8188664
Scalable On-Demand Streaming of Nonlinear Media
A conventional video file contains a single temporally-ordered sequence of video frames. Clients requesting on-demand streaming of such a file receive (all or intervals of) the same content. For popular files that receive many requests during a file playback time, scalable streaming protocols based on multicast or broadcast have been devised. Such protocols require server and network bandwidth that grow much slower than linearly with the file request rate. This paper considers ldquononlinearrdquo video content in which there are parallel sequences of frames. Clients dynamically select which branch of the video they wish to follow, sufficiently ahead of each branch point so as to allow the video to be delivered without jitter. An example might be ldquochoose-your-own-endingrdquo movies. With traditional scalable delivery architectures such as movie theaters or TV broadcasting, such personalization of the delivered video content is very difficult or impossible. It becomes feasible, in principle at least, when the video is streamed to individual clients over a network. For on-demand streaming of nonlinear media, this paper analyzes the minimal server bandwidth requirements, and proposes and evaluates practical scalable delivery protocols.
7784369
Network bandwidth requirements for scalable on-demand streaming
Recently proposed streaming protocols are able to deliver multimedia files on-demand with the required server bandwidth growing only logarithmically with the file request rate. The same efficiencies are achieved for network bandwidth if delivery is over a true broadcast channel. This paper considers the required network bandwidth for on-demand streaming over multicast delivery trees. We consider both simple canonical delivery trees, and more complex cases in which delivery trees are constructed using both existing and new algorithms for various randomly generated network topologies and client site locations. Our results quantify the potential savings from the use of multicast trees that are configured to minimize network bandwidth rather than the latency to the content server. Further, we show that it is possible to achieve reasonably close to the minimum possible bandwidth usage for both network and server simultaneously, with a practical on-demand streaming protocol.
15310670
A Recent-Biased Dimension Reduction Technique for Time Series Data
There are many techniques developed for tackling time series and most of them consider every part of a sequence equally. In many applications, however, recent data can often be much more interesting and significant than old data. This paper defines new recent-biased measures for distance and energy, and proposes a recent-biased technique based on DWT for time series in which more recent data are considered more significant. With such a recent-biased technique, the dimension of time series can be reduced while effectively preserving the recent-biased energy. Our experiments have demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed approach for handling time series.
6777571
Hierarchical and multi-resolution representation of protein flexibility
MOTIVATION
Conformational rearrangements during molecular interactions are observed in a wide range of biological systems. However, computational methods that aim at simulating and predicting molecular interactions are still largely ignoring the flexible nature of biological macromolecules as the number of degrees of freedom is computationally intractable when using brute force representations.


RESULTS
In this article, we present a computational data structure called the Flexibility Tree (FT) that enables a multi-resolution and hierarchical encoding of molecular flexibility. This tree-like data structure allows the encoding of relatively small, yet complex sub-spaces of a protein's conformational space. These conformational sub-spaces are parameterized by a small number of variables and can be searched efficiently using standard global search techniques. The FT structure makes it straightforward to combine and nest a wide variety of motion types such as hinge, shear, twist, screw, rotameric side chains, normal modes and essential dynamics. Moreover, the ability to assign shapes to the nodes in a FT allows the interactive manipulation of flexible protein shapes and the interactive visualization of the impact of conformational changes on the protein's overall shape. We describe the design of the FT and illustrate the construction of such trees to hierarchically combine motion information obtained from a variety of sources ranging from experiment to user intuition, and describing conformational changes at different biological scales. We show that the combination of various types of motion helps refine the encoded conformational sub-spaces to include experimentally determined structures, and we demonstrate searching these sub-spaces for specific conformations.
1680683
Subscription Propagation in Highly-Available Publish/Subscribe Middleware
Achieving availability and scalability while providing service guarantees such as in-order, gapless delivery is essential for deploying publish/subscribe messaging middleware in wide area networks. Scalability often requires a publish/subscribe system to propagate subscription information and perform content matching across the network. Existing subscription propagation algorithms do not support in-order, gapless delivery in a redundant overlay network.This paper presents a novel approach that utilizes virtual time (VT) vectors to convey temporal consistency in propagating incremental and consolidated subscription information. The VT vectors provide a means of testing sufficiency of filtering information, by comparing a broker's VT vector with that of a message. When the test fails, indicating insufficient broker subscription information, safety may be preserved by "flooding" the message to all neighbors on a routing tree. This approach does not require subscription state agreement across redundant paths and hence is highly available. We present a detailed evaluation of the approach.
29045473
On Reduct Construction Algorithms
This paper critically analyzes reduct construction methods at two levels. At a high level, one can abstract commonalities from the existing algorithms, and classify them into three basic groups based on the underlying control structures. At a low level, by adopting different heuristics or fitness functions for attribute selection, one is able to derive most of the existing algorithms. The analysis brings new insights into the problem of reduct construction, and provides guidelines for the design of new algorithms
3140808
Voxels on Fire
We introduce a method for the animation of fire propagation and the burning consumption of objects represented as volumetric data sets. Our method uses a volumetric fire propagation model based on an enhanced distance field. It can simulate the spreading of multiple fire fronts over a specified isosurface without actually having to create that isosurface. The distance field is generated from a specific shell volume that rapidly creates narrow spatial bands around the virtual surface of any given isovalue. The complete distance field is then obtained by propagation from the initial bands. At each step multiple fire fronts can evolve simultaneously on the volumetric object. The flames of the fire are constructed from streams of particles whose movement is regulated by a velocity field generated with the hardware-accelerated Lattice Boltzmann Model (LBM). The LBM provides a physically-based simulation of the air flow around the burning object. The object voxels and the splats associated with the flame particles are rendered in the same pipeline so that the volume data with its external and internal structures can be displayed along with the fire.