Question: Analyzing audio adversarial examples through the lens of temporal dependency.

This paper explores the efficacy of combining multiple, potentially weak, defenses to create a robust defense strategy against adversarial examples in neural networks. Despite the ongoing research proposing various methods to safeguard against these targeted attacks, many defenses have proven inadequate. We investigate the hypothesis that a strong defense can emerge from the amalgamation of multiple, even weak, defense mechanisms. Our analysis focuses on three specific defense strategies that embody this ensemble approach. Two of these are recent innovations explicitly designed to synergize their components for enhanced protection. The third defense strategy combines three distinct and independent defenses. Through rigorous testing, we demonstrate that, for all components of these defenses and the combined defenses themselves, an adaptive adversary can still generate adversarial examples with minimal distortion. Our findings suggest that simply combining weak defenses does not necessarily result in a strong defense against adversarial examples, challenging the notion that ensemble methods are inherently robust.

Recently Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN) acoustic models have demonstrated superior performance over deep neural networks (DNN) models in speech recognition and many other tasks. Although a lot of work have been reported on DNN model adaptation, very little has been done on LSTM model adaptation. In this paper we present our extensive studies of speaker adaptation of LSTM-RNN models for speech recognition. We investigated different adaptation methods combined with KL-divergence based regularization, where and which network component to adapt, supervised versus unsupervised adaptation and asymptotic analysis. We made a few distinct and important observations. In a large vocabulary speech recognition task, by adapting only 2.5% of the LSTM model parameters using 50 utterances per speaker, we obtained 12.6% WERR on the dev set and 9.1% WERR on the evaluation set over a strong LSTM baseline model.

In this paper we present some experiments using a deep learning model for speech denoising. We propose a very lightweight procedure that can predict clean speech spectra when presented with noisy speech inputs, and we show how various parameter choices impact the quality of the denoised signal. Through our experiments we conclude that such a structure can perform better than some comparable single-channel approaches and that it is able to generalize well across various speakers, noise types and signal-to-noise ratios.

Our aim is to recognise the words being spoken by a talking face, given only the video but not the audio. Existing works in this area have focussed on trying to recognise a small number of utterances in controlled environments (e.g. digits and alphabets), partially due to the shortage of suitable datasets. We make three novel contributions: first, we develop a pipeline for fully automated data collection from TV broadcasts. With this we have generated a dataset with over a million word instances, spoken by over a thousand different people; second, we develop a two-stream convolutional neural network that learns a joint embedding between the sound and the mouth motions from unlabelled data. We apply this network to the tasks of audio-to-video synchronisation and active speaker detection; third, we train convolutional and recurrent networks that are able to effectively learn and recognize hundreds of words from this large-scale dataset. In lip reading and in speaker detection, we demonstrate results that exceed the current state-of-the-art on public benchmark datasets.

We investigate the potential of Context-Dependent Deep-Neural-Network HMMs, or CD-DNN-HMMs, from a feature-engineering perspective. Recently, we had shown that for speaker-independent transcription of phone calls (NIST RT03S Fisher data), CD-DNN-HMMs reduced the word error rate by as much as one third—from 27.4%, obtained by discriminatively trained Gaussian-mixture HMMs with HLDA features, to 18.5%—using 300+ hours of training data (Switchboard), 9000+ tied triphone states, and up to 9 hidden network layers.

This article faces the problem of how different audio features and segmentation methods work with different music genres. A new annotated corpus of Chinese traditional Jingju music is presented. We incorporate this dataset with two existing music datasets from the literature in an integrated retrieval system to evaluate existing features, structural hypotheses, and segmentation algorithms outside a Western bias. A harmonic-percussive source separation technique is introduced to the feature extraction process and brings significant improvement to the segmentation. Results show that different features capture the structural patterns of different music genres in different ways. Novelty- or homogeneity-based segmentation algorithms and timbre features can surpass the investigated alternatives for the structure analysis of Jingju due to their lack of harmonic repetition patterns. Findings indicate that the design of audio features and segmentation algorithms as well as the consideration of contextual information related to the music corpora should be accounted dependently in an effective segmentation system.

Despite the efficacy on a variety of computer vision tasks, deep neural networks (DNNs) are vulnerable to adversarial attacks, limiting their applications in securitycritical systems. Recent works have shown the possibility of generating imperceptibly perturbed image inputs (a.k.a., adversarial examples) to fool well-trained DNN classifiers into making arbitrary predictions. To address this problem, we propose a training recipe named “deep defense”. Our core idea is to integrate an adversarial perturbation-based regularizer into the classification objective, such that the obtained models learn to resist potential attacks, directly and precisely. The whole optimization problem is solved just like training a recursive network. Experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms training with adversarial/Parseval regularizations by large margins on various datasets (including MNIST, CIFAR-10 and ImageNet) and different DNN architectures. Code and models for reproducing our results will be made publicly available.

Nowadays, deep learning is more and more used for Music Genre Classification: particularly Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) taking as entry a spectrogram considered as an image on which are sought different types of structure.
 But, facing the criticism relating to the difficulty in understanding the underlying relationships that neural networks learn in presence of a spectrogram, we propose to use, as entries of a CNN, a small set of eight music features chosen along three main music dimensions: dynamics, timbre and tonality. With CNNs trained in such a way that filter dimensions are interpretable in time and frequency, results show that only eight music features are more efficient than 513 frequency bins of a spectrogram and that late score fusion between systems based on both feature types reaches 91% accuracy on the GTZAN database.

Nowadays, convolutional neural network (CNN) based steganalysis methods achieved great performance. While those methods are also facing security problems. In this paper, we proposed an attack scheme aiming at CNN based steganalyzer including two different attack methods 1) the LSB-Jstego Gradient Based Attack; 2) LSB-Jstego Evolutionary Algorithms Based Attack. The experiment results show that the attack strategies could achieve 96.02% and 90.25% success ratio separately on the target CNN. The proposed attack scheme is an effective way to fool the CNN based steganalyzer and in addition demonstrates the vulnerability of the neural networks in steganalysis.

This paper investigates a new voice conversion technique using phone-aware Long Short-Term Memory Recurrent Neural Networks (LSTM-RNNs). Most existing voice conversion methods, including Joint Density Gaussian Mixture Models (JDGMMs), Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) and Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory Recurrent Neural Networks (BLSTM-RNNs), only take acoustic information of speech as features to train models. We propose to incorporate linguistic information to build voice conversion system by using monophones generated by a speech recognizer as linguistic features. The monophones and spectral features are combined together to train LSTM-RNN based voice conversion models, reinforcing the context-dependency modelling of LSTM-RNNs. The results of the 1st voice conversion challenge shows our system achieves significantly higher performance than baseline (GMM method) and was found among the most competitive scores in similarity test. Meanwhile, the experimental results show phone-aware LSTM-RNN method obtains lower Mel-cepstral distortion and higher MOS scores than the baseline LSTM-RNNs.

This paper describes experiments in using audible sound as a means for wireless device communications. The direct application of standard modulation techniques to sound, without further improvements, results in sounds that are immediately perceived as digital communications and that are fairly aggressive and intrusive. We observe that some parameters of the modulation that have an impact in the data rate, the error probability and the computational overhead at the receiver also have a tremendous impact in the quality of the sound as perceived by humans. This paper focuses on how to vary those parameters in standard modulation techniques such as ASK, FSK and Spread-Spectrum to obtain communication systems in which the messages are musical and other familiar sounds, rather than modem sounds. A prototype called Digital Voices demonstrates the feasibility of this music-based communication technology. Our goal is to lay out the basis of sound design for aerial acoustic communications so that the presence of such communications, though noticeable, is not intrusive and can even be considered as part of musical compositions and sound tracks.


Question: The Essential Component in Complex Analytics: Achieving Low Latency and Scalable Model Management with Velox for Serving.

