14189953
Adaptive record clustering
An algorithm for record clustering is presented. It is capable of detecting sudden changes in users' access patterns and then suggesting an appropriate assignment of records to blocks. It is conceptually simple, highly intuitive, does not need to classify queries into types, and avoids collecting individual query statistics. Experimental results indicate that it converges rapidly; its performance is about 50 percent better than that of the total sort method, and about 100 percent better than that of randomly assigning records to blocks.
11887466
On a partitioning problem
This paper investigates the problem of locating a set of “boundary points” of a large number of records. Conceptually, the boundary points partition the records into subsets of roughly the same number of elements, such that the key values of the records in one subset are all smaller or all larger than those of the records in another subset. We guess the locations of the boundary points by linear interpolation and check their accuracy by reading the key values of the records on one pass. This process is repeated until all boundary points are determined. Clearly, this problem can also be solved by performing an external tape sort. Both analytical and empirical results indicate that the number of passes required is small in comparison with that in an external tape sort. This kind of record partitioning may be of interest in setting up a statistical database system.
1690905
Broadcast of consistent data to read-only transactions from mobile clients
We study the inconsistency problem in data broadcast. While data items in a mobile computing system are being broadcast, update transactions may install new values for the data items. If the executions of update transactions and the broadcast of data items are interleaved without any control, it is possible that the mobile transactions, which are generated by mobile clients, may observe inconsistent data values. We propose a new algorithm, called Update-First with Order (UFO), for concurrency control among the mobile transactions and update transactions. The mobile transactions are assumed to be read-only. In the UFO algorithm, all the schedules among them are serializable. Two important properties of the UFO algorithm are that: (1) the mobile transactions do not need to set any lock before they read the data items from the "air"; and (2) its impact on the adopted broadcast algorithm, which has been shown to be an efficient method for data dissemination in mobile computing systems, is minimal.
17880514
Concurrency Control for Mobile Systems with Data Broadcast
Although data broadcast has been shown to be an efficient method for disseminating data items in a mobile computing system with large number of clients, the issue on how to ensure the data consistency observed by mobile transactions, which are generated by mobile clients, has been largely ignored by researchers in the area. While data items are being broadcast, update transactions may install new values for the data items. If the executions of update and broadcast of data items are interleaved without any control, the mobile transactions may observe inconsistent data values. In this paper, we propose a serialization checking method (SCM) for concurrency control between read-only mobile transactions and update transactions. SCM is based on the framework of an earlier algorithm, Update First with Ordering (UFO), but improves on that algorithm by reducing re-broadcast overhead when the probability of data conflict between updates and data broadcast is high. Simulation experiments have been performed to investigate the performance characteristics of the proposed method.
52318069
Pulling, Pushing, and Grouping for Image Segmentation
This paper presents a novel computational visual grouping method, termed pulling, pushing and grouping, or PPG for short. Visual grouping is formulated as a functional optimisation process. Our computational function has three terms, the first pulls similar visual cues together, the second pushes different visual cues apart, and the third groups spatially adjacent visual cues without regarding their visual properties. An efficient numerical algorithm based on the Hopfield neural model is developed for solving the optimisation process. Experimental results on various intensity, colour and texture images demonstrate the effectiveness of the new method.
12206604
An adaptive active contour model for highly irregular boundaries
Abstract Snake is an active contour model for representing image contours. In this paper, we propose an efficient active contour model which can represent highly irregular boundaries. The algorithm includes an adaptive force along the contour, and adjusts the number of points for the snake according to the desired boundary. A better stopping criterion based on the area of a closed contour is devised. Furthermore, in this method, a contour can break automatically to represent the contours of multiple objects. Experiments show that this method can extract object's boundaries accurately and efficiently.
18060824
Performance evaluation of a new distributed deadlock detection algorithm
In this paper, a new probe-based distributed deadlock detection algorithm is proposed. It is an enhanced version of the algorithm originally proposed by Chandy's et al. [5,6]. The new algorithm has proven to be error free and suffers very little performance degradation from the additional deadlock detection overhead. The algorithm has been compared with the modified probe-based and timeout methods. It is found that under high data contention, it has the best performance. Results also indicate that the rate of probe initiation is significantly reduced in the new algorithm.