45192656
Maintaining Unstructured Case Base
With the dramatic proliferation of case based reasoning systems in commercial applications, many case bases are now becoming legacy systems. They represent a significant portion of an organization's assets, but they are large and difficult to maintain. One of the contributing factors is that these case bases are often large and yet unstructured; they are represented in natural language text. Adding to the complexity is the fact that the case bases are often authored and updated by different people from a variety of knowledge sources, making it highly likely for a case base to contain redundant and inconsistent knowledge. In this paper, we present methods and a system for maintaining large and unstructured case bases. We focus on two difficult problems in case-base maintenance: redundancy and inconsistency detection. These two problems are particularly pervasive when one deals with an unstructured case base. We will discuss both algorithms and a system for solving these problems. As the ability to contain the knowledge acquisition problem is of paramount importance, our methods allow one to express relevant domain expertise for detecting both redundancy and inconsistency naturally and effortlessly. Empirical evaluations of the system prove the effectiveness of the methods in several large domains.
5296157
A Novel Scalable Algorithm for Supervised Subspace Learning
Subspace learning approaches aim to discover important statistical distribution on lower dimensions for high dimensional data. Methods such as principal component analysis (PCA) do not make use of the class information, and linear discriminant analysis (LDA) could not be performed efficiently in a scalable way. In this paper, we propose a novel highly scalable supervised subspace learning algorithm called as supervised Kampong measure (SKM). It assigns data points as close as possible to their corresponding class mean, simultaneously assigns data points to be as far as possible from the other class means in the transformed lower dimensional subspace. Theoretical derivation shows that our algorithm is not limited by the number of classes or the singularity problem faced by LDA. Furthermore, our algorithm can be executed in an incremental manner in which learning is done in an online fashion as data streams are received. Experimental results on several datasets, including a very large text data set RCV1, show the outstanding performance of our proposed algorithm on classification problems as compared to PCA, LDA and a popular feature selection approach, information gain (IG).
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.
13595177
Multiple-Goal Recognition from Low-Level Signals
Researchers and practitioners from both the artificial intelligence and pervasive computing communities have been paying increasing attention to the task of inferring users' high-level goals from low-level sensor readings. A common assumption made by most approaches is that a user either has a single goal in mind, or achieves several goals sequentially. However, in real-world environments, a user often has multiple goals that are concurrently carried out, and a single action can serve as a common step towards multiple goals. In this paper, we formulate the multiple-goal recognition problem and exemplify it in an indoor environment where an RF-based wireless network is available. We propose a goal-recognition algorithm based on a dynamic model set and show how goal models evolve over time based on pre-defined states. Experiments with real data demonstrate that our method can accurately and efficiently recognize multiple interleaving goals in a user's trace.
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.
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.
2308836
RAPID-Cache-A Reliable and Inexpensive Write Cache for High Performance Storage Systems
Modern high performance disk systems make extensive use of nonvolatile RAM (NVRAM) write caches. A single-copy NVRAM cache creates a single point of failure while a dual-copy NVRAM cache is very expensive because of the high cost of NVRAM. This paper presents a new cache architecture called RAPID-Cache for Redundant, Asymmetrically Parallel, and Inexpensive Disk Cache. A typical RAPID-Cache consists of two redundant write buffers on top of a disk system. One of the buffers is a primary cache made of RAM or NVRAM and the other is a backup cache containing a two-level hierarchy: a small NVRAM buffer on top of a log disk. The small NVRAM buffer combines small write data and writes them into the log disk in large sizes. By exploiting the locality property of I/O accesses and taking advantage of well-known Log-structured File Systems, the backup cache has nearly equivalent write performance as the primary RAM cache. The read performance of the backup cache is not as critical because normal read operations are performed through the primary RAM cache and reads from the backup cache happen only during error recovery periods. The RAPID-Cache presents an asymmetric architecture with a fast-write-fast-read RAM being a primary cache and a fast-write-slow-read NVRAM-disk hierarchy being a backup cache. The asymmetrically parallel architecture and an algorithm that separates actively accessed data from inactive data in the cache virtually eliminate the garbage collection overhead, which are the major problems associated with previous solutions such as Log-structured File Systems and Disk Caching Disk. The asymmetric cache allows cost-effective designs for very large write caches for high-end parallel disk systems that would otherwise have to use dual-copy, costly NVRAM caches. It also makes it possible to implement reliable write caching for low-end disk I/O systems since the RAPID-Cache makes use of inexpensive disks to perform reliable caching. Our analysis and trace-driven simulation results show that the RAPID-Cache has significant reliability/cost advantages over conventional single NVRAM write caches and has great cost advantages over dual-copy NVRAM caches. The RAPID-Cache architecture opens a new dimension for disk system designers to exercise trade-offs among performance, reliability, and cost.
40082925
Analysis of Packet-Switched Multiple-Bus Multiprocessor Systems
Performance analyses of packet-switched multiple-bus multiprocessor systems are presented. Approximate queuing network models are developed for both synchronous and asynchronous control schemes, and the results are shown to be in good agreement with simulation results. The analysis of the synchronous system is based on a decomposition technique, with each of the shared resources in the system being represented as a single-server queue. For asynchronous systems, the analysis is based on the flow equivalence technique. Numerical results obtained from the analyses indicate that packet-switched multiple-bus multiprocessors with only a few buses perform almost as well as crossbar-based multiprocessors. >
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.
27730185
Parallel All-Row Preconditioned Interval Linear Solver for Nonlinear Equations on Multiprocessors
Interval Newton methods in conjunction with generalized bisection form the basis of algorithms that find all real roots within a specified X ⊂ Rn of a system of nonlinear equations F(X) = 0 with mathematical certainty, even in finite-precision arithmetic. One of the major computational cost in such methods is solving a correspondent linear interval system. This paper proposes parallel implementations of the all-row preconditioned interval linear solver on two multiprocessor architectures: shared bus multiprocessor and hypercube connected multiprocessor. Efficient parallel algorithms that are specifically tailored for these architectures are presented. The algorithms effectively use the hardware features to minimize communication overheads. Performance evaluation is carried out by means of actual measurements of the algorithms running on real parallel computers. Our numerical results show that data partitioning, data allocation and processor scheduling play important roles in the performance of the parallel computation. In both systems, significant speedup can be obtained by properly overlapping computation and communication.
7030953
Energy-aware partitioning for multiprocessor real-time systems
In this paper, we address the problem of partitioning periodic real-time tasks in a multiprocessor platform by considering both feasibility and energy-awareness perspectives: our objective is to compute the feasible partitioning that results in minimum energy consumption on multiple identical processors by using variable voltage earliest-deadline-first scheduling. We show that the problem is NP-hard in the strong sense on m /spl ges/ 2 processors even when feasibility is guaranteed a priori. Then, we develop our framework where load balancing plays a major role in producing energy-efficient partitionings. We evaluate the feasibility and energy-efficiency performances of partitioning heuristics experimentally.