Irreducibility of configurations

In a paper from 1886, Martinetti enumerated small $v_3$-configurations. One of his tools was a construction that permits to produce a $(v+1)_3$-configuration from a $v_3$-configuration. He called configurations that were not constructible in this way irreducible configurations. According to his definition, the irreducible configurations are Pappus' configuration and four infinite families of configurations. In 2005, Boben defined a simpler and more general definition of irreducibility, for which only two $v_3$-configurations, the Fano plane and Pappus' configuration, remained irreducible. The present article gives a generalization of Boben's reduction for both balanced and unbalanced $(v_r,b_k)$-configurations, and proves several general results on augmentability and reducibility. Motivation for this work is found, for example, in the counting and enumeration of configurations

The Processing of Small Issues of Securities Under Regulation A

The project “Six weeks in Belgrade” is a comic book and an exhibition of our research on citizen participation in the planning process in Belgrade, Serbia.   The project discusses how participation can be used to improve the way we plan and build our cities: If, and how, participation can result in a more democratic planning, aiming at a more long-term sustainable and less market-driven urban development. It presents current planning conditions in Belgrade, and current actors and projects in Belgrade. It also introduces a speculative method for a participatory practice through fiction and the visual language of comics. The project maps both formal and informal initiatives in the field of urban planning.The research was done on the basis of interviews, books and articles. By mapping these initiatives we wanted to show their importance, hoping that people will get inspired and involved in the planning and making of the city, and also to strengthen already existing initiatives. The research is presented in the form of a comic narrative, presenting an alternative mode of communicating ideas in architecture and planning. Something which is of specific importance for the development of a participatory practice. Projektet “Sex veckor i Belgrad” är en seriebok och en utställning baserad på vår undersökning av medborgardeltagande i stadsplaneringen i Belgrad, Serbien. Utställningen var på KTH, Arkitekturskolan 2-5 juni 2014. “Sex veckor i Belgrad” diskuterar hur deltagande i stadsplanering kan användas för att förbättra hur vi planerar våra städer: Om och hur deltagande kan leda till en mer demokratisk stadsplanering i en strävan mot en mer långsiktigt hållbar och mindre marknadsstyrd stadsutveckling. Det diskuterar dagens förutsättningar för stadsplanering i Belgrad genom att titta på stadsplaneringshistorien där. Och genom intervjuer med planerare, politiker, akademiker och framförallt aktivister kartläggs både formella och informella initiativ inom stadsbyggandet i Belgrad. Genom att kartlägga dessa initiativ vill vi stärka dem och visa på deras betydelse, och hoppas att fler blir inspirerade och involverade i planeringen och skapandet av staden.     Projektet föreslår ett nytt sätt att jobba på, med deltagande i praktiken och en spekulativ metod som tar avstamp i fiktion och serieteckningens visuella språk. Resultaten av undersökningen är presenterad i form av en narrativ seriebok, och visar en alternativ metod att kommunicera idéer inom arkitektur och stadsplanering. Något som är angeläget vid en utveckling av en deltagande praktik

Cooperative Caching for Multimedia Streaming in Overlay Networks

Traditional data caching, such as web caching, only focuses on how to boost the hit rate of requested objects in caches, and therefore, how to reduce the initial delay for object retrieval. However, for multimedia objects, not only reducing the delay of object retrieval, but also provisioning reasonably stable network bandwidth to clients, while the fetching of the cached objects goes on, is important as well. In this paper, we propose our cooperative caching scheme for a multimedia delivery scenario, supporting a large number of peers over peer-to-peer overlay networks. In order to facilitate multimedia streaming and downloading service from servers, our caching scheme (1) determines the appropriate availability of cached stream segments in a cache community, (2) determines the appropriate peer for cache replacement, and (3) performs bandwidth-aware and availability-aware cache replacement. By doing so, it achieves (1) small delay of stream retrieval, (2) stable bandwidth provisioning during retrieval session, and (3) load balancing of clients' requests among peers

