A large amount of the world's data is both sequential and imprecise. Such data is commonly modeled as Markovian streams; examples include words/sentences inferred from raw audio signals, or discrete location sequences inferred from RFID or GPS data. The rich semantics and large volumes of these streams make them difficult to query efficiently. In this paper, we study the effects-on both efficiency and accuracy-of two common stream approximations. Through experiments on a realworld RFID data set, we identify conditions under which these approximations can improve performance by several orders of magnitude, with only minimal effects on query results. We also identify cases when the full rich semantics are necessary.

Model-based views have recently been proposed as an effective method for querying noisy sensor data. Commonly used models from the AI literature (e.g., the hidden Markov model) expose to applications a stream of probabilistic and correlated state estimates computed from the sensor data. Many applications want to detect sophisticated patterns of states from these Markovian streams. Such queries are called event queries. In this paper, we present a new Markovian stream storage manager, Caldera. We develop and evaluate Caldera as a component of Lahar, a Markovian stream event query processing system developed in previous work. At the heart of Caldera is a set of access methods for Markovian streams that can improve event query performance by orders of magnitude compared to existing techniques, which must scan the entire stream. Our access methods use new adaptations of traditional B+ tree indexes, and a new index, called the Markov-chain index. They efficiently extract only the relevant timesteps from a stream, while retaining the stream's Markovian properties. We have implemented our prototype system on BDB and demonstrate its effectiveness on both synthetic data and real data from a building-wide RFID deployment.

Lahar is a warehousing system for Markovian streams ---a common class of uncertain data streams produced via inference on probabilistic models. Example Markovian streams include text inferred from speech, location streams inferred from GPS or RFID readings, and human activity streams inferred from sensor data. Lahar supports OLAP-style queries on Markovian stream archives by leveraging novel approximation and indexing techniques that efficiently manipulate stream probabilities. This demonstration allows users to interactively query a warehouse of imprecise text streams inferred automatically from audio podcasts. