed as an extension of ODMG and the language as an extension of OQL. The main novelties of the Lorel language are: (i) extensive use of coercion to relieve the user from the strict typing of OQL, which is inappropriate for semistructured data

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