Quantifying user satisfaction is essential, because the results can help service providers deliver better services. In this work, we propose a generalizable methodology, based on survival analysis, to quantify user satisfaction in terms of session times, i.e., the length of time users stay with an application. Unlike subjective human surveys, our methodology is based solely on passive measurement, which is more cost-efficient and better able to capture subconscious reactions. Furthermore, by using session times, rather than a specific performance indicator, such as the level of distortion of voice signals, the effects of other factors like loudness and sidetone, can also be captured by the developed models. Like survival analysis, our methodology is characterized by low complexity and a simple model-developing process. The feasibility of our methodology is demonstrated through case studies of ShenZhou Online, a commercial MMORPG in Taiwan, and the most prevalent VoIP application in the world, namely Skype. Through the model development process, we can also identify the most significant performance factors and their impacts on user satisfaction and discuss how they can be exploited to improve user experience and optimize resource allocation.

Multi-recast techniques make it possible for a voter to participate in a sequence of different designated votings by using only one ticket. In a multi-recastable ticket scheme for electronic voting, every voter of a group can obtain an m-castable ticket (m-ticket), and through the m-ticket, the voter can participate in a sequence of m different designated votings held in this group. The m-ticket contains all possible intentions of the voter in the sequence of votings, and in each of the m votings, a voter casts his vote by just making appropriate modifications to his m-ticket. The authority cannot produce both the opposite version of a vote cast by a voter in one voting and the succeeding uncast votes of the voter. Only one round of registration action is required for a voter to request an m-ticket from the authority. Moreover, the size of such an m-ticket is not larger than that of an ordinary vote. It turns out that the proposed scheme greatly reduces the network traffic between the voters and the authority during the registration stages in a sequence of different votings, for example, the proposed method reduces the communication traffic by almost 80% for a sequence of 5 votings and by nearly 90% for a sequence of 10 votings.

Privacy, voter uncoercibility, collision freedom, verifiability, and tally correctness are essential properties of modern electronic election systems. None of the single-authority election systems proposed in the literatures achieves all the above five properties. In this paper we propose a universal single-authority election system that satisfies the five properties. In particular, the privacy of each voter is protected against the authority and other voters, and no voter can coerce any other voter into changing the value of his vote in our proposed system. We also show that it is impossible for a collision-free single-authority election system to possess the voter uncoercibility and authority uncoercibility at the same time.

We study the performance of oblivious routing algorithms that follow minimal (shortest) paths, referred to as minimal oblivious routing algorithms in this paper, using competitive analysis on a d-dimensional, N = 2d-node hypercube. We assume that packets are injected into the hypercube arbitrarily and continuously, without any (e.g., probabilistic) assumption on the arrival pattern of the packets. Minimal algorithms reduce the total load in the network in the first place and they preserve locality. First we show that the well known deterministic oblivious routing algorithm, namely, the greedy routing algorithm, has competitive ratio Ω(N1/2). Then we show a problem lower bound of Ω(Nlog 2 (5/4)/log5 N). We also give a natural randomized minimal oblivious routing algorithm whose competitive ratio is close to the problem lower bound we provide.

In this paper, we propose a practical and secure electronic voting scheme which meets the requirements of large scale general elections. This scheme involves voters, the administrator or so called the government and some scrutineers. In our scheme, a voter only has to communicate with the administrator three times and it ensures independence among voters without the need of any global computation. This scheme uses the threshold cryptosystem to guarantee the fairness among the candidate's campaign and to provide mechanism for achieving the function that any voter can make an open objection to the tally if his vote has not been published. This scheme preserves the privacy of a voter against the administrator, scrutineers, and other voters. Completeness, robustness, and verifiability of the voting process are ensured and hence no one can produce a false tally, corrupt or disrupt the election.

Distributed shared memory (DSM) systems on top of network of workstations are especially vulnerable to the impact of false sharing because of their higher memory transaction overheads and thus higher false sharing penalties. In this paper we develop a dynamic-granularity shared memory management scheme that eliminates false sharing without sacrificing the transparency to conventional shared-memory applications. Our approach utilizes a special threaded splay tree (TST) for shared memory information management, and a dynamic token-based path-compression synchronization algorithm for data transferring. The combination of the TST and path compression is quite efficient; asymptotically, in an n-processor system with m shared memory segments, synchronizing at most s segments takes O(s log m log n) amortized computation steps and generates O(s log n) communication messages, respectively. Based on the proposed scheme we constructed an experimental DSM prototype which consists of several Ethernet-connected Pentium-based computers running Linux. Preliminary benchmark results on our prototype indicate that our scheme is quite efficient, significantly outperforming traditional schemes and scaling up well.

This paper presents a model for the naming, packing, version control, storage, and retrieval of software assets. The naming and version control schemes are based on content-derived coding of the asset body. The name-to-asset mapping can be fixed or be varying with time. The packing scheme is designed so that the asset integrity verification and authentication information is made an intrinsic part of the packed asset. A comparison with an existing naming and version control scheme is given. The storage and retrieval scheme is a unification of four most commonly used methods, namely the enumerative method, the keyword-based method, the faceted method, and the text-based method. This unification makes it possible for the users to access heterogeneous repositories (with different storage and retrieval methods) simultaneously, using the same tool set and query syntax. The degradation functions technique is used to automatically broaden queries. A demonstrative retrieval tool is described to show how the unification of methods is done at the user interface level.

In a secure partially blind signature scheme, the signer assures that the blind signatures issued by him contains the information he desires. The techniques make it possible to minimize the unlimited growth of the bank's database which storing all spent electronic cash in an anonymous electronic cash system. In this paper we propose an efficient partially blind signature scheme for electronic cash. In our scheme, only several modular additions and modular multiplications are required for a signature requester to obtain and verify a signature. It turns out that the proposed scheme is suitable for mobile clients and smart-card applications because no time-consuming computations are required, such as modular exponentiation and inverse computations. Comparing with the existing blind signature schemes proposed in the literatures, our method reduces the amount of computations for signature requesters by almost 98%.