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In this paper, divided in two parts, we are interested in exploring the concept of natural law (NL). This concept, to say it briefly, pretends that every human being, Christian or not Christians, has a certain degree of moral knowledge. The usefulness therefore of this notion, in the field of social ethics, is that it gives foundations for a possible and fruitful dialogue with not believers, that it allows us to hope that our "Christian" convictions may be shared and defended by others in society. However, it is not that simple. This paper will explore the way Catholics think NL and the critical questions it raises, and then will dip in the tumultuous history of this notion in protestant theology. This study, both historical, theological and biblical, will allow us to position ourselves as evangelicals as regard to this concept and, if it is legitimate, to see how to use apologetically. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, divided in two parts, we are interested in exploring the concept of natural law (NL). This concept, to say it briefly, pretends that every human being, Christian or not Christians, has a certain degree of moral knowledge. The usefulness therefore of this notion, in the field of social ethics, is that it gives foundations for a possible and fruitful dialogue with not believers, that it allows us to hope that our "Christian" convictions may be shared and defended by others in society. However, it is not that simple. This paper will explore the way Catholics think NL and the critical questions it raises, and then will dip in the tumultuous history of this notion in protestant theology. This study, both historical, theological and biblical, will allow us to position ourselves as evangelicals as regard to this concept and, if it is legitimate, to see how to use apologetically. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the post-WWII period, the claims over the savoirdévelopper were numerous, coming from diverse ideological and institutional origins, and dealing with multiple topics, from rural welfare to community development, from education to health and labour. Many were the competing arguments and plans to intervene about those topics in various geographic spaces. Among the international actors participating in the promotion of a developmentalist agenda with global impacts, two interimperial organizations were particularly active, sometimes cooperating, sometimes rivalling with the specialized agencies of the United Nations system: The International Institute of Differing Civilizations (INCIDI, 1949) and the Commission for Technical Co-operation in Africa South of the Sahara (CCTA, 1950). Associated to projects of imperial and colonial resilience in contexts characterized by mounting anti-colonial pressures, both organisations contributed to the growing internationalization of social policies, gathering numerous experts in various conferences, in Europe and in Africa, promoting the production and transfer of original knowledge, publishing diverse reports and enquiries with considerable reach, and even sponsoring specific interventions on the ground. These dynamics were meaningfully, and frequently, shaped by disputes about the motivations and applications of social policies that occurred at the imperial metropoles. This paper addresses these two institution’s roles in the internationalization of social policies, analysing some of their major meetings, key publications, and significant projects, taking the topics of education, ‘social’ and ‘rural welfare’ and, mostly, labour as main observatories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims at demonstrating the methodological and epistemological added value of secondary analysis of qualitative data (SAQD) in political science research on defence issues. Although mainly under-used, the SAQD is of convincing interest for researchers working on defence issues, as the collection of first-hand qualitative data can be complex on this type of research topics. Starting with an epistemological and methodological reflection on the SAQD’s method itself, the article proposes an application of this approach to political science research on defence issues. It also highlights, in a reflexive manner, the inevitable challenges and pitfalls to be taken into account and proposes a reflexive use of SAQD as well as perspectives particularly on the issue of storing the primary qualitative data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reviews the Website Mendeley which allows users to manage and share research papers, create personal digital libraries, and organize and annotate documents.

There exists a lot of travelers mobility simulations, having as main purpose to support decision on mobility policies. When the simulations consider an individual representation of the travelers, in the form of a multiagent system, it is important to consider real volumes of travelers and wide geographic regions. Indeed, it might be important to rapidly predict the effects of a regulation measure or the impact of a particular event on the status of the network. With distributed multiagent mobility simulations, it would become possible to accelerate the simulations and to be able to perform this kind ofpredictions. In this paper, we propose a comparison between two methods for distributing multiagent travelers mobility simulations. The first method consists in a duplication of the transport network and a egalitarian distribution of the agents, while the second method consists in a network partitioning. For the type of simulations considered in this paper, the results show the superiority of the first approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper is a survey of results on universality for cellular automata in the hyperbolic plane and in the hyperbolic 3D-space. We especially address the issue of universal cellular automata with a small number of states. The paper starts with an introduction to hyperbolic geometry and some properties of the tilings in this setting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since 2006, the Conservative government has consistently supported the state of Israel. This support creates a lot of controversy because it is interpreted as a break with the traditional Canadian position on the Israel-Palestine