This paper introduces Resilient Distributed Datasets (RDDs), a novel distributed memory abstraction designed to enable in-memory computations on large-scale clusters while ensuring fault tolerance, akin to data flow models such as MapReduce. RDDs are specifically tailored to address the inefficiencies encountered in current data flow systems when handling two primary types of applications: iterative algorithms, which are prevalent in graph processing and machine learning, and interactive data mining tools. These applications benefit significantly from in-memory data processing, which can enhance performance by a factor of ten compared to traditional methods. To achieve efficient fault tolerance, RDDs implement a constrained form of shared memory, characterized by read-only datasets that can only be constructed through bulk operations on other RDDs. Despite these restrictions, we demonstrate that RDDs are sufficiently versatile to encompass a broad range of computations, including MapReduce operations and specialized programming paradigms for iterative tasks like Pregel. Our implementation of RDDs showcases superior performance, outpacing Hadoop by a factor of 20 for iterative workloads and enabling interactive queries on a terabyte-scale dataset with response times as low as 5-7 seconds. This showcases the potential of RDDs as a pivotal component in complex analytics, particularly in the realm of low latency, scalable model management and serving, akin to the capabilities provided by Velox.

We present a web-based software, named TrajAnalytics, for the visual analytics of urban trajectory datasets. It allows users to interactively visualize and analyze the massive taxi trajectories over urban spaces. The software offers data management capability and enable various visual queries through a web interface. A set of visualization widgets and interaction functions are developed to promote easy user engagement. We implemented two prototypes with realworld datasets: (1) the origin/destination (OD) data of taxi trips collected in New York City; and (2) the taxi trajectory data collected in Porto City in Portugal. This open source software supports practitioners, researchers, and decision-makers in advancing transportation and urban studies in the new era of smart city.

With rapidly increasing volumes of data to be processed in modern data analytics, it is commonplace to run multiple data processing jobs with inter-job dependencies in a datacenter cluster, typically as recurring data processing workloads. Such a group of inter-dependent data analytic jobs is referred to as a workflow, and may have a deadline due to its mission-critical nature. In contrast, non-recurring ad-hoc jobs are typically best-effort in nature, and rather than meeting deadlines, it is desirable to minimize their average job turnaround time. The state-of-the-art scheduling mechanisms focused on meeting deadlines for individual jobs only, and are oblivious to workflow deadlines. In this paper, we present FlowTime, a new system framework designed to make scheduling decisions for workflows so that their deadlines are met, while simultaneously optimizing the performance of ad-hoc jobs. To achieve this objective, we first adopt a divide-and-conquer strategy to transform the problem of workflow scheduling to a deadline-aware job scheduling problem, and then design an efficient algorithm that tackles the scheduling problem with both deadline-aware jobs and ad-hoc jobs by solving its corresponding optimization problem directly using a linear program solver. Our experimental results have clearly demonstrated that FlowTime achieves the lowest deadline-miss rates for deadline-aware workflows and 2-10 times shorter average job turnaround time, as compared to the state-of-the-art scheduling algorithms.

In this paper we work on the balance between hardware and software implementation of a machine learning algorithm, which belongs to the area of statistical learning theory. We use system-on-chip technology to demonstrate the potential usefulness of moving the critical sections of an algorithm into HW: the so-called hardware/software balance. Our experiments show that the approach can achieve speedups using a complex machine learning algorithm called a support vector machine. The experiments are conducted on a real-time Java virtual machine named Java optimized processor

Big Data has drawn huge attention from researchers in information sciences, decision makers in governments and enterprises. However, there is a lot of potential and highly useful value hidden in the huge volume of data. Data is the new oil, but unlike oil data can be refined further to create even more value. Therefore, a new scientific paradigm is born as data-intensive scientific discovery, also known as Big Data. The growth volume of real-time data requires new techniques and technologies to discover insight value. In this paper we introduce the Big Data real-time analytics model as a new technique. We discuss and compare several Big Data technologies for real-time processing along with various challenges and issues in adapting Big Data. Realtime Big Data analysis based on cloud computing approach is our future research direction.

Scalable database management systems (DBMS)---both for update intensive application workloads as well as decision support systems for descriptive and deep analytics---are a critical part of the cloud infrastructure and play an important role in ensuring the smooth transition of applications from the traditional enterprise infrastructures to next generation cloud infrastructures. Though scalable data management has been a vision for more than three decades and much research has focussed on large scale data management in traditional enterprise setting, cloud computing brings its own set of novel challenges that must be addressed to ensure the success of data management solutions in the cloud environment. This tutorial presents an organized picture of the challenges faced by application developers and DBMS designers in developing and deploying internet scale applications. Our background study encompasses both classes of systems: (i) for supporting update heavy applications, and (ii) for ad-hoc analytics and decision support. We then focus on providing an in-depth analysis of systems for supporting update intensive web-applications and provide a survey of the state-of-the-art in this domain. We crystallize the design choices made by some successful systems large scale database management systems, analyze the application demands and access patterns, and enumerate the desiderata for a cloud-bound DBMS.

The enormous growth of data in a variety of applications has increased the need for high performance data mining based on distributed environments. However, standard data mining toolkits per se do not allow the usage of computing clusters. The success of MapReduce for analyzing large data has raised a general interest in applying this model to other, data intensive applications. Unfortunately current research has not lead to an integration of GUI based data mining toolkits with distributed file system based MapReduce systems. This paper defines novel principles for modeling and design of the user interface, the storage model and the computational model necessary for the integration of such systems. Additionally, it introduces a novel system architecture for interactive GUI based data mining of large data on clusters based on MapReduce that overcomes the limitations of data mining toolkits. As an empirical demonstration we show an implementation based on Weka and Hadoop.

Customers of the High Performance Computing Center (HLRS) tend to execute more complex and data-driven applications, often resulting in large amounts of data of up to 1 Petabyte. The majority of our customers, however, is currently lacking the ability and knowledge to process this amount of data in a timely manner in order to extract meaningful information. We have therefore established a new project in order to support our users with the task of knowledge discovery by means of data analytics. We put the high performance data analytics system, a Cray Urika-GX, into operation to cope with this challenge. In this paper, we give an overview about our project and discuss immanent challenges in bridging the gap between HPC and data analytics in a production environment. The paper concludes with a case study about analyzing log files of a Cray XC40 to detect variations in system performance. We were able to identify successfully so-called aggressor jobs, which reduce significantly the performance of other simultaneously running

We propose a demonstration of Cayuga, a complex event monitoring system for high speed data streams. Our demonstration will show Cayuga applied to monitoring Web feeds; the demo will illustrate the expressiveness of the Cayuga query language, the scalability of its query processing engine to high stream rates, and a visualization of the internals of the query processing engine.

Scientific problems that depend on processing largeamounts of data require overcoming challenges in multiple areas:managing large-scale data distribution, co-placement andscheduling of data with compute resources, and storing and transferringlarge volumes of data. We analyze the ecosystems of thetwo prominent paradigms for data-intensive applications, hereafterreferred to as the high-performance computing and theApache-Hadoop paradigm. We propose a basis, common terminologyand functional factors upon which to analyze the two approachesof both paradigms. We discuss the concept of "Big DataOgres" and their facets as means of understanding and characterizingthe most common application workloads found acrossthe two paradigms. We then discuss the salient features of thetwo paradigms, and compare and contrast the two approaches.Specifically, we examine common implementation/approaches ofthese paradigms, shed light upon the reasons for their current"architecture" and discuss some typical workloads that utilizethem. In spite of the significant software distinctions, we believethere is architectural similarity. We discuss the potential integrationof different implementations, across the different levelsand components. Our comparison progresses from a fully qualitativeexamination of the two paradigms, to a semi-quantitativemethodology. We use a simple and broadly used Ogre (K-meansclustering), characterize its performance on a range of representativeplatforms, covering several implementations from bothparadigms. Our experiments provide an insight into the relativestrengths of the two paradigms. We propose that the set of Ogreswill serve as a benchmark to evaluate the two paradigms alongdifferent dimensions.

