18512433
An Algebraic Approach to Conflict Resolution in Planning
This paper presents an algebra for conflict resolution in nonlinear planning. A set of conflicts in a plan is considered as a constraint network. Each node in the network represents a conflict, and is associated with a set of alternative ways for resolving it. Thus, resolving conflicts in a plan corresponds to selecting a set of consistent resolution methods so that, after they are applied to the plan, every conflict can be removed. The paper discusses the representional issues related to the conflict resolution, presents an algebra for resolving conflicts, and illustrates that some modified algorithms for preprocessing networks of constraints can greatly enhance the efficiency of conflict resolution.
17216165
Cut-and-Pick Transactions for Proxy Log Mining
Web logs collected by proxy servers, referred to as proxy logs or proxy traces, contain information about Web document accesses by many users against many Web sites. This "many-to-many" characteristic poses a challenge to Web log mining techniques due to the difficulty in identifying individual access transactions. This is because in a proxy log, user transactions are not clearly bounded and are sometimes interleaved with each other as well as with noise. Most previous work has used simplistic measures such as a fixed time interval as a determination method for the transaction boundaries, and has not addressed the problem of interleaving and noisy transactions. In this paper, we show that this simplistic view can lead to poor performance in building models to predict future access patterns. We present a more advanced cut-and-pick method for determining the access transactions from proxy logs, by deciding on more reasonable transaction boundaries and by removing noisy accesses. Our method takes advantage of the user behavior that in most transactions, the same user typically visits multiple, related Web sites that form clusters. These clusters can be discovered by our algorithm based on the connectivity among Web sites. By using real-world proxy logs, we experimentally show that this cut-and-pick method can produce more accurate transactions that result in Web-access prediction models with higher accuracy.
15099164
A scalable supervised algorithm for dimensionality reduction on streaming data
Algorithms on streaming data have attracted increasing attention in the past decade. Among them, dimensionality reduction algorithms are greatly interesting due to the desirability of real tasks. Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA) are two of the most widely used dimensionality reduction approaches. However, PCA is not optimal for general classification problems because it is unsupervised and ignores valuable label information for classification. On the other hand, the performance of LDA is degraded when encountering limited available low-dimensional spaces and singularity problem. Recently, Maximum Margin Criterion (MMC) was proposed to overcome the shortcomings of PCA and LDA. Nevertheless, the original MMC algorithm could not satisfy the streaming data model to handle large-scale high-dimensional data set. Thus an effective, efficient and scalable approach is needed. In this paper, we propose a supervised incremental dimensionality reduction algorithm and its extension to infer adaptive low-dimensional spaces by optimizing the maximum margin criterion. Experimental results on a synthetic dataset and real datasets demonstrate the superior performance of our proposed algorithm on streaming data.
9645876
Handling feature interactions in process-planning
Abstract The development of a successful approach to the integration of computer-aided design and computer-aided process-planning will require solutions to several fundamental problems in planning and geometric reasoning. In this article, we consider two such problems, both of which arise from interactions among machinable features. The first problem is that interactions can lead to several alternative interpretations of what the machinable features are. We address this problem by developing an algebra of features. The second problem is that interactions among features can cause problems in optimizing the process plans. For this problem, we have developed a branch-and-bound optimization algorithm with good heuristics to guide the search. This article presents the theory and mathematical framework for both problems and also the details of the implementation and experimental results.
32457716
Downward Refinement and the Efficiency of Hierarchical Problem Solving
Abstract Analysis and experiments have shown that hierarchical problem solving is most effective when the hierarchy satisfies the downward refinement property (DRP), whereby every abstract solution can be refined to a concrete-level solution without backtracking across abstraction levels. However, the DRP is a strong requirement that is not often met in practice. In this paper we examine the case when the DRP fails, and provide an analytical model of search complexity parameterized by the probability of an abstract solution being refinable. Our model provides a more accurate picture of the effectiveness of hierarchical problem solving. We then formalize the DRP in Abstrips -style hierarchies, providing a syntactic test that can be applied to determine if a hierarchy satisfies the DRP. Finally, we describe an algorithm called Highpoint that we have developed. This algorithm builds on the Alpine algorithm of Knoblock in that it automatically generates abstraction hierarchies. However, it uses the theoretical tools we have developed to generate hierarchies superior to those generated by Alpine . This superiority is demonstrated empirically. 2
11767978
Real-Time Scheduling for Multi-agent Call Center Automation
In a call center, service agents with different capabilities are available for solving incoming customer problems at any time. To supply quick response and better problem solution to customers, it is necessary to schedule customer problems to appropriate service agents efficiently. We developed SANet, a service agent network for call center, which integrates multiple service agents including both software agents and human agents, and employs a broker to schedule customer problems to service agents for better solutions according to their changing capabilities and availability. This paper describes the real-time scheduling method in SANet as well as its architecture. There are two phases in our scheduling method. One is problem-type learning. The broker is trained to learn the problem types and hence can decide the type of incoming problems automatically. The other is the scheduling algorithm based on problem types, capabilities and availability of service agents. We highlight an application in which we apply SANet to a call center problem for a cable-TV company. Finally, we support our claims via experimental results and discuss related works.
38252541
A Memory Interference Model for Regularly Patterned Multiple Stream Vector Accesses
Most existing analytical models for memory interference generally assume random bank selection for each memory access. In vector computers, however, memory accesses are typically regularly patterned with a number of data items being accessed concurrently from different banks. Very little is known about the queueing behavior of memory interferences in multiple stream vector accesses. This paper presents an analytical model for memory interferences due to vector accesses in multiple vector processor systems. The model captures the effects of both bank conflicts among elements within one vector access stream and conflicts among multiple vector access streams on system performance. The model is based on a closed queueing network assuming an ideal interconnection network. An approximation technique is proposed to solve the memory queueing system that serves customers in a complicated way (non-FIFO). We also carry out extensive simulation experiments to study memory interference and validate our analytical model. Simulation results and analytical results are in a very good agreement, indicating that the model is very accurate. We further validate our analysis by comparing the numerical results obtained from our analytical model with those measurement results that were published by other researchers. Based on our analytical model and simulations, we carry out performance evaluation of the multiple vector processor systems. Our numerical results show that memory access conflicts pose a severe limitation on the number of useful processors in the system, implying that memory system design is essential to high-performance computing. >
6583750
Building Trust in Online Rating Systems Through Signal Modeling
Online feedback-based rating systems are gaining popularity. Dealing with unfair ratings in such systems has been recognized as an important but difficult problem. This problem is challenging especially when the number of regular ratings is relatively small and the unfair ratings contribute to a significant portion of the overall ratings. In this paper, we propose a novel algorithm to detect the unfair ratings that cannot be effectively prevented by existing state-of-the-art techniques. Our algorithm is particularly effective to detect malicious raters that collaboratively manipulate ratings of one or several products. The main idea of our algorithm is to use an autoregressive signal modeling technique combined with trust-enhanced rating aggregation. We are able to detect and filter out unfair ratings very accurately. Extensive experiments through simulations and real-world data have been performed to validate the proposed algorithm. The experimental results show significant improvements on detecting collaborative unfair raters over existing techniques.
26868159
A compression-boosting transform for 2D data
In this paper, we present an invertible transform for 2D data which has the objective of reordering the matrix to improve its (lossless) compression at later stages. Given a binary matrix, the transform involves first searching for the largest uniform submatrix, that is, a submatrix solely composed by the same symbol (either 0 or 1) induced by a subset of rows and columns (which are not necessarily contiguous). Then, the rows and the columns are reordered such that the uniform submatrix is moved to the left-upper corner of the matrix. The transform is recursively applied on the rest of the matrix. The recursion is stopped when the partition produces a matrix which is smaller than a predetermined threshold. The inverse transform (decompression) is fast and can be implemented in linear time in the size of the matrix. The effects of the transform on the compressibility of 2D data is studied empirically by comparing the performance of gzip and bzip2 before and after the application of the transform on several inputs. The preliminary results show that the transform boosts compression.
32009068
Finding biclusters by random projections
Given a matrix X composed of symbols, a bicluster is a submatrix of X obtained by removing some of the rows and some of the columns of X in such a way that each row of what is left reads the same string. In this paper, we are concerned with the problem of finding the bicluster with the largest area in a large matrix X. The problem is first proved to be NP-complete. We present a fast and efficient randomized algorithm that discovers the largest bicluster by random projections. A detailed probabilistic analysis of the algorithm and an asymptotic study of the statistical significance of the solutions are given. We report results of extensive simulations on synthetic data.
40202410
On Performance of Parallel iSCSI Protocol for Networked Storage Systems
A newly emerging protocol for storage networking, iSCSI, was recently ratified by the Internet Engineering Task Force. The iSCSI protocol is perceived as a low cost alternative to the FC protocol for networked storages. It allows block level storage data to be transported over the popular TCP/IP network that is widely understood. This paper presents a new storage architecture allowing parallel processing of iSCSI packets. By leveraging inexpensive Ethernet ports, we are able to greatly improve the throughput of iSCSI storages through parallel processing. We have carried out a performance analysis to evaluate the performance of the new architecture as compared to the existing iSCSI storages. Our numerical results show that the new architecture has good performance potential