conflict. In this paper, we examine the position of Conservatives Joe Clark and Brian Mulroney, in order to evaluate how the Conservatives' current position, under Harper, is different from those of the past. Finally, the paper reviews the explanations that have been suggested to understand the current Conservative support and we conclude that if there is break, there is also some continuity between Harper and other Conservatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper deals with an extension of SES (System Entity Structure) defined by B. P. Zeigler in order to integrate the concepts of abstraction hierarchy and time granularity into the DEVS (Discrete EVent system Specification) formalism. To accomplish this task, we detail the set of actions that have to be performed: (1) define the abstraction hierarchy and time granularity; (2) add abstraction hierarchy and time granularity to the SES; (3) provide operations to implement abstraction hierarchy and time granularity into DEVS M&S. We explain in detail: (1) the concept of abstraction hierarchy and time hierarchy; (2) the extension of SES in order to take into account the abstraction hierarchy and time granularity; (3) DEVS M&S of complex systems according to different levels of abstraction and different levels of time granularity. A concrete example dealing with the study of the hydraulic behavior of catchment basins is used in order to validate the proposed approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Automatic detection of negated content is often a pre-requisite in information extraction systems, especially in the biomedical domain. This paper proposes two main contributions in this field. It first introduces a corpus built with excerpts from clinical trial protocols in French, describing the inclusion criteria for patient recruitment. The corpus is manually annotated for marking up the negation cues and their scope. Secondly, two supervised learning approaches are proposed for the automatic detection of negation. Besides, one of the approaches is validated on English data from the state of the art: the approach shows very good results and outperforms existing approaches, and it also yields comparable results on the French data. Finally, we propose several experiments with different vector representations of words. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we focus on applying feature selection in the context of secondary diagnoses prediction starting from medico-economic data sources. The results of the prediction is used as guidelines for encoding secondary diagnoses which is a sensitive task in the hospitals requiring a lot of attention in order to be achieved properly. We propose a practical approach to select stable and relevant features from imbalanced datasets. The stability of features is obtained through the convergence of several FS methods to a fair number of features without being impacted by the sampled dataset. The quality of featured shall be deducted from the quality prediction of machine learning algorithms on the selected features. We evaluate the proposed approach on the PMSI database of the CHIC-CM hospital. Our results are quite interesting and opening discussions for these specific health care data supports. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Virtual machines (VM) are used in cloud computing environments to isolate different software. They also make live migration, and thus dynamic VM consolidation to reduce power consumption in the cloud. However, consolidation in cloud environments is limited due to reliance on VMs, mainly due to their memory overhead. This paper presents a solution introducing dynamic software consolidation that makes it possible to dynamically collocate several software applications on the same VM to reduce the number of VMs used. This approach can be combined with VM consolidation, which collocates multiple VMs on a reduced number of physical machines. Software consolidation can be used in a private cloud to reduce power consumption about 40%, or by a client of a public cloud to reduce the number of VMs used, thus reducing costs about 40,5% (SPECjms, 2014). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The temporal fuzzy semantic data model, named EFSM-Tempo (Ellouze and Bouaziz, 2011), keeps track of the evolution of fuzzy data over time, which interests nowadays several computer science applications in different fields (health, meteorology...). However, (1) formulas defined for calculating degrees of membership (d.o.m) of an object to a class require revisions, optimizations and extensions, and (2) modeling and management of temporal complex classes, which are essential components of these applications, require appropriate investigations. In this paper, we first revise formulas mentioned above, and then we extend EFSM-Tempo in order to solve the problems dealing with (a) modeling complex classes evolving over time, and more specifically composition and aggregation classes, and (b) calculating partial and global d.o.m of an object to a class, at any given temporal point. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Software testing is an empirical approach increasingly used for verification and validation of complex systems. It is especially deployed on the upward-sloping branch of the Vmodel through unit testing, integration testing and acceptance testing. Usually, these tests are performed after the development phase on an already written production code. Agile software development pushes some best traditional software engineering practices at extreme levels. In this context, testing is considered as a first and major element of a development process. Test-driven development cycles not only use test cases to check errors but also to specify requirements and lead to test automation. In this paper, we show that usual and agile testing are not opposite, but rather can mutually enhance one another. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The use of models in a context of production requires being able to verify them and transform them to exploit them at best, and this whatever is their size and tools that must handle them. To do it, they have to be store das well as their description (metamodels), in what we name repositories. At present, these repositories of models store the models and their metamodels in forms specific to the various tools which handle them, what returns difficult their sharing within the scope of a collaborative work for example. This paper presents a new approach for the realization of repositories of models based on an independent type of platforms handling. This approach is based on the use of graph databases whose structure is close to those models and metamodels. This article includes an experiment carried out on our NEPTUNE platform with the management of the Neo4J graph database system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Communication protocols reverse engineering consists in developing methods and techniques enabling the inference of a model of these protocols. It is used for different purposes such as to ensure interoperability or to perform security audits. During the last twelve years, numerous tools have been developed to automate, totally or partially, the inference of protocols. The tools rely of various techniques, that are selected and tuned depending on the goal of the reverse engineering activity. The aim of this paper is to present the state of the art of reverse engineering tools, and to identify the major categories of techniques used by these tools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Computing systems have become more and more distributed and heterogeneous, making their manual administration difficult and error-prone. The Autonomic Computing approach has been proposed to overcome this issue, by automating the administration of computing systems with the help of control loops called autonomic managers. Many research works have investigated the automation of the administration functions of computing systems and today many autonomic managers are available. However the existing autonomic managers are mostly specialized in the management of few administration concerns. This makes necessary the coexistence of multiple autonomic managers for a complete system management. The coexistence of several such managers is required to address multiple concerns, yet requires coordination mechanisms to avoid incoherent administration decisions. We investigate the use of control techniques for the design of coordination controllers, for which we exercise synchronous programming that provides formal semantics, and discrete controller synthesis to automate the construction of the controller. The paper details an application of the latter approach for the design of a coordination controller to orchestrate the execution of four self-repair and two self-sizing managers that address the availability and performance of a multi-tiers replication-based system. We evaluate and demonstrate the benefits of our approach by coordinating autonomic managers that address the availability, the performance and the resource optimization within a multi-tiers system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many studies have shown that taking into account the context improves the quality of recommender systems. However, traditional methods infer the context using personal data (location, date, age, etc.). In this paper, we propose to automatically detect context changes, without knowledge on users (explicit context), but based on common features of consulted items (implicit context). To do this, we propose a formal model which can establish a correspondence between the variation of diversity over time within the paths of users and context changes. This model has been tested on a musical corpus of more than 200,000 tracks. To validate the relevance of our model, we sought to retrieve events from the detected changes of context : our model has recovered 88 % of session ends. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper deals with a novel state observer synthesis method of discrete event systems modeled by p-time Petri nets. Indeed, the developed approach aims at estimating the net marking based on the observation of the occurrence of particular transitions. As opposed to many existing approaches the application of the method does not required strong assumptions on the structure of the model considered except the finiteness of the set of reachable markings of the underlying autonomous Petri net. In addition, although the time factor is taken into consideration, the proposed technique is not hampered by the state space explosion problem as it relies on the underlying untimed structure of the P-time model studied - the building of the state class graph is not necessary. The analysis of the firing sequences of interest relies on a schedulability analysis technique based on linear programming. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents the motives that pushed the Chinese leaders to build the Great Firewall and the political functions attached to it. The paper argues that the immaterial wall is a way to preserve an authoritarian regime with little legitimacy because mainly based on fast economic growth. From this perspective, the purpose of the Great Firewall is not to ban access to Internet but to prevent certain western ideas to spread, so perceived as threatening the regime's stability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reviewing the academic literature about the "culture war" debate in the United States, this paper shows that there is no consensus among experts of American politics regarding the thesis that there is a "culture war" under way in the United States and that the American society is polarized on social and moral issues such as abortion, gun control or gay rights. The paper then explains why the arguments debunking the "myth of a polarized America" are relatively absent in the U.S. and Qudbec media coverage of American politics. The last part of the paper argues that the reproduction of this myth has negative consequences for both U.S. and Qudbec societies, but also for Qudbec-U.S. relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the key theoretical and meta-theoretical issues at stake in the analysis of the political and economical dynamics of neoliberal governance on the basis of feminist critiques. More particularly, it problematizes the gendered and racialized dimensions of the changing processes of social reproduction in this context. It stresses the density of the power relations constitutive of these processes and, more significantly, argues that gender relations are not constituted independently of these specific dynamics of power. On the contrary, the paper argues that they must be understood as a constitutive dimension of these transformations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the position papers on vaccines and vaccine combinations against diseases published by the World Health Organization (WHO). The regularly updated position papers summarize essential background information on the respective diseases and vaccines and conclude with the current WHO position concerning their use in the global context. The papers are designed for use mainly by national public health officials and immunization programme managers.