Distributed stream processing platforms is a new class of real-time monitoring systems that analyze and extracts knowledge from large continuous streams of data. This type of systems is crucial for providing high throughput and low latency required by Big Data or Internet of Things monitoring applications. This paper describes and analyzes three main open-source distributed stream- processing platforms: Storm Flink, and Spark Streaming. We analyze the system architectures and we compare their main features. We carry out two experiments concerning anomaly detection on network traffic to evaluate the throughput efficiency and the resilience to node failures. Results show that the performance of native stream processing systems, Storm and Flink, is up to 15 times higher than the micro-batch processing system, Spark Streaming. On the other hand, Spark Streaming is more robust to node failures and provides recovery without losses.


Question: The Essential Component in Complex Analytics: Achieving Low Latency and Scalable Model Management with Velox for Serving.

Incorporating Model Management for Advanced Meta Data Challenges
Model management represents an innovative technique for meta data management, providing a more sophisticated programming interface compared to existing methods. Central to this approach are models, such as schemas and interface definitions, and the relationships between these models. Treating models and their mappings as bulk objects, model management offers a range of operators, including Match, Merge, Diff, Compose, Apply, and ModelGen. This paper builds upon previous work by delving deeper into these operators and their application to three fundamental meta data management issues: schema integration, schema evolution, and the process of round-trip engineering. By applying model management to these classical problems, we demonstrate its potential to enhance meta data management practices significantly.

**Question**: A Direct Search Method to solve Economic Dispatch Problem with Valve-Point Effect

**Documents**: A hybrid of genetic algorithm and particle swarm optimization for recurrent network design

**Similar Documents**: A Novel Hybrid Approach: Genetic Algorithm and Particle Swarm Optimization for Enhanced Network Design
This paper introduces a new methodology that combines the strengths of genetic algorithms (GA) and particle swarm optimization (PSO) to address complex network design challenges. The proposed hybrid approach, termed HGAPSO, integrates GA's evolutionary principles with PSO's swarm intelligence, resulting in a powerful algorithm for optimizing network structures. Unlike traditional design methods, HGAPSO employs a sophisticated mechanism for generating new generations of solutions. Not only does it utilize crossover and mutation operations from GA, but it also incorporates PSO's swarm dynamics. The elite strategy, a core concept in HGAPSO, ensures that the highest-performing individuals are not only preserved but also enhanced through PSO's maturation process. This enhancement is achieved by treating the elite individuals as particles in a swarm, allowing them to evolve further through PSO's operations. The resulting enhanced elites form a significant portion of the next generation, while the remaining individuals are produced by applying crossover and mutation operations to these refined elites. The HGAPSO algorithm is showcased through its application in the design of recurrent neural/fuzzy networks. For recurrent neural networks, a fully connected structure is designed and tested on a temporal sequence production problem. In the case of recurrent fuzzy network design, a Takagi-Sugeno-Kang-type architecture is employed for dynamic plant control. Comparative analysis with standard GA and PSO techniques highlights the superior performance of HGAPSO in these network design scenarios, underscoring its potential for solving intricate optimization problems in network design.

Emerging big data analytics applications require a significant amount of server computational power. As chips are hitting power limits, computing systems are moving away from general-purpose designs and toward greater specialization. Hardware acceleration through specialization has received renewed interest in recent years, mainly due to the dark silicon challenge. To address the computing requirements of big data, and based on the benchmarking and characterization results, we envision a data-driven heterogeneous architecture for next generation big data server platforms that leverage the power of field-programmable gate array (FPGA) to build custom accelerators in a Hadoop MapReduce framework. Unlike a full and dedicated implementation of Hadoop MapReduce algorithm on FPGA, we propose the hardware/software (HW/SW) co-design of the algorithm, which trades some speedup at a benefit of less hardware. Considering communication overhead with FPGA and other overheads involved in Hadoop MapReduce environment such as compression and decompression, shuffling and sorting, our experimental results show significant potential for accelerating Hadoop MapReduce machine learning kernels using HW/SW co-design methodology.

MXNet is a multi-language machine learning (ML) library to ease the development of ML algorithms, especially for deep neural networks. Embedded in the host language, it blends declarative symbolic expression with imperative tensor computation. It offers auto differentiation to derive gradients. MXNet is computation and memory efficient and runs on various heterogeneous systems, ranging from mobile devices to distributed GPU clusters. This paper describes both the API design and the system implementation of MXNet, and explains how embedding of both symbolic expression and tensor operation is handled in a unified fashion. Our preliminary experiments reveal promising results on large scale deep neural network applications using multiple GPU machines.

Compiling database queries into executable (sub-) programs provides substantial benefits comparing to traditional interpreted execution. Many of these benefits, such as reduced interpretation overhead, better instruction code locality, and providing opportunities to use SIMD instructions, have previously been provided by redesigning query processors to use a vectorized execution model. In this paper, we try to shed light on the question of how state-of-the-art compilation strategies relate to vectorized execution for analytical database workloads on modern CPUs. For this purpose, we carefully investigate the behavior of vectorized and compiled strategies inside the Ingres VectorWise database system in three use cases: Project, Select and Hash Join. One of the findings is that compilation should always be combined with block-wise query execution. Another contribution is identifying three cases where "loop-compilation" strategies are inferior to vectorized execution. As such, a careful merging of these two strategies is proposed for optimal performance: either by incorporating vectorized execution principles into compiled query plans or using query compilation to create building blocks for vectorized processing.

Carefully balancing load in distributed stream processing systems has a fundamental impact on execution latency and throughput. Load balancing is challenging because real-world workloads are skewed: some tuples in the stream are associated to keys which are significantly more frequent than others. Skew is remarkably more problematic in large deployments: having more workers implies fewer keys per worker, so it becomes harder to “average out” the cost of hot keys with cold keys. We propose a novel load balancing technique that uses a heavy hitter algorithm to efficiently identify the hottest keys in the stream. These hot keys are assigned to d ≥ 2 choices to ensure a balanced load, where d is tuned automatically to minimize the memory and computation cost of operator replication. The technique works online and does not require the use of routing tables. Our extensive evaluation shows that our technique can balance real-world workloads on large deployments, and improve throughput and latency by 150% and 60% respectively over the previous state-of-the-art when deployed on Apache Storm.

Cloud computing provides on-demand services with pay-as-you-go model. In this sense, customers expect quality from providers where QoS control over DBMSs services demands decision making, usually based on performance aspects. It is essential that the system be able to assimilate the characteristics of the application in order to determine the execution time for its queries' execution. Machine learning techniques are a promising option in this context, since they o er a wide range of algorithms that build predictive models for this purpose based on the past observations of the demand and on the DBMS system behavior. In this work, we propose and evaluate the use of regression methods for modeling the SQL query execution time in the cloud. This process uses di erent techniques, such as bag-of-words, statistical lter and genetic algorithms. We use K-Fold Cross-Validation for measuring the quality of the models in each step. Experiments were carried out based on data from database systems in the cloud generated by the TPC-C benchmark.

Disk-oriented approaches to online storage are becoming increasingly problematic: they do not scale gracefully to meet the needs of large-scale Web applications, and improvements in disk capacity have far outstripped improvements in access latency and bandwidth. This paper argues for a new approach to datacenter storage called RAMCloud, where information is kept entirely in DRAM and large-scale systems are created by aggregating the main memories of thousands of commodity servers. We believe that RAMClouds can provide durable and available storage with 100-1000x the throughput of disk-based systems and 100-1000x lower access latency. The combination of low latency and large scale will enable a new breed of dataintensive applications.

