Agency for Science, Innovation and Technology

Abstract Lithuania, as a part of the former Soviet Union, has a long‐standing history of perceived equality for women in the workplace. Women played an equal role in economic production as it was a constitutional expectation that all citizens had both a right and an obligation to work. Consequently, at the time of independence in 1990 the levels of participation of women in the workplace including at managerial and professional levels were much higher than other western European countries. In architecture, women achieved parity in terms of numbers, but this equality did not transfer into all aspects of economic activity. Drawing on qualitative survey and interview data from 31 Lithuanian women architects, our findings show, despite the historical emphasis on equality, the existence of a “critical mass” of women in the profession and the adoption of EU gender equality policy, the position of women remains poor with clear evidence of sex discrimination, harassment, and lack of opportunities for career advancement.

Regular expression matching is a key task (and often computational bottleneck) in a variety of software tools and applications. For instance, the standard grep and sed utilities, scripting languages such as perl, internet traffic analysis, XML querying, and protein searching. The basic definition of a regular expression is that we combine characters with union, concatenation, and kleene star operators. The length m is proportional to the number of characters. However, often the initial operation is to concatenate characters in fairly long strings, e.g., if we search for certain combinations of words in a firewall. As a result, the number k of strings in the regular expression is significantly smaller than m. Our main result is a new algorithm that essentially replaces m with k in the complexity bounds for regular expression matching. More precisely, after an O(m log k) time and O(m) space preprocessing of the expression, we can match it in a string presented as a stream of characters in O(k log w/w + log k) time per character, where w is the number w of bits in a memory word. For large w, this corresponds to the previous best bound of O(m log w/w + logm). Prior to this work no O(k) bound per character was known. We further extend our solution to efficiently handle character class interval operators C{x, y}. Here, C is a set of characters and C{x, y}, where x and y are integers such that 0 ≤ x ≤ y, represents a string of length between x and y from C. These character class intervals generalize variable length gaps which are frequently used for pattern matching in computational biology applications.