14302352
Information Security on the Logistical Network: An End-to-End Approach
We describe the information security aspects of logistical networking. The security model adopted by logistical networking is an end-to-end model that provides tunable security levels while maintaining the scalability of the network as a whole.
6969845
Real-time Application Monitoring and Diagnosis for Service Hosting Platforms of Black Boxes
Service hosting platforms typically run a large number of third-party applications that are composed of multiple communicating components distributed on a dynamic set of hosting servers. Understanding the real-time behaviors of these applications and the intricate interactions/dependency relationships among these application components is very important to service management tasks such as load balancing, capacity planning, performance debugging and fault diagnosis. In this paper, we present the scalable real-time application monitoring and diagnosis (SRAMD) tool, for applications consisting of "black box" components: software without source code available, and usually without desired logging instrumentation. SRAMD runs at application layer and requires no modification to existing applications, middleware, or messages. For each application component collocated at its hosting server, a SRAMD monitor traces the component's packet-level traffic unobtrusively, summarizes its local resource utilization and performance (e.g. response time) online, performs interactive queries (e.g. per- request resource utilization) to locate possible bottlenecks on- demand, and discovers inter-component dependence relationships statistically. The SRAMD controller simply aggregates reports from distributed monitors to construct real-time application topologies with rich runtime information. We have developed mechanisms to decentralize the computation overhead and minimize the communication cost in the monitoring and diagnosis process, and two schemes to discover application component dependency relationships in different scenarios. The SRAMD tool offers an alternative to server logs and message-level traces for service monitoring and performance diagnosis.
14767737
Dynamic co-scheduling of distributed computation and replication
We are interested in developing the infrastructural tools that allow a distributed data intensive computing environment to be shared by a group of collaborating but geographically separated researchers in an interactive manner, as opposed to a batch mode of operation. However, without advanced reservation, it is difficult to assure a certain level of performance on a large number of shared and heterogeneous servers. To achieve scalable parallel speedups in this scenario, we must closely integrate the management of computation and runtime data movement. In this paper, we first define the canonical scheduling problem for datasets distributed with k-way replication in the wide area. We then develop a dynamic co-scheduling algorithm that integrates the scheduling of computation and data movement. Using time-varying visualization as the driving application, we demonstrate that our co-scheduling approach improves not only application performance but also server utilization at a very reasonable cost.
17436749
Feature Transformation and Multivariate Decision Tree Induction
Univariate decision trees (UDT's) have inherent problems of replication, repetition, and fragmentation. Multivariate decision trees (MDT's) have been proposed to overcome some of the problems. Close examination of the conventional ways of building MDT's, however, reveals that the fragmentation problem still persists. A novel approach is suggested to minimize the fragmentation problem by separating hyperplane search from decision tree building. This is achieved by feature transformation. Let the initial feature vector be x, the new feature vector after feature transformation T is y, i.e., y = T(x). We can obtain an MDTb y (1) building a UDT on y; and (2) replacing new features y at each node with the combinations of initial features x. We elaborate on the advantages of this approach, the details of T, and why it is expected to perform well. Experiments are conducted in order to confirm the analysis, and results are compared to those of C4.5, OC1, and CART.
14126485
Efficient and scalable filtering of graph-based metadata
RDF Site Summaries constitute an application of RDF on the Web that has considerably grown in popularity. However, the way RSS systems operate today limits their scalability. Current RSS feed arregators follow a pull-based architecture model, which is not going to scale with the increasing number of RSS feeds becoming available on the Web. In this paper, we introduce G-ToPSS, a scalable publish/subscribe system for selective information dissemination. G-ToPSS only sends newly updated information to the interested user and follows a push-based architecture model. G-ToPSS is particularly well suited for applications that deal with large-volume content distribution from diverse sources. G-ToPSS allows use of an ontology as a way to provide additional information about the data disseminated. We have implemented and experimentally evaluated G-ToPSS and we provide results demonstrating its scalability compared to alternative approaches. In addition, we describe an application of G-ToPSS and RSS to a Web-based content management system that provides an expressive, efficient, and convenient update notification dissemination system.
16551486
Feature Extraction for Image Mining
Due to the digitization of data and advances in technology, it has become extremely easy to obtain and store large quantities of data, particularly Multimedia data. Fields ranging from Commercial to Military need to analyze these data in an efficient and fast manner. Presently, tools for mining images are few and require human intervention. Feature selection and extraction is the pre-processing step of Image Mining. Obviously this is a critical step in the entire scenario of Image Mining. Our approach to mine from Images – to extract patterns and derive knowledge from large collections of images, deals mainly with identification and extraction of unique features for a particular domain. Though there are various features available, the aim is to identify the best features and thereby extract relevant information from the images. We have tried various methods for extraction; the features extracted and the techniques used are evaluated for their contribution to solving the problem. Experimental results show that the features used are sufficient to identify the patterns from the Images. The extracted features were evaluated for goodness and tested on test images. An interactive system was developed which allows the user to define new features and to resolve uncertain regions.
23957657
Terminology model discovery using natural language processing and visualization techniques
Medical terminologies are important for unambiguous encoding and exchange of clinical information. The traditional manual method of developing terminology models is time-consuming and limited in the number of phrases that a human developer can examine. In this paper, we present an automated method for developing medical terminology models based on natural language processing (NLP) and information visualization techniques. Surgical pathology reports were selected as the testing corpus for developing a pathology procedure terminology model. The use of a general NLP processor for the medical domain, MedLEE, provides an automated method for acquiring semantic structures from a free text corpus and sheds light on a new high-throughput method of medical terminology model development. The use of an information visualization technique supports the summarization and visualization of the large quantity of semantic structures generated from medical documents. We believe that a general method based on NLP and information visualization will facilitate the modeling of medical terminologies.
52857898
Schema Discovery for Semistructured Data
To formulate a meaningful query on semistructured data, such as on the Web, that matches some of the source's structure, we need first to discover something about how the information is represented in the source. This is referred to as schema discovery and was considered for a single object recently. In the case of multiple objects, the task of schema discovery is to identify typical structuring information of those objects as a whole. We motivate the schema discovery in this general setting and propose a framework and algorithm for it. We apply the framework to a real Web database, the Internet Movies Database, to discover typical schema of most voted movies.