Emerging paradigms like High Performance Data Analytics (HPDA) and Deep Learning (DL) pose at least two new design challenges for existing MPI runtimes. First, these paradigms require an efficient support for communicating unusually large messages across processes. And second, the communication buffers used by HPDA applications and DL frameworks generally reside on a GPU's memory. In this context, we observe that conventional MPI runtimes have been optimized over decades to achieve lowest possible communication latency for relatively smaller message sizes (up-to 1 Megabyte) and that too for CPU memory buffers. With the advent of CUDA-Aware MPI runtimes, a lot of research has been conducted to improve performance of GPU buffer based communication. However, little exists in current state of the art that deals with very large message communication of GPU buffers. In this paper, we investigate these new challenges by analyzing the performance bottlenecks in existing CUDA-Aware MPI runtimes like MVAPICH2-GDR, and propose hierarchical collective designs to improve communication latency of the MPI_Bcast primitive by exploiting a new communication library called NCCL. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that addresses these new requirements where GPU buffers are used for communication with message sizes surpassing hundreds of megabytes. We highlight the design challenges for our work along with the details of design and implementation. In addition, we provide a comprehensive performance evaluation using a Micro-benchmark and a CUDA-Aware adaptation of Microsoft CNTK DL framework. We report up to 47% improvement in training time for CNTK using the proposed hierarchical MPI_Bcast design.

Big data processing is a hot topic in today’s computer science world. There is a significant demand for analysing big data to satisfy many requirements of many industries. Emergence of the Kappa architecture created a strong requirement for a highly capable and efficient data processing engine. Therefore data processing engines such as Apache Flink and Apache Spark emerged in open source world to fulfill that efficient and high performing data processing requirement. There are many available benchmarks to evaluate those two data processing engines. But complex deployment patterns and dependencies make those benchmarks very difficult to reproduce by our own. This project has two main goals. They are making few of community accepted benchmarks easily reproducible on cloud and validate the performance claimed by those studies. Keywords– Data Processing, Apache Flink, Apache Spark, Batch processing, Stream processing, Reproducible experiments, Cloud

Hive is a data warehousing solution on top of the Hadoop MapReduce framework that has been designed to handle large amounts of data and store them in tables like a relational database management system or a conventional data warehouse while using the parallelization and batch processing functionalities of the Hadoop MapReduce framework to speed up the execution of queries. Data inserted into Hive is stored in the Hadoop FileSystem (HDFS), which is part of the Hadoop MapReduce framework. To make the data accessible to the user, Hive uses a query language similar to SQL, which is called HiveQL. When a query is issued in HiveQL, it is translated by a parser into a query execution plan that is optimized and then turned into a series of map and reduce iterations. These iterations are then executed on the data stored in the HDFS, writing the output to a file.
 The goal of this work is to to develop an approach for improving the performance of the HiveQL queries executed in the Hive framework. For that purpose, we introduce an extension to the Hive MetaStore which stores metadata that has been extracted on the column level of the user database. These column level statistics are then used for example in combination with join ordering algorithms which are adapted to the specific needs of the Hadoop MapReduce environment to improve the overall performance of the HiveQL query execution.

Effective processing of extremely large volumes of spatial data has led to many organizations employing distributed processing frameworks. Apache Spark is one such open-source framework that is enjoying widespread adoption. Within this data space, it is important to note that most of the observational data (i.e., data collected by sensors, either moving or stationary) has a temporal component, or timestamp. In order to perform advanced analytics and gain insights, the temporal component becomes equally important as the spatial and attribute components. In this paper, we detail several variants of a spatial join operation that addresses both spatial, temporal, and attribute-based joins. Our spatial join technique differs from other approaches in that it combines spatial, temporal, and attribute predicates in the join operator.
 In addition, our spatio-temporal join algorithm and implementation differs from others in that it runs in commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) application. The users of this functionality are assumed to be GIS analysts with little if any knowledge of the implementation details of spatio-temporal joins or distributed processing. They are comfortable using simple tools that do not provide the ability to tweak the configuration of the


Question: The Essential Component in Advanced Analytics: Achieving Low Latency and Scalable Model Management with Velox for Complex Data Serving.

This paper serves as an in-depth guide to Support Vector Machines (SVMs) for pattern recognition, starting with foundational concepts such as VC dimension and structural risk minimization. It delves into the workings of linear SVMs for both separable and non-separable data, providing a detailed walkthrough of a complex example. The mechanical analogy is explained to clarify the SVM concept, and the uniqueness and global nature of SVM solutions are discussed. The practical implementation of support vector training is described, with a focus on the kernel mapping technique, which is crucial for constructing nonlinear SVM solutions. The paper explores the capacity of SVMs to achieve very high, even infinite, VC dimensions through the use of homogeneous polynomial and Gaussian radial basis function kernels. Despite the potential risks associated with high VC dimensions, the paper argues that SVMs often exhibit excellent generalization performance, presenting experimental evidence that supports this observation. Throughout the document, a plethora of examples and proofs of key theorems are provided, aiming to offer both new insights and fresh perspectives on established material.

**Question**: A Comparative Study of Machine Learning Techniques for Fraud Detection in Credit Card Transactions

**Documents**: A Comprehensive Survey on Graph Neural Networks
The research field of graph neural networks (GNNs) has been a rapidly growing area in the broad domain of machine learning (ML) over graphs. Graphs are powerful data representations which can naturally model the relations between objects. Many real-world applications can be abstracted into graph-structured data, such as citation networks, molecules, and images. ML over graph data has been widely studied, and GNNs have shown promising results in many graph-based tasks. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive survey over GNN models. We first introduce the taxonomy of GNNs, including spectral-based GNNs and spatial-based GNNs. Then, we review the state-of-the-art GNN models in both categories. We also discuss the applications of GNNs in many fields, such as bioinformatics, social networks, and recommendation systems. Finally, we identify several promising research directions in GNNs.

**Similar Documents**: This article presents a thorough examination of graph neural networks (GNNs), a burgeoning field within the broader domain of machine learning (ML) that deals with graph-based data. Graphs are a potent data representation tool that can effortlessly encapsulate relationships between objects. Their utility is evident in various real-world applications, including citation networks, molecular structures, and image analysis. ML techniques applied to graph data have been extensively explored, and GNN

The efficient processing of video streams is a key component in many emerging Internet of Things (IoT) and edge applications, such as Virtual and Augmented Reality (V/AR) and self-driving cars. These applications require real-time high-throughput video processing. This can be attained via a collaborative processing model between the edge and the cloud—called an Edge-Cloud model. To this end, many approaches were proposed to optimize the latency and bandwidth consumption of Edge-Cloud video processing, especially for Neural Networks (NN)-based methods. In this demonstration. We investigate the efficiency of these NN techniques, how they can be combined, and whether combining them leads to better performance. Our demonstration invites participants to experiment with the various NN techniques, combine them, and observe how the underlying NN changes with different techniques and how these changes affect accuracy, latency and bandwidth consumption. PVLDB Reference Format: Philipp M. Grulich and Faisal Nawab. Collaborative Edge and Cloud Neural Networks for Real-Time Video Processing. PVLDB, 11 (12): 2046-2049, 2018. DOI: https://doi.org/10.14778/3229863.3236256

With advances in data collection and generation technologies, organizations and researchers are faced with the ever growing problem of how to manage and analyze large dynamic datasets. Environments that produce streaming sources of data are becoming common place. Examples include stock market, sensor, web click stream, and network data. In many instances, these environments are also equipped with multiple distributed computing nodes that are often located near the data sources. Analyzing and monitoring data in such environments requires data mining technology that is cognizant of the mining task, the distributed nature of the data, and the data influx rate. In this chapter, we survey the current state of the field and identify potential directions of future research.

Big Data , it is a word which is used for the huge amount of data sets which have the big, extra various and difficu lt structure facing some difficult ies in storing the data then analyzing and visualizing the data for the final outcome [1] . Big data analytics is the procedure of probing huge amounts of data. Here we use cloud computing technology so firstly acquaint the general environment of big data and some associated technology like Hadoop. This powerful technology is used to execute the huge s cale and complicated data computing. It eradicates the requirements of hardware computing which is costly dedicated space and software’s [3]. It is a resolution for analyzing Big Data by deploying Big Data softwares like Hadoop on cloud background which gives users an innovative pattern of service called as Analytics as a Service [7]. Hadoop uses the map-reduce paradigm .We also talk about various advantages, challenges, and issues associated with Big Data.