Much of the current research on the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) points to an alliance that is deeply troubled, largely irrelevant, or is bound to collapse. Nearly all of this research focuses on the transatlantic differences over Iraq, the wide differences in military capabilities between the United States and its allies, or the perceived negative impact of alliance expansion. Within recent literature, no research examines Congress's role in shaping the alliance's evolution. This paper examines Congress's views toward NATO across four issue areas; alliance expansion, NATO'S role in Afghanistan, NATO's assistance to the African Union in Sudan, and NATO's role in Iraq after Operation Iraqi Freedom. This paper finds that Congress devoted little attention to shaping NATO's transformation, and was surprisingly disengaged on NATO'S mission in Afghanistan. While examples of congressional entrepreneurship were evident, Congress was mostly deferential to the president. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper begins with a definition of dumping, and then offers an overview of anti-dumping measures and their economic impacts. First, it describes the concept of dumping and explains that anti-dumping measures are quite ineffective. Next, it documents the raise of anti-dumping measures over time. It demonstrates that, nowadays, developing countries are using this protectionist tool as much as traditional industrial countries. Finally, the paper comments the WTO regulation in order to examine the effectiveness of dispute settlement cases involving anti-dumping measures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, the author seeks to explain to lawyers other than from a common law background the approach of English courts to the authoritative impact of previous decisions ('precedents' if a first sense), an approach which English law has famously (or notoriously) set in the framework of the 'doctrine of precedent' by which previous decisions can bind subsequent courts ('precedent' in a second sense). In order to do so, the author first sets this doctrine in the context of certain particular features of the wider legal system (the constitutional position of judges, the relationship between statute and the common law, the unity of English judicial institutions and the relative roles of judges and the parties). The author then describes the formal doctrine of precedent but then seeks to explain the use of earlier authority by modern English judges, illustrating this by reference to the recent decision of the House of Lords in Shogun Finance Ltd v Hudson. The picture which emerges is much more complex than the formal doctrine suggests: rather than following previous decisions in a mechanistic way, English judges engage closely with the variety of approaches, techniques, principles and considerations which they find in earlier judgments, and they evaluate the substantive arguments which these address. In all this, they are willing to innovate, though they are also conscious of the practical and constitutional limitations on judicial law-making. In a final part of the paper, the author considers whether English judges extend their treatment of common law cases to decisions of the European Court of Justice or the European Court of Human Rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Temporal data management is required by different applications in various fields. However, expressing the functional, structural and behavioral temporal specifications of Temporal DataBases (TDB) is not sufficiently addressed in the literature. For this reason, we present in this paper a second version of the UML-TF profile (Mkaouar et al., 2007) in order to further simplify these specifications and the application modules for their deployment. This version proposes: (i) stereotypes to describe temporal functional needs of users, (ii) stereotypes to represent temporal structures of TDB and (iii) a module-library in order to allow expressing TDB manipulating operations by ordinary stereotyped calls to the principals routines of this module-library. This module-library constitutes a proprietary software layer that allows manipulating TDB on top of a Relational DBMS. We illustrate our proposals by examples of a practical application. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies the problem of feature selection in the context of supervised classification. The proposed method is based on the principles of support vector machines (SVM) for the evaluation of subsets of selected features. The Principal component analysis (PCA) method is also usedto highlight the features that explain the most the data. The proposed method is an embedded one as its operation is closely related to the classification algorithm used is that SVM. Hybridized with the ACP it offers the possibility of ordering attributes to select the best thing that other integrated methods can not accomplish. The results showed a significant gain in computation time and classification performance when compared to those obtained by other methods from the literature of feature selection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The registration of two 3D point clouds is an essential step in many applications. The objective of our work is to estimate the isometric transformation to merge two heterogeneous point clouds obtained from two different sensors. In this paper, we present a new approach for 3D-3D registration which is distinguished by the nature of the extracted signature on each point and by the similarity criterion used to measure the degree of similarity. The descriptor that we propose is invariant to the rotation and also to the translation and overcomes the problem of multi-resolution that is related to heterogeneous data. At the end, our approach has been tested on synthetic data and applied on heterogeneous real data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper summarizes the history of automata and proto-robots from Antiquity to the beginnings of Artificial Intelligence. Having explained the difference between an automaton and a robot, it describes the means ± mechanical, hydraulic, pneumatic, electromechanical ± by which these machines have been used as simple automata, as programmable automata, as faked or tele-operated automata, as proto-robots. It emphasizes how much some realizations anticipated the mechanisms or questionings that characterize modern approaches to Artificial Intelligence and bio-inspired robotics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the model-driven engineering field, model execution is one of the main ways to fill the gap between the code (i.e. the developed system) and the model. For adapting a model execution, we propose to directly adapt the model under execution. This requires to add onto the model requisite elements for the adaptation but this avoids to have a second model dedicated to the adaptation as for models@run.time. This paper proposes a contract-based approach for directly adapting a model execution. If some conditions of the contract are not respected, an adaptation action has to be undertaken. The approach is illustrated through a state machine i-DSML (interpreted Domain Specific Modeling Language) and an example of a railway signaling based on the ability to ensure that a model is adapted with a given execution environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The work presented in this paper aims at promoting the reusability of legacy tools in specific contexts, defined by specific metamodels. The approach is based on Modif, a dedicated language for metamodel evolution and model coevolution. Its associated process involves two model migrations. The first one (initial migration), allows to put data under the scope of a legacy tool. The second one (reverse migration), allows to put the legacy tool's output back into the original specific context. This second migration called recontextualization is made possible thanks to the notion of dependency graph. It specifies the relations between the legacy tool's input and the legacy tool's output. The abilities of recontextualization are illustrated by the reuse of three legacy tools defined on a specific metamodel for finite state machines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The specification of a safety critical real-time application often includes end-to-end temporal requirements, imposed by the designer, that are usually checked at implementation level. In this paper we focus on three requirements: latency, i.e. the amount of time required before an input is taken into account by the corresponding output, freshness, i.e., the age of an output with respect to its related input, and reactivity, i.e., the minimal duration of an input to be taken into account by the corresponding output. Using a synchronous modeling language extended with real-time clocks, we show that these requirements can be computed automatically without considering implementation choices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper gives an overview of recent results on scalable analysis of automata networks dynamics. We focus on two properties: reachability - given a global state of the network, does there exist a sequence of transitions that reach a given local state of a given automaton?; and fixed point characterization. Concerning reachability, we give necessary conditions in the general scope of automata networks; and sufficient conditions in the scope of asynchronous automata networks. We address the computation of cut sets for reachability, that is, the sets of local states such that, if disabled, will make the concerned reachability impossible. Those analyses exploit the concurrency in nondeterministic automata networks and rely on abstractions giving compact, non-redundant, but approximate representations of the network dynamics. Such methods have made tractable the analysis of dynamics of biological networks gathering thousands of components. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper develops a data representation of an indoor environment that takes into account user-centred contextual dimensions and mobile data management issues. We introduce a hierarchical, context-dependent, and feature-based indoor spatial data model in which location information is represented at different levels of abstraction. A query language supporting continuous location-dependent queries and taking into account user preferences at execution time is developed on top of that model. The modelling approach is complemented by the implementation of several algorithms that support path searches and range queries applied to both static and moving objects. Several experiments have been conducted to evaluate the benefits of the hierarchical design as well as the scalability and performance of the whole framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is the second part of our survey of results on universality for cellular automata in the hyperbolic plane and in the hyperbolic 3D-space. Here we remind the notion of universality and its variants. We also remind the railway model on which many of our results are based for universal cellular autmata in the hyperbolic plane and in the hyperbolic 3D space. We conclude this section with a application to the pentagrid, the heptagrid, the dodecagrid and the tessellation {11, 3} of the hyperbolic plane. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The economists agree that actually the African economies did take off. A further growth, however, needs investments. Attracting these investments is precisely one of the purposes of the African Union with her 54 Member States and of -- in a geographically more limited area -- the OHADA, the organization for the harmonization of business law in mainly French-speaking Africa. The originality of the OHADA consists in the adoption of uniform Acts, which apply in all 17 Member States. It is only fair to say that through these uniform statutes the influence of France and that of the French juridical culture are perpetuated in Africa. In this paper, the OHADA legislation is described, more specifically from the perspective of one of the Member States, namely the Democratic Republic of Congo, the former Belgian colony. An overview of the uniform Acts relating to the following commercial contracts is given: sale, arbitration agreement, carriage of goods by land, lease for professional purposes, lease of the management of a business, agency and brokerage, pledge, surety, and other guarantees. The uniform Acts modernize the outdated law of the Member States. Some of the introduced innovations are the Trade and Personal Property Credit Register and the Trustee for the guarantees. The French law as it stands in our days (including e.g. the trust-like device of the "fiducie") serves as a model, but so does the United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods (CISG) and the UNIDROIT Principles. The latter is not faithfully followed, though. For instance, the remedy of the anticipatory breach (provided for in the CISG) did disappear out of the revised uniform Act relating to the general commercial law. The unilateral avoidance for breach of contract (provided for in the UNIDROIT Principles), on the other hand, is only by exception allowed and the exceptional circumstances are not defined. The creditor must normally thus apply to the court for an order resolving the contract. The non-commercial special contracts continue to be regulated by the national law of each Member State. This can produce odd effects, so is the ownership of the goods sold transferred to the buyer at the very moment of the agreement of the contracting parties according to the Congolese Civil Code, while the ownership of the goods sold in Congo by commercial contract takes place at the moment of the delivery since the joining of the OHADA. In the present state of affairs, the general law of contracts (as opposed to the OHADA special rules for the different nominate contracts) remains also part of the national law of the Member States. Obviously, this has to change by all means, if one wants the harmonization of the commercial contracts. This article deals therefore also with a text that should become the cornerstone of the OHADA legislation, i.e., the preliminary draft on general contract law. It follows as close as possible the UNIDROIT Principles and there are good reasons for this, as explained by the draughts man professor M. Fontaine. Unfortunately, this draft is momentarily blocked off backstage by some lawyers steeped in the myth of the French legal culture. It may indeed seem hard to imagine, for instance, that the causa disappears! But then also does the consideration in the UNIDROIT Principles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gyrokinetic simulations lead to huge computational needs. Up to now, the Semi- Lagrangian code GYSELA performs large simulations using up to 65k cores. To understand more accurately the nature of plasma turbulence, finer resolutions are necessary which make GYSELA a good candidate to exploit the computational power of future Extreme scale machines. Among the Exascale challenges, the less memory per core is one of the most critical issues. This paper deals with memory management in order to reduce the memory peak and presents a general method to understand the memory behavior of an application when dealing with very large meshes. This enables us to extrapolate the behavior of GYSELA for expected capabilities of Extreme scale machines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Designing and implementing a quality matchmaking service for Multiplayer Online Games requires an extensive knowledge of the habits, behaviors and expectations of the players. Gathering and analyzing traces of real games offers insight on these matters, but game server providers are very protective of such data in order to deter possible reuse by the competition and to prevent cheating. We circumvented this issue by gathering public data from a League of Legends server (information over more than 28 million game sessions). In this paper, we present our database which is freely available online, and we detail the analysis and conclusions we draw from this data regarding the expected requirements for the matchmaking service. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since 2004, the trend in the semiconductor industry is to increase the number of cores. Circuits with tens or even hundreds of cores are currently available on the market, and circuits with thousands of cores are foreseen within the next few years. Virtual platforms are key tools for the design and validation of these circuits and to develop the software. To simulate processors in virtual platforms, interpretive instruction set simulation is the most widespread technique but it does not scale well with the increasing number of cores. In this paper, we extend a native simulation technique to handle of ad-hoc architectural specificities and study its scalability with respect to the number of cores. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Some applications, like online sales servers, intensively use disk I/Os. Their performance is tightly coupled with I/Os efficiency. To speed up I/Os, operating systems use free memory to offer caching mechanisms. Several I/O intensive applications may require a large cache to perform well. However, nowadays resources are virtualized. In clouds, for instance, virtual machines (VMs) offer both isolation and flexibility. This is the foundation of cloud elasticity, but it induces a partitionning of the physical resources, including memory. This partitionning reduces the amount of available memory a VM can use for caching I/Os. In this paper, we propose PUMA, a tool that allows I/O intensive applications running on top of VMs to benefit of large caches. This is realized by providing a remote caching mechanism that provides the ability for any VM to extend its cache using the memory of other VMs located either in the same or in a different host. PUMA can increase application performance up to 9 times. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Generalized distributed mutual exclusion algorithms allow processes to concurrently access a set of shared resources. However, they must ensure an exclusive access to each resource. In order to avoid deadlocks, many of them are based on the strong assumption of a prior knowledge about conflicts between processes' requests. Some other approaches, which do not require such a knowledge, exploit broadcast mechanisms or a global lock, degrading message complexity and synchronization cost. We propose in this paper a new algorithm for shared resources allocation which reduces the communication between non-conflicting processes without a prior knowledge of processes conflicts. Performance evaluation results show that our solution improves resource use rate by a factor up to 20 compared to a global lock based algorithm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents GECOS (GEneration Counter Optimistic Synchronisation), a new mechanism for a multi-reader single-writer lock-free access to linked data structures. This mechanism has been specially conceived to take into account different constraints of manycore architectures by ensuring not only scalable performance, but also an optimal use of memory. First results, obtained on a system with 64 cores, show excellent performance that are similar to the best known mechanisms, such as Hazard Pointers or Read-Copy-Update. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The fast data delivering to computing resources is a crucial issue for the effectiveness of High Performance Computing. Indeed, the microprocessor speed improvement rate is far slower than the improvement rate of the access time to the memory. The virtualization adds additional layers to communications taking place inside a computer. Therefore, we have considered the development of two tools to speed up data transfers between Xen virtual machines, also called domains. The first tool allows faster data transfers between domains by avoiding data copies using a circular buffer. The second tool drastically reduces transferred data volume through memory pages pinning and Machine Frame Number (MFN) sharing. In this paper, we describe our tools' architectures, compare their performances with existing solutions (TCP sockets and XenSocket), and benchmark OpenCL GPU applications in realistic situations. In some cases, we spare nearly 60 % of the transfer time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The growing number of cores in a single chip goes along with an increase in communications. The variety of applications runing on the chip causes spatial and temporal heterogeneity of communications. To address these issues, we present in this paper a dynamically reconfigurable interconnect based on Radio Frequency (RF) for intra chip communications. The use of RF allows to increase the bandwidth while minimizing the latency. Dynamic reconfiguration of the interconnect allows to handle the heterogeneity of communications. We present the rationale for choosing RF over optics and 3D, the detailed architecture of the network and the chip implementing it, the evaluation of its feasibility and its performances. One advantage of this RF interconnect is the ability to broadcast without additional cost compared to point-topoint communications, opening new perspectives in terms of cache coherence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper compares the political ideas of Stephen Harper and the controversial philosopher, Leo Strauss. It focuses specifically on these thinkers' shared fear of the United Nations, using Strauss ' more penetrating and systematic thought to clarify the deeper assumptions underlying Harper s attitude toward the institution. The first such assumption is the belief that western nations 'supportfor the UN is symptomatic of a weak-willed liberalism that is unwilling to face its enemies. No less important, however, is the assumption that it is precisely through the encounter with a deadly enemy that the nation-state can be returned to moral and political health. These views, I argue, help to explain an era in Canadian foreign policy that has been marked by strained relations with the UN and an abiding preoccupation with the threat of terrorism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Is there such a thing as Canadian neoconservatism ? Even though many analysts in Canadian foreign policy use this term to describe the Harper government and the « Calgary School », they fail to conceptualize precisely the political object in question. Some go as far as saying that this ideology was imported from the United States. This paper s goal is, first, to show the « recognition » that American neoconservatives give to their Canadian counterparts and vice versa, thus illustrating the ideological proximity between these two neoconservatisms. However, the second portion of the article consists in proposing a generic definition of neoconservatism, to show that if it is warranted to speak of a Canadian neoconservatism to describe the Harper government and the « Calgary School », it is not a sign of American influence. Rather, Canadian neoconservatism has its own particularities and tradition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Web applications have become increasingly exposed to malicious attacks that could affect essential properties such as confidentiality, integrity or availability of information systems. To cope with these threats, it is necessary to develop efficient security protection mechanisms and testing techniques (firewall, intrusion detection system, Web scanner, etc.). This paper presents a new methodology, based on Web pages clustering techniques, that is aimed at identifying the vulnerabilities of a Web application following a black box analysis of the target application. Each identified vulnerability is actually exploited to ensure that the identified vulnerability does not correspond to a false positive. The proposed approach can also highlight different potential attack scenarios including the exploitation of several successive vulnerabilities, taking into account explicitly the dependencies between these vulnerabilities. We have focused in particular on code injection vulnerabilities, such as SQL injections. The proposed method led to the development of a new Web vulnerability scanner and has been validated experimentally based on various vulnerable applications. This methodology has been implemented and has been validated experimentally on several examples of vulnerable applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]