unique aspects: it does not require the programmer to annotate the source program (invariants are inferred); it minimizes noise (false error messages) through a process known as "counterexample-driven refinement". SLAM exploits and extends results fi'om program analysis, model checking

Current standard security practices do not provide substantial assurance that the end-to-end behavior of a computing system satisfies important security policies such as confidentiality. An end-to-end confidentiality policy might assert that secret input data cannot be inferred by an attacker through the attacker's observations of system output; this policy regulates information flow.

We present a new tool, named DART, for automatically testing software that combines three main techniques: (1) automated extraction of the interface of a program with its external environment using static source-code parsing; (2) automatic generation of a test driver for this interface that performs random testing to simulate the most general environment the program can operate in; and (3) dynamic analysis of how the program behaves under random testing and automatic generation of new test inputs to direct systematically the execution along alternative program paths. Together, these three techniques constitute Directed Automated Random Testing,or DART for short. The main strength of DART is thus that testing can be performed completely automatically on any program that compiles – there is no need to write any test driver or harness code. During testing, DART detects standard errors such as program crashes, assertion violations, and non-termination. Preliminary experiments to unit test several examples of C programs are very encouraging.

WordNet is an on-line lexical reference system whose design is inspired by current

We develop a connectionist approach to processing in quasi-regular domains, as exemplified by English word reading. A consideration of the shortcomings of a previous implementation (Seidenberg & McClelland, 1989, Psych. Rev.) in reading nonwords leads to the development of orthographic and phonological representations that capture better the relevant structure among the written and spoken forms of words. In a number of simulation experiments, networks using the new representations learn to read both regular and exception words, including low-frequency exception words, and yet are still able to read pronounceable nonwords as well as skilled readers. A mathematical analysis of the effects of word frequency and spelling-sound consistency in a related but simpler system serves to clarify the close relationship of these factors in influencing naming latencies. These insights are verified in subsequent simulations, including an attractor network that reproduces the naming latency data directly in its time to settle on a response. Further analyses of the network's ability to reproduce data on impaired reading in surface dyslexia support a view of the reading system that incorporates a graded division-of-labor between semantic and phonological processes. Such a view is consistent with the more general Seidenberg and McClelland framework and has some similarities with---but also important differences from---the standard dual-route account.

This book presents a unified treatment of many different kinds of planning algorithms. The subject lies at the crossroads between robotics, control theory, artificial intelligence, algorithms, and computer graphics. The particular subjects covered include motion planning, discrete planning, planning under uncertainty, sensor-based planning, visibility, decision-theoretic planning, game theory, information spaces, reinforcement learning, nonlinear systems, trajectory planning, nonholonomic planning, and kinodynamic planning.

Today’s smartphone operating systems fail to provide users with adequate control and visibility into how third-party applications use their private data. We present TaintDroid, an efficient, system-wide dynamic taint tracking and analysis system for the popular Android platform that can simultaneously track multiple sources of sensitive data. TaintDroid’s efficiency to perform real-time analysis stems from its novel system design that leverages the mobile platform’s virtualized system architecture. TaintDroid incurs only 14 % performance overhead on a CPU-bound micro-benchmark with little, if any, perceivable overhead when running thirdparty applications. We use TaintDroid to study the behavior of 30 popular third-party Android applications and find several instances of misuse of users ’ private information. We believe that TaintDroid is the first working prototype demonstrating that dynamic taint tracking and analysis provides informed use of third-party applications in existing smartphone operating systems.

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Cyclone is a safe dialect of C. It has been designed from the ground up to prevent the buffer overflows, format string attacks, and memory management errors that are common in C programs, while retaining C's syntax and semantics. This paper examines safety violations enabled by C's design, and shows how Cyclone avoids them, without giving up C's hallmark control over low-level details such as data representation and memory management.

Experimental economists are leaving the reservation. They are recruiting subjects in the field rather than in the classroom, using field goods rather than induced valuations, and using field context rather than abstract terminology in instructions. We argue that there is something methodologically fundamental behind this trend. Field experiments differ from laboratory experiments in many ways. Although it is tempting to view field experiments as simply less controlled variants of laboratory experiments, we argue that to do so would be to seriously mischaracterize them. What passes for “control ” in laboratory experiments might in fact be precisely the opposite if it is artificial to the subject or context of the task. We propose six factors that can be used to determine the field context of an experiment: the nature of the subject pool, the nature of the information that the subjects bring to the task, the nature of the commodity, the nature of the task or trading rules applied, the nature