Digital world is growing very fast and become more complex in the volume (terabyte to petabyte), variety (structured and un-structured and hybrid), velocity (high speed in growth) in nature. This refers to as ‘Big Data’ that is a global phenomenon. This is typically considered to be a data collection that has grown so large it can’t be effectively managed or exploited using conventional data management tools: e.g., classic relational database management systems (RDBMS) or conventional search engines. To handle this problem, traditional RDBMS are complemented by specifically designed a rich set of alternative DBMS; such as NoSQL, NewSQL and Search-based systems. This paper motivation is to provide classification, characteristics and evaluation of NoSQL databases in Big Data Analytics. This report is intended to help users, especially to the organizations to obtain an independent understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of various NoSQL database approaches to supporting applications that process huge volumes of data.

Many stream-based applications are naturally distributed. Applications are often embedded in an environment with numerous connected computing devices with heterogeneous capabilities. As data travels from its point of origin (e.g., sensors) downstream to applications, it passes through many computing devices, each of which is a potential target of computation. Furthermore, to cope with time-varying load spikes and changing demand, many servers would be brought to bear on the problem. In both cases, distributed computation is the norm. Abstract

Resource Description Framework (RDF) represents a flexible and concise model for representing the metadata of resources on the web. Over the past years, with the increasing amount of RDF data, efficient and scalable RDF data management has become a fundamental challenge to achieve the Semantic Web vision. However, multiple approaches for RDF storage have been suggested, ranging from simple triple stores to more advanced techniques like vertical partitioning on the predicates or centralized approaches. Unfortunately, it is still a challenge to store a huge quantity of RDF quads due, in part, to the query processing for RDF data. This paper proposes a scalable solution for RDF data management that uses Apache Accumulo. We focus on introducing storage methods and indexing techniques that scale to billions of quads across multiple nodes, while providing fast and easy access to the data through conventional query mechanisms such as SPARQL. Our performance evaluation shows that in most cases our approach works well against large RDF datasets.

Scientists are now faced with an incredible volume of data to analyze. To successfully analyze and validate various hypothesis, it is necessary to pose several queries, correlate disparate data, and create insightful visualizations of both the simulated processes and observed phenomena. Often, insight comes from comparing the results of multiple visualizations. Unfortunately, today this process is far from interactive and contains many error-prone and time-consuming tasks. As a result, the generation and maintenance of visualizations is a major bottleneck in the scientific process, hindering both the ability to mine scientific data and the actual use of the data. The VisTrails system represents our initial attempt to improve the scientific discovery process and reduce the time to insight. In VisTrails, we address the problem of visualization from a data management perspective: VisTrails manages the data and metadata of a visualization product. In this demonstration, we show the power and flexibility of our system by presenting actual scenarios in which scientific visualization is used and showing how our system improves usability, enables reproducibility, and greatly reduces the time required to create scientific visualizations.

Big data analytics associated with database searching, mining, and analysis can be seen as an innovative IT capability that can improve firm performance. Even though some leading companies are actively adopting big data analytics to strengthen market competition and to open up new business opportunities, many firms are still in the early stage of the adoption curve due to lack of understanding of and experience with big data. Hence, it is interesting and timely to understand issues relevant to big data adoption. In this study, a research model is proposed to explain the acquisition intention of big data analytics

People, devices, infrastructures and sensors can constantly communicate exchanging data and generating new data that trace many of these exchanges. This leads to vast volumes of data collected at ever increasing velocities and of different variety, a phenomenon currently known as Big Data. In particular, recent developments in Information and Communications Technologies are pushing the fourth industrial revolution, Industry 4.0, being data generated by several sources like machine controllers, sensors, manufacturing systems, among others. Joining volume, variety and velocity of data, with Industry 4.0, makes the opportunity to enhance sustainable innovation in the Factories of the Future. In this, the collection, integration, storage, processing and analysis of data is a key challenge, being Big Data systems needed to link all the entities and data needs of the factory. Thereby, this paper addresses this key challenge, proposing and implementing a Big Data Analytics architecture, using a multinational organisation (Bosch Car Multimedia – Braga) as a case study. In this work, all the data lifecycle, from collection to analysis, is handled, taking into consideration the different data processing speeds that can exist in the real environment of a factory (batch or stream).

Relational database systems have been the dominating technology to manage and analyze large data warehouses. Moreover, the ER model, the standard in database design has a close relationship with the relational model. Recently, there has been a surge of alternative technologies for large scale analytic processing, most of which are not based on the relational model. Out of these proposals, distributed file systems together with MapReduce have become strong competitors to relational database systems to analyze large data sets, exploiting parallel processing. Moreover, there is progress on using MapReduce to evaluate relational queries. With that motivation in mind, this panel will compare pros and cons of each technology for data warehousing and will identify research issues, considering practical aspects like ease of use, programming flexibility and cost; as well as technical aspects like data modeling, storage, hardware, scalability, query processing, fault tolerance and data mining.


Question: The Crucial Component in Advanced Analytics: Achieving Low Latency and Scalable Model Management with Velox for Model Serving.

This paper advocates for a unified architecture for in-RDBMS (Relational Database Management System) analytics, aiming to streamline the development process and enhance the sophistication of in-database analytics offered by database vendors. The current landscape necessitates the implementation of each new statistical technique from the ground up within the RDBMS, a process that is both time-consuming and complex. We posit that the absence of a cohesive architecture for in-database analytics is at the crux of this issue. Our primary innovation is a move towards this unified architecture, which allows for generic performance optimizations across various statistical techniques, as opposed to ad hoc optimizations tailored to each technique. Specifically, our research focuses on two pivotal elements that significantly affect performance: the data storage order and the parallelization of computations on a single-node multicore RDBMS. To substantiate the viability of our proposed architecture, we have integrated a range of popular analytics methods into both commercial and open-source RDBMS platforms, requiring modifications to merely a few dozen lines of code for the addition of a new statistical technique. Through comparative analysis, we illustrate that our method not only matches but often outperforms the native analytics tools provided by commercial RDBMSes on various analytics tasks, all while maintaining equivalent quality. This unified architecture paves the way for more efficient and effective in-database analytics, reducing the overhead associated with the development of new statistical techniques and enhancing the overall performance of data analysis within RDBMS environments.

We introduce EMARS, an efficient resource management system for serverless cloud computing frameworks with the goal to enhance resource (focus on memory) allocation among containers. We have built our prototype on top of an open-source serverless platform, OpenLambda. It is based upon application workloads and serverless functions' memory needs. As a background motivation we analyzed the latencies and memory requirements of functions running on AWS lambda. The memory limits also lead to variations in number of containers spawned on OpenLambda. We use memory limit settings to propose a model of predictive efficient memory management.

Advances in Internet of Things (IoT) give rise to a variety of latency-sensitive, closed-loop applications that reside at the edge. These applications often involve a large number of sensors that generate volumes of data, which must be processed and disseminated in real-time to potentially a large number of entities for actuation, thereby forming a closed-loop, publish-process-subscribe system. To meet the response time requirements of such applications, this paper presents techniques to realize a scalable, fog/edge-based broker architecture that balances data publication and processing loads for topic-based, publish-process-subscribe systems operating at the edge, and assures the Quality-of-Service (QoS), specified as the 90th percentile latency, on a per-topic basis. The key contributions include: (a) a sensitivity analysis to understand the impact of features such as publishing rate, number of subscribers, per-sample processing interval and background load on a topic's performance; (b) a latency prediction model for a set of co-located topics, which is then used for the latency-aware placement of topics on brokers; and (c) an optimization problem formulation for k-topic co-location to minimize the number of brokers while meeting each topic's QoS requirement. Here, k denotes the maximum number of topics that can be placed on a broker. We show that the problem is NP-hard for k >=3 and present three load balancing heuristics. Empirical results are presented to validate the latency prediction model and to evaluate the performance of the proposed heuristics.

