16556041
Segmented fuzzy checkpointing for main memory databases
'Toscane' can be used as a decorative pot plant that flowers early and abundantly. The plant can be sold in different sizes from approximately 40 cm to 80 cm in height. The plant produces abundant flowers that enlarge in size as the plant becomes bigger. The decorative leaves are glossy, dark green, coriaceous and extremely durable. 'Toscane' produces bright, long-lived and large flowers that are held above the foliage. The heart-shaped flowers maintain their original red color as they mature.
546802
A Low-Cost Checkpointing Technique for Distributed Databases
For distributed databases, checkpointing is used to ensure an efficient way to perform global reconstruction. However, the need for global reconstruction is infrequent. Most current checkpointing approaches for distributed databases are too expensive during run time. Some of them allow the checkpointing process to run in parallel with normal transactions at the cost of more data and resource contention, which in turn causes longer response time for normal transactions. Thus, an efficient way to checkpoint distributed databases is needed to avoid degrading the system performance. This paper presents a low-cost solution, called Loosely Synchronized Local Fuzzy Checkpointing (LSLFC), to these problems. LSLFC supports global reconstruction, and our performance study shows that LSLFC has little overhead during run time.
11169177
Mining maximal frequent intervals
Many real world data are associated with intervals of time or distance. Mining frequent intervals from such data allows the users to group transactions with similar behavior together. Previous work only focuses on the problem of mining frequent intervals in a discrete domain. This paper first proposes the notion of maximal frequent intervals, which are superior to frequent intervals in many perspectives, and then provides a method for mining maximal frequent intervals in either a discrete domain or a continuous domain. Experimental results indicate that our method outperforms previous method for mining frequent intervals, and improves the runtime by two orders of magnitude for databases with a large number of distinct endpoints.
1825025
The START Multimedia Information System: Current Technology and Future Directions
To address the problem of information overload in today’s world, we have developed Start, a natural language question answering system that provides users with high-precision multimedia information access through the use of natural language annotations. To address the difficulty of accessing large amounts of heterogeneous data, we have developed Omnibase, which assists Start by integrating structured and semistructured Web databases into a single, uniformly structured “virtual database.” Our ultimate goal is to develop a computer system that acts like a “smart reference librarian,” and we believe we have laid a firm foundation for achieving our goal. This paper describes our current implemented system and discusses future research directions.
6272838
A visual language for sketching large and complex interactive designs
Informal, sketch-based design tools closely match the work practices of user interface designers. Current tools, however, are limited in the size and complexity of interaction that can be specified. We have created an advanced sketch-based visual language that allows for easy prototyping of large, complex interactive designs. In its current embodiment in the denim web design tool, the visual language allows designers to sketch reusable components for recurring page elements, such as navigation bars, as well as conditionals to illustrate and test transitions that depend on a user's input. Designers can also specify sites that accept richer user input than simple clicking. Our informal evaluation shows that these features allow designers with little programming experience to quickly create prototypes of large, complex web sites while still working inside an informal, sketch-based environment
12964519
Development and evaluation of emerging design patterns for ubiquitous computing
Design patterns are a format for capturing and sharing design knowledge. In this paper, we look at a new domain for design patterns, namely ubiquitous computing. The overall goal of this work is to aid practice by speeding up the diffusion of new interaction techniques and evaluation results from researchers, presenting the information in a form more usable to practicing designers. Towards this end, we have developed an initial and emerging pattern language for ubiquitous computing, consisting of 45 pre-patterns describing application genres, physical-virtual spaces, interaction and systems techniques for managing privacy, and techniques for fluid interactions. We evaluated the effectiveness of our pre-patterns with 16 pairs of designers in helping them design location-enhanced applications. We observed that our pre-patterns helped new and experienced designers unfamiliar with ubiquitous computing in generating and communicating ideas, and in avoiding design problems early in the design process.
8944311
Recent shortcuts: using recent interactions to support shared activities
We present an empirical study of teams that revealed the amount of extraneous individual work needed to enable collaboration: finding references to other people, finding files to attach to email, managing incoming email attachments, managing the variety of files used in shared activities, and tracking what work is owed to others. Much of this work involves finding recently accessed objects that are needed again in the user's current task focus. These observations led to the design of Recent Shortcuts, a tool to help support coordination by making recently used objects easily accessible. Recent Shortcuts enables quick access to people (including groups of people), received attachments, files, and file folders that the user interacted with recently for re-use in the user's current context. Recent Shortcuts makes it easy to use these objects across applications with no additional user input and minimal changes to the user's applications or work practice. Early user experiences with a working prototype led to an extension that integrates recently accessed objects across multiple devices.
14212803
Merging Databases Under Constraints
The problem of integrating information from conflicting sources comes up in many current applications, such as cooperative information systems, heterogeneous databases, and multiagent systems. We model this by the operation of merging first-order theories. We propose a formal semantics for this operation and show that it has desirable properties, including abiding by majority rule in case of conflict and syntax independence. We apply our semantics to the special case when the theories to be merged represent relational databases under integrity constraints. We then present a way of merging databases that have different or conflicting schemas caused by problems such as synonyms, homonyms or type conflicts mentioned in the schema integration literature.