Dramatic environmental and economic impact of the ever increasing power and energy consumption of modern computing devices in data centers is now a critical challenge. On one hand, designers use technology scaling as one of the methods to face the phenomenon called dark silicon (only segments of a chip function concurrently due to power restrictions). On the other hand, designers use extreme-scale systems such as teradevices to meet the performance needs of their applications which in turn increases the power consumption of the platform. In order to overcome these challenges, we need novel computing paradigms that address energy efficiency. One of the promising solutions is to incorporate parallel distributed methodologies at different abstraction levels. The FP7 project ParaDIME focuses on this objective to provide different distributed methodologies (software-hardware techniques) at different abstraction levels to attack the power-wall problem. In particular, the ParaDIME framework will utilize: circuit and architecture operation below safe voltage limits for drastic energy savings, specialized energy-aware computing accelerators, heterogeneous computing, energy-aware runtime, approximate computing and power-aware message passing. The major outcome of the project will be a processor architecture for a heterogeneous distributed system that utilizes future device characteristics for drastic energy savings. Wherever possible, ParaDIME will adopt multidisciplinary techniques, such as hardware support for message passing, runtime energy optimization utilizing new hardware energy performance counters, use of accelerators for error recovery from sub-safe voltage operation, and approximate computing through annotated code. Furthermore, we will establish and investigate the theoretical limits of energy savings at the device, circuit, architecture, runtime and programming model levels of the computing stack, as well as quantify the actual energy savings achieved by the ParaDIME approach for the complete computing stack with the real environment.

Regular expressions are the dominant technique to extract business relevant entities (e.g., invoice numbers or product names) from text data (e.g., invoices), since these entity types often follow a strict underlying syntactical pattern. However, the manual construction of regular expressions that guarantee a high recall and precision is a tedious manual task and requires expert knowledge. In this paper, we propose an approach that automatically infers regular expressions from a set of (positive) sample entities, which in turn can be derived either from enterprise databases (e.g., a product catalog) or annotated documents (e.g., historical invoices). The main innovation of our approach is that it learns effective regular expressions that can be easily interpreted and modified by a user. The effectiveness is obtained by a novel method that weights dependent entity features of different granularity (i.e. on character and token level) against each other and selects the most suitable ones to form a regular expression.

Enterprise Search (ES) is different from traditional IR due to a number of reasons, among which the high level of ambiguity of terms in queries and documents and existence of graph-structured enterprise data (ontologies) that describe the concepts of interest and their relationships to each other, are the most important ones. Our method identifies concepts from the enterprise ontology in the query and corpus. We propose a ranking scheme for ontology sub-graphs on top of approximately matched token q-grams. The ranking leverages the graph-structure of the ontology to incorporate not explicitly mentioned concepts. It improves previous solutions by using a fine-grained ranking function that is specifically designed to cope with high levels of ambiguity. This method is able to capture much more of the semantics of queries and documents than previous techniques. We prove this claim by an evaluation of our method in three real-life scenarios from two different domains, and found it to consistently be superior both in terms of precision and recall.

Current forum search technologies lack the ability to identify threads with near-duplicate content and to group these threads in the search results. As a result, forum users are overloaded with duplicated search results and prefer to create new threads without trying to find existing ones. In this paper we therefore identify common reasons leading to near-duplicates and develop a new near-duplicate detection algorithm for forum threads. The algorithm is implemented using a large case study of a real-world forum serving more than one million users. We compare this work with current algorithms, similar to [4, 5], for detecting near-duplicates on machine generated web pages. Our preliminary results show, that we significantly outperform these algorithms and that we are able to group forum threads with a precision of 74%.

Developer communities built around software products, like the SAP Community Network, provide a knowledge base for reocurring problems and their solutions. Due to the large amount of content maintained in such communities, e.g., in forums, finding relevant solutions is a major challenge beyond the scope of common keyword-based search engines. In fact, it is measured that around 50% of the forum questions of our particular scenario have already been answered at the time they are posted. We target this challenge by an entity aware search, which exploits structured knowledge, such as domain-specific ontologies, for both query interpretation and creation of document indexes. The system takes a natural language query as input, interprets it as an entity graph, matches this graph with pre-processed content and supports the user in refining his query based on the top-k relevant entities. Results are presented in a user interface that supports faceted search based on entities. Additionally, the user interface is structured according to possible search intentions of users. The evaluation of our system on the SCN scenario yields that the top 5 entities in user queries are recognized with a precision of 83% compared to 61% of state of the art algorithms.