In today's era, data has been increasing in volume, velocity and variety. Due to large and complex collection of datasets, it is difficult to process on traditional data processing application. So, this leads to emerging of new technology called data analytics. Data analytics is a science of exploring raw data and elicitation the useful information and hidden pattern. The main aim of data analytics is to use advance analytics techniques for huge and different datasets. Datasets may vary in sizes from terabytes to zettabytes and can be structured or unstructured. The paper gives the comprehensive and theoretical analysis of four open source data analytics tools which are RapidMiner, Weka, R Tool and KNIME. The study describes the technical specification, features, and specialization for each selected tool. By employing the study the choice and selection of tools can be made easy. The tools are evaluated on basis of various parameters like volume of data used, response time, ease of use, price tag, analysis algorithm and handling.

Implementing E cient, Portable Computations for Machine Learning

Large corpora are ubiquitous in today’s world and memory quickly becomes the limiting factor in practical applications of the Vector Space Model (VSM). In this paper, we identify a gap in existing implementations of many of the popular algorithms, which is their scalability and ease of use. We describe a Natural Language Processing software framework which is based on the idea of document streaming, i.e. processing corpora document after document, in a memory independent fashion. Within this framework, we implement several popular algorithms for topical inference, including Latent Semantic Analysis and Latent Dirichlet Allocation, in a way that makes them completely independent of the training corpus size. Particular emphasis is placed on straightforward and intuitive framework design, so that modifications and extensions of the methods and/or their application by interested practitioners are effortless. We demonstrate the usefulness of our approach on a real-world scenario of computing document similarities within an existing digital library DML-CZ.

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Cross-Industry Standard process model (CRISP-DM) was developed in the late 90s by a consortium of industry participants to facilitate the end-to-end data mining process for Knowledge Discovery in Databases (KDD). While there have been efforts to better integrate with management and software development practices, there are no extensions to handle the new activities involved in using big data technologies. Data Science Edge (DSE) is an enhanced process model to accommodate big data technologies and data science activities. In recognition of the changes, the author promotes the use of a new term, Knowledge Discovery in Data Science (KDDS) as a call for the community to develop a new industry standard data science process model.

S ystems are now being designed that can scale to very large configurations. Examples include parallel architectures with thousands of processors, wireless networks connecting tens of thousands of computers, and parallel database systems capable of processing millions of transactions a second. In some cases, systems have grown considerably larger than envisaged by their designers. Design and development costs for such systems could be significantly reduced if only there were efficient techniques for evaluating design alternatives and predicting their impact on overall system performance metrics. Due to the systems' analytical intractability, simulation is the most common performance evaluation technique for such systems. However, the long execution times needed for sequential simulation models often hamper evaluation. For instance, it can easily take weeks to simulate wireless networks with thousands of mobile nodes that are subject to the interference and signal-fading effects of a realistic environment. Also, the simulation of parallel programs typically suffers from slowdown factors of 30 to 50 per processor. 1 This means that simulation of a parallel program executing for five to 15 minutes on a 128-node multi-processor can take anywhere from a few weeks to a few months—even on state-of-the-art sequential workstations. As the size of the physical system increases, the models' memory requirements can easily exceed the workstations' capacity. The limitations of sequential model execution have led to growing interest in the use of parallel execution for simulating large-scale systems. Widespread use of parallel simulation, however, has been significantly hindered by a lack of tools for integrating parallel model execution into the overall framework of system simulation. Although a number of algorithmic alternatives exist for parallel execution of discrete-event simulation models, performance analysts not expert in parallel simulation have relatively few tools giving them flexibility to experiment with multiple algorithmic or architectural alternatives for model execution. Another drawback to widespread use of simulations is the cost of model design and maintenance. The design and development costs for detailed simulation models for complex systems can easily rival the costs for the physical systems themselves. The simulation environment we developed at UCLA attempts to address some of these issues by providing these features: • An easy path for the migration of simulation models to operational software prototypes. • Implementation on both distributed-and shared-memory platforms and support for a diverse set of parallel simulation protocols. • Support for visual and hierarchical model design. Our environment consists of three primary components: …

The big data phenomenon is growing throughout private and public sector domains. Profit motives make it urgent for companies in the private sector to learn how to leverage big data. However, in the public sector, government services could also be greatly improved through the use of big data. Here, the authors describe some drivers, barriers, and best practices affecting the use of big data and associated analytics in the government domain. They present a model that illustrates how big data can result in transformational government through increased efficiency and effectiveness in the delivery of services. Their empirical basis for this model uses a case vignette from the US Department of Veterans Affairs, while the theoretical basis is a balanced view of big data that takes into account the continuous growth and use of such data. This article is part of a special issue on big data and business analytics.

Recently, the R package has become a popular tool for big data analysis due to its several matured software packages for the data analysis and visualization, including the analysis of air pollution. The air pollution problem is of increasing global concern as it has greatly impacts on the environment and human health. With the rapid development of IoT and the increase in the accuracy of geographical information collected by sensors, a huge amount of air pollution data were generated. Thus, it is difficult to analyze the air pollution data in a single machine environment effectively and reliably due to its inherent characteristic of memory design. In this work, we construct a distributed computing environment based on both the softwares of RHadoop and SparkR for performing the analysis and visualization of air pollution with the R more reliably and effectively. In the work, we firstly use the sensors, called EdiGreen AirBox to collect the air pollution data in Taichung, Taiwan. Then, we adopt the Inverse Distance Weighting method to transform the sensors’ data into the density map. Finally, the experimental results show the accuracy of the short-term prediction results of PM2.5 by using the ARIMA model. In addition, the verification with respect to the prediction accuracy with the MAPE method is also presented in the experimental results.


Question: The Essential Component in Advanced Analytics: Low Delay, Expandable Model Administration and Deployment with Velox

This paper explores the intricacies of learning from delayed rewards in complex environments, a critical challenge in contemporary machine learning applications. Delayed rewards, a common occurrence in scenarios where the immediate consequences of actions are not apparent, pose significant hurdles to the training of intelligent agents. The authors delve into the nuances of reinforcement learning algorithms, specifically addressing how these algorithms can effectively cope with the uncertainty and latency associated with delayed rewards. Through a series of experiments and theoretical analyses, the paper elucidates the strategies that can enhance the adaptability and performance of learning systems in environments where feedback is delayed. The findings are particularly relevant to domains such as game AI, robotics, and financial decision-making, where the impact of actions may only become evident after a considerable time lag. By illuminating the mechanisms for optimizing learning under such conditions, the research contributes a crucial piece to the puzzle of complex analytics, highlighting the importance of robust model management and serving techniques to handle low latency and scalability issues in real-world applications.

Existing computational models for processing continuously changing input data are unable to efficiently support iterative queries except in limited special cases. This makes it difficult to perform complex tasks, such as social-graph analysis on changing data at interactive timescales, which would greatly benefit those analyzing the behavior of services like Twitter. In this paper we introduce a new model called differential computation, which extends traditional incremental computation to allow arbitrarily nested iteration, and explain—with reference to a publicly available prototype system called Naiad—how differential computation can be efficiently implemented in the context of a declarative dataparallel dataflow language. The resulting system makes it easy to program previously intractable algorithms such as incrementally updated strongly connected components, and integrate them with data transformation operations to obtain practically relevant insights from real data streams.

