I believe that in about 50 years' time it will be possible to program computers with a storage capacity of about 109, to make them play the imitation game so well that an average interrogator will not have more than a 70% chance of making the right identification (whether he is interrogating a man or a computer) after five minutes of questioning. The original question, ‘Can a machine think?’ I believe too meaningless to deserve discussion. Nevertheless I believe that at the end of the century the use of words and general educated opinion will have altered so much that one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted. I believe no useful purpose is served by concealing these beliefs.

– A M Turing (1950),
Computing Machinery and Intelligence

Traditional software designs for modern multicore processors, in which threads manipulate shared data, have limited scalability because synchronization of updates with shared data serializes threads and limits parallelism. Alternative distributed software designs, in which threads do not share mutable data, eliminate synchronization and offer better scalability. But distributed designs make it challenging to implement features that shared data structures naturally provide, such as dynamic load balancing and strong consistency guarantees, and is simply not a good fit for every program. Advanced synchronization methods can boost the performance of shared mutable data structures. Synchronization still has its price, and when performance demands are extreme, distributed data structures are probably the right choice.

In the first paper, “Synchronization of Data Between SQLite (Local Database) and SQL Server (Remote Database)”, Showkat Ahmad Dar and Jan Iqra have developed synchronization tier of SQLite database that synchronizes data between local database (SQLite) and SQL server using the concept of web services. The application has stored the data in SQLite local database and at the same time synchronized that data with the remote database SQL server using web services.

Manash Bhuyan in the next paper, “Computer-Aided Analysis and Design of Facility Layout Using Ant Colony Optimization”, has studied ant colony optimization of selecting optimal layout design for a healthcare unit. The paper presents a heuristic algorithm for the facility layout problem as a quadratic assignment problem. The results are compared with real-life data and the effectiveness of the methodology is verified.

In the next paper, “Image, Audio and Video Watermarking Using LSB and DCT”, Gaurav Khare and Vijay Khare have compared two watermarking algorithms which are based on Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) and Lease Significant Bit (LSB) replacement. The methods have been exposed to several simulation tests to test their resistance to various types of attacks.

In the last paper, “An Analysis of Requirements Prioritization in Large, Medium and Small Software Organizations”, Sita Devulapalli, O R S Rao and Akhil Khare have analyzed the requirements prioritization across 61 organizations with 106 participants. The analysis indicates the need for multistage framework for requirements prioritization.

-- C R K Prasad
Consulting Editor