Interactions are ubiquitous in our world, spanning from social interactions between human individuals to physical interactions between robots and objects to mechanistic interactions among different components of an intelligent system. Despite their prevale ...
Transaction processing is a central part of most database applications. While serializability remains the gold standard for desirable transactional semantics, many database systems offer improved transaction throughput at the expense of introducing potenti ...
The isolation level Multiversion Read Committed (RC), offered by many database systems, is known to trade consistency for increased transaction throughput. Sometimes, transaction workloads can be safely executed under RC obtaining the perfect isolation of ...
Fuzzing is a testing technique to discover unknown vulnerabilities in software. When applying fuzzing to libraries, the core idea of supplying random input remains unchanged, yet it is non-trivial to achieve good code coverage. Libraries cannot run as stan ...
Triaxial testing of argillaceous rocks and shales is significantly more challenging than conventional rock mechanical testing. The challenges are mainly related to the very low permeability of these geomaterials, and their sensitivity to exposure of atmosp ...
Despite major advances in the engineering of maintainable and robust software over the years, upgrading software remains a primitive and error-prone activity. In this dissertation, we argue that several problems with upgrading software are caused by a poor ...
Neural networks have been traditionally considered robust in the sense that their precision degrades gracefully with the failure of neurons and can be compensated by additional learning phases. Nevertheless, critical applications for which neural networks ...
Modern software is plagued by elusive corner-case bugs (e.g., security bugs). Because there are no scalable, automated ways of finding them, such bugs can remain hidden until software is deployed in production. This thesis proposes approaches to solve this ...
The rapid accumulation of whole-genome data has renewed interest in the study of genomic rearrangements. Comparative genomics, evolutionary biology, and cancer research all require models and algorithms to elucidate the mechanisms, history, and consequence ...
Fault injection-a key technique for testing the robustness of software systems-ends up rarely being used in practice, because it is labor-intensive and one needs to choose between performing random injections (which leads to poor coverage and low represent ...