Real-world data --- especially when generated by distributed measurement infrastructures such as sensor networks --- tends to be incomplete, imprecise, and erroneous, making it impossible to present it to users or feed it directly into applications. The traditional approach to dealing with this problem is to first process the data using statistical or probabilistic models that can provide more robust interpretations of the data. Current database systems, however, do not provide adequate support for applying models to such data, especially when those models need to be frequently updated as new data arrives in the system. Hence, most scientists and engineers who depend on models for managing their data do not use database systems for archival or querying at all; at best, databases serve as a persistent raw data store.In this paper we define a new abstraction called model-based views and present the architecture of MauveDB, the system we are building to support such views. Just as traditional database views provide logical data independence, model-based views provide independence from the details of the underlying data generating mechanism and hide the irregularities of the data by using models to present a consistent view to the users. MauveDB supports a declarative language for defining model-based views, allows declarative querying over such views using SQL, and supports several different materialization strategies and techniques to efficiently maintain them in the face of frequent updates. We have implemented a prototype system that currently supports views based on regression and interpolation, using the Apache Derby open source DBMS, and we present results that show the utility and performance benefits that can be obtained by supporting several different types of model-based views in a database system.

Comdb2 is a distributed database system designed for geographical replication and high availability. In contrast with the latest trends in this field, Comdb2 o↵ers full transactional support, a standard relational model, and the expressivity of SQL. Moreover, the system allows for rich stored procedures using a dialect of Lua. Comdb2 implements a serializable system in which reads from any node always return current values. Comdb2 provides transparent High Availability through built-in service discovery and sophisticated retry logic embedded in the standard API. In addition to the relational data model, Comdb2 implements queues for publisher-to-subscriber message delivery. Queues can be combined with table triggers for timeconsistent log distribution, providing functionality commonly needed in modern OLTP. In this paper we give an overview of our last twelve years of work. We focus on the design choices that have made Comdb2 the primary database solution within our company, Bloomberg LP (BLP).

The increasing main memory capacity and the explosion of big data have fueled the development of in-memory big data management and processing. By offering an efficient in-memory parallel execution model which can eliminate disk I/O bottleneck, existing in-memory cluster computing platforms (e.g., Flink and Spark) have already been proven to be outstanding platforms for big data processing. However, these platforms are merely CPU-based systems. This paper proposes GFlink, an in-memory computing architecture on heterogeneous CPU-GPU clusters for big data. Our proposed architecture extends the original Flink from CPU clusters to heterogeneous CPU-GPU clusters, greatly improving the computational power of Flink. Furthermore, we have proposed a programming framework based on Flink's abstract model, i.e., DataSet (DST), hiding the programming complexity of GPUs behind the simple and familiar high-level interfaces. To achieve high performance and good load-balance, an efficient JVM-GPU communication strategy, a GPU cache scheme, and an adaptive locality-aware scheduling scheme for three-stage pipelining execution are proposed. Extensive experiment results indicate that the high computational power of GPUs can be efficiently utilized, and the implementation on GFlink outperforms that on the original CPU-based Flink.

The security event correlation scalability has become a major concern for security analysts and IT administrators when considering complex IT infrastructures that need to handle gargantuan amounts of events or wide correlation window spans. The current correlation capabilities of Security Information and Event Management (SIEM), based on a single node in centralized servers, have proved to be insufficient to process large event streams. This paper introduces a step forward in the current state of the art to address the aforementioned problems. The proposed model takes into account the two main aspects of this field: distributed correlation and query parallelization. We present a case study of a multiple-step attack on the Olympic Games IT infrastructure to illustrate the applicability of our approach.

In recent years the amount of data stored in educational database is growing rapidly. The stored database contains hidden information which if used aids improvement of student's performance and behaviour. In this paper predictive modelling approach is used for extracting this hidden information. Data is collected, a predictive model is formulated, predictions are made, and the model is validated as additional data becomes available. The predictive models will help the instructor to understand how well or how poorly the students in his/her class will perform, and hence the instructor can choose proper pedagogical and instructional interventions to enhance student learning outcomes. The implementation is done in Hadoop framework with MapReduce and Revolutionary R Enterprise RRE.

Cross-Industry Standard process model (CRISP-DM) was developed in the late 90s by a consortium of industry participants to facilitate the end-to-end data mining process for Knowledge Discovery in Databases (KDD). While there have been efforts to better integrate with management and software development practices, there are no extensions to handle the new activities involved in using big data technologies. Data Science Edge (DSE) is an enhanced process model to accommodate big data technologies and data science activities. In recognition of the changes, the author promotes the use of a new term, Knowledge Discovery in Data Science (KDDS) as a call for the community to develop a new industry standard data science process model.

In many applications involving continuous data streams, data arrival is bursty and data rate fluctuates over time. Systems that seek to give rapid or real-time query responses in such an environment must be prepared to deal gracefully with bursts in data arrival without compromising system performance. We discuss one strategy for processing bursty streams --- adaptive, load-aware scheduling of query operators to minimize resource consumption during times of peak load. We show that the choice of an operator scheduling strategy can have significant impact on the run-time system memory usage. We then present Chain scheduling, an operator scheduling strategy for data stream systems that is near-optimal in minimizing run-time memory usage for any collection of single-stream queries involving selections, projections, and foreign-key joins with stored relations. Chain scheduling also performs well for queries with sliding-window joins over multiple streams, and multiple queries of the above types. A thorough experimental evaluation is provided where we demonstrate the potential benefits of Chain scheduling, compare it with competing scheduling strategies, and validate our analytical conclusions.

Researchers have made significant progress in disciplines such as scientific and information visualization, statistically based exploratory and confirmatory analysis, data and knowledge representations, and perceptual and cognitive sciences. Although some research is being done in this area, the pace at which new technologies and technical talents are becoming available is far too slow to meet the urgent need. National Visualization and Analytics Center's goal is to advance the state of the science to enable analysts to detect the expected and discover the unexpected from massive and dynamic information streams and databases consisting of data of multiple types and from multiple sources, even though the data are often conflicting and incomplete. Visual analytics is a multidisciplinary field that includes the following focus areas: (i) analytical reasoning techniques, (ii) visual representations and interaction techniques, (iii) data representations and transformations, (iv) techniques to support production, presentation, and dissemination of analytical results. The R&D agenda for visual analytics addresses technical needs for each of these focus areas, as well as recommendations for speeding the movement of promising technologies into practice. This article provides only the concise summary of the R&D agenda. We encourage reading, discussion, and debate as well as active innovation toward the agenda for visual analysis.

Distributed stream processing platforms is a new class of real-time monitoring systems that analyze and extracts knowledge from large continuous streams of data. This type of systems is crucial for providing high throughput and low latency required by Big Data or Internet of Things monitoring applications. This paper describes and analyzes three main open-source distributed stream- processing platforms: Storm Flink, and Spark Streaming. We analyze the system architectures and we compare their main features. We carry out two experiments concerning anomaly detection on network traffic to evaluate the throughput efficiency and the resilience to node failures. Results show that the performance of native stream processing systems, Storm and Flink, is up to 15 times higher than the micro-batch processing system, Spark Streaming. On the other hand, Spark Streaming is more robust to node failures and provides recovery without losses.


Question: Enhancing the sparse spectrum approximation of Gaussian processes by incorporating uncertainty in frequency inputs.

This paper introduces a novel algorithm, Stochastic Variational Inference, designed to approximate posterior distributions for large-scale probabilistic models. This technique is applicable to a broad range of models and is showcased through its implementation in two probabilistic topic models: Latent Dirichlet Allocation and the Hierarchical Dirichlet Process Topic Model. To illustrate its effectiveness, Stochastic Variational Inference is applied to extensive document collections: a corpus of 300,000 articles from Nature, 1.8 million articles from The New York Times, and 3.8 million articles from Wikipedia. The algorithm's scalability enables it to efficiently handle data sets of this magnitude, outperforming traditional variational inference methods which are limited to smaller datasets. Additionally, the paper highlights that the Bayesian nonparametric topic model surpasses its parametric equivalent in performance. Stochastic Variational Inference thus enables the application of sophisticated Bayesian models to big data scenarios.

Motivated by a real-world problem, we study a novel budgeted optimization problem where the goal is to optimize an unknown function f(·) given a budget by requesting a sequence of samples from the function. In our setting, however, evaluating the function at precisely specified points is not practically possible due to prohibitive costs. Instead, we can only request constrained experiments. A constrained experiment, denoted by Q, specifies a subset of the input space for the experimenter to sample the function from. The outcome of Q includes a sampled experiment x, and its function output f(x). Importantly, as the constraints of Q become looser, the cost of fulfilling the request decreases, but the uncertainty about the location x increases. Our goal is to manage this trade-off by selecting a set of constrained experiments that best optimize f(·) within the budget. We study this problem in two different settings, the non-sequential (or batch) setting where a set of constrained experiments is selected at once, and the sequential setting where experiments are selected one at a time. We evaluate our proposed methods for both settings using synthetic and real functions. The experimental results demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed methods.

In this paper, we propose a novel speech dereverberation framework that utilizes deep neural network (DNN)-based spectrum estimation to construct linear inverse filters. The proposed dereverberation framework is based on the state-of-the-art inverse filter estimation algorithm called weighted prediction error (WPE) algorithm, which is known to effectively reduce reverberation and greatly boost the ASR performance in various conditions. In WPE, the accuracy of the inverse filter estimation, and thus the deverberation performance, is largely dependent on the estimation of the power spectral density (PSD) of the target signal. Therefore, the conventional WPE iteratively performs the inverse filter estimation, actual dereverberation and the PSD estimation to gradually improve the PSD estimate. However, while such iterative procedure works well when sufficiently long acoustically-stationary observed signals are available, WPE’s performance degrades when the duration of observed/accessible data is short, which typically is the case for real-time applications using online block-batch processing with small batches. To solve this problem, we incorporate the DNN-based spectrum estimator into the framework ofWPE, because a DNN can estimate the PSD robustly even from very short observed data. We experimentally show that the proposed framework outperforms the conventional WPE, and improves the ASR performance in real noisy reverberant environments in both single-channel and multichannel cases.

The paper describes a novel spectral conversion method for voice transformation. We perform spectral conversion between speakers using a Gaussian mixture model (GMM) on the joint probability density of source and target features. A smooth spectral sequence can be estimated by applying maximum likelihood (ML) estimation to the GMM-based mapping using dynamic features. However, there is still degradation of the converted speech quality due to an over-smoothing of the converted spectra, which is inevitable in conventional ML-based parameter estimation. In order to alleviate the over-smoothing, we propose an ML-based conversion taking account of the global variance of the converted parameter in each utterance. Experimental results show that the performance of the voice conversion can be improved by using the global variance information. Moreover, it is demonstrated that the proposed algorithm is more effective than spectral enhancement by postfiltering.

Sparse sampling schemes can broadly be classified into two main categories: static sampling where the sampling pattern is predetermined, and dynamic sampling where each new measurement location is selected based on information obtained from previous measurements. Dynamic sampling methods are particularly appropriate for pointwise imaging methods, in which pixels are measured sequentially in arbitrary order. Examples of pointwise imaging schemes include certain implementations of atomic force microscopy, electron back scatter diffraction, and synchrotron X-ray imaging. In these pointwise imaging applications, dynamic sparse sampling methods have the potential to dramatically reduce the number of measurements required to achieve a desired level of fidelity. However, the existing dynamic sampling methods tend to be computationally expensive and are, therefore, too slow for many practical applications. In this paper, we present a framework for dynamic sampling based on machine learning techniques, which we call a supervised learning approach for dynamic sampling (SLADS). In each step of SLADS, the objective is to find the pixel that maximizes the expected reduction in distortion (ERD) given previous measurements. SLADS is fast because we use a simple regression function to compute the ERD, and it is accurate because the regression function is trained using datasets that are representative of the specific application. In addition, we introduce an approximate method to terminate dynamic sampling at a desired level of distortion. We then extend our algorithm to incorporate multiple measurements at each step, which we call groupwise SLADS. Finally, we present results on computationally generated synthetic data and experimentally collected data to demonstrate a dramatic improvement over state-of-the-art static sampling methods

Declarative queries are proving to be an attractive paradigm for interacting with networks of wireless sensors. The metaphor that “the sensornet is a database” is problematic, however, because sensors do not exhaustively represent the data in the real world. In order to map the raw sensor readings onto physical reality, a modelof that reality is required to complement the readings. In this paper, we enrich interactive sensor querying with statistical modeling techniques. We demonstrate that such models can help provide answers that are both more meaningful, and, by introducing approximations with probabilistic confidences, significantly more efficient to compute in both time and energy. Utilizing the combination of a model and live data acquisition raises the challenging optimization problem of selecting the best sensor readings to acquire, balancing the increase in the confidence of our answer against the communication and data acquisition costs in the network. We describe an exponential time algorithm for finding the optimal solution to this optimization problem, and a polynomial-time heuristic for identifying solutions that perform well in practice. We evaluate our approach on several real-world sensor-network data sets, taking into account the real measured data and communication quality, demonstrating that our model-based approach provides a high-fidelity representation of the real phenomena and leads to significant performance gains versus traditional data acquisition techniques.

The frequency of a sinusoidal signal is a well defined quantity. However, often in practice, signals are not truly sinusoidal, or even aggregates of sinusoidal components. Nonstationary signals in particular do not lend themselves well to decomposition into sinusoidal components. For such signals, the notion of frequency loses its effectiveness, and one needs to use a parameter which accounts for the time-varying nature of the process. This need has given rise to the idea of instantaneous frequency. The instantaneous frequency (IF) of a signal is a parameter which is often of significant practical importance. In many situations such as seismic, radar, sonar, communications, and biomedical applications, the IF is a good descriptor of some physical phenomenon. This paper discusses the concept of instantaneous frequency, its definitions, and the correspondence between the various mathematical models formulated for representation of IF. The paper also considers the extent to which the IF corresponds to our intuitive expectation of reality. A historical review of the successive attempts to define the IF is presented. Then the relationships between the IF and the group-delay, analytic signal, and bandwidth-time (BT) product are explored, as well as the relationship with time-frequency distributions. Finally, the notions of monocomponent and multicomponent signals, and instantaneous bandwidth are discussed. It is shown that all these notions are well described in the context of the theory presented.

Parameter estimation of sinusoids is a problem of significance in many practical applications. This problem is revisited through a new alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) based approach, where the unknown parameters are estimated from one-bit quantized noisy measurements with time varying thresholds. The proposed method is computationally efficient and easy to implement, since each ADMM update has simple closed-form formula. Moreover, it provides accurate estimates by exploiting group sparsity hidden in the signal model. Simulations demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithm.

This paper describes an efficient method for learning the parameters of a Gaussian process (GP). The parameters are learned from multiple tasks which are assumed to have been drawn independently from the same GP prior. An efficient algorithm is obtained by extending the informative vector machine (IVM) algorithm to handle the multi-task learning case. The multi-task IVM (MTIVM) saves computation by greedily selecting the most informative examples from the separate tasks. The MT-IVM is also shown to be more efficient than random sub-sampling on an artificial data-set and more effective than the traditional IVM in a speaker dependent phoneme recognition task.

We propose a semiparametric approach called the nonparanormal SKEPTIC for efficiently and robustly estimating high-dimensional undirected graphical models. To achieve modeling flexibility, we consider the nonparanormal graphical models proposed by Liu, Lafferty and Wasserman [J. Mach. Learn. Res. 10 (2009) 2295–2328]. To achieve estimation robustness, we exploit nonparametric rank-based correlation coefficient estimators, including Spearman’s rho and Kendall’s tau. We prove that the nonparanormal SKEPTIC achieves the optimal parametric rates of convergence for both graph recovery and parameter estimation. This result suggests that the nonparanormal graphical models can be used as a safe replacement of the popular Gaussian graphical models, even when the data are truly Gaussian. Besides theoretical analysis, we also conduct thorough numerical simulations to compare the graph recovery performance of different estimators under both ideal and noisy settings. The proposed methods are then applied on a large-scale genomic data set to illustrate their empirical usefulness. The R package huge implementing the proposed methods is available on the Comprehensive R Archive Network: http://cran.r-project.org/.