Reasoning & Querying – State of the Art

Various query languages for Web and Semantic Web data, both for practical use and as an area of research in the scientific community, have emerged in recent years. At the same time, the broad adoption of the internet where keyword search is used in many applications, e.g. search engines, has familiarized casual users with using keyword queries to retrieve information on the internet. Unlike this easy-to-use querying, traditional query languages require knowledge of the language itself as well as of the data to be queried. Keyword-based query languages for XML and RDF bridge the gap between the two, aiming at enabling simple querying of semi-structured data, which is relevant e.g. in the context of the emerging Semantic Web. This article presents an overview of the field of keyword querying for XML and RDF

Alibi framework for identifying reactive jamming nodes in wireless LAN

Reactive jamming nodes are the nodes of the network that get compromised and become the source of jamming attacks. They assume to know any shared secrets and protocols used in the networks. Thus, they can jam very effectively and are very stealthy. We propose a novel approach to identifying the reactive jamming nodes in wireless LAN (WLAN). We rely on the half-duplex nature of nodes: they cannot transmit and receive at the same time. Thus, if a compromised node jams a packet, it cannot guess the content of the jammed packet. More importantly, if an honest node receives a jammed packet, it can prove that it cannot be the one jamming the packet by showing the content of the packet. Such proofs of jammed packets are called "alibis" - the key concept of our approach. In this paper, we present an alibi framework to deal with reactive jamming nodes in WLAN. We propose a concept of alibi-safe topologies on which our proposed identification algorithms are proved to correctly identify the attackers. We further propose a realistic protocol to implement the identification algorithm. The protocol includes a BBC-based timing channel for information exchange under the jamming situation and a similarity hashing technique to reduce the storage and network overhead. The framework is evaluated in a realistic TOSSIM simulation where the simulation characteristics and parameters are based on real traces on our small-scale MICAz test-bed. The results show that in reasonable dense networks, the alibi framework can accurately identify both non-colluding and colluding reactive jamming nodes. Therefore, the alibi approach is a very promising approach to deal with reactive jamming nodes.published or submitted for publicationnot peer reviewe

CA-AQM: Channel-Aware Active Queue Management for Wireless Networks

In a wireless network, data transmission suffers from varied signal strengths and channel bit error rates. To ensure successful packet reception under different channel conditions, automatic bit rate control schemes are implemented to adjust the transmission bit rates based on the perceived channel conditions. This leads to a wireless network with diverse bit rates. On the other hand, TCP is unaware of such {\em rate diversity} when it performs flow rate control in wireless networks. Experiments show that the throughput of flows in a wireless network are driven by the one with the lowest bit rate, (i.e., the one with the worst channel condition). This does not only lead to low channel utilization, but also fluctuated performance for all flows independent of their individual channel conditions. To address this problem, we conduct an optimization-based analytical study of such behavior of TCP. Based on this optimization framework, we present a joint flow control and active queue management solution. The presented channel-aware active queue management (CA-AQM) provides congestion signals for flow control not only based on the queue length but also the channel condition and the transmission bit rate. Theoretical analysis shows that our solution isolates the performance of individual flows with diverse bit rates. Further, it stabilizes the queue lengths and provides a time-fair channel allocation. Test-bed experiments validate our theoretical claims over a multi-rate wireless network testbed

CENTURION: Incentivizing Multi-Requester Mobile Crowd Sensing

The recent proliferation of increasingly capable mobile devices has given rise to mobile crowd sensing (MCS) systems that outsource the collection of sensory data to a crowd of participating workers that carry various mobile devices. Aware of the paramount importance of effectively incentivizing participation in such systems, the research community has proposed a wide variety of incentive mechanisms. However, different from most of these existing mechanisms which assume the existence of only one data requester, we consider MCS systems with multiple data requesters, which are actually more common in practice. Specifically, our incentive mechanism is based on double auction, and is able to stimulate the participation of both data requesters and workers. In real practice, the incentive mechanism is typically not an isolated module, but interacts with the data aggregation mechanism that aggregates workers' data. For this reason, we propose CENTURION, a novel integrated framework for multi-requester MCS systems, consisting of the aforementioned incentive and data aggregation mechanism. CENTURION's incentive mechanism satisfies truthfulness, individual rationality, computational efficiency, as well as guaranteeing non-negative social welfare, and its data aggregation mechanism generates highly accurate aggregated results. The desirable properties of CENTURION are validated through both theoretical analysis and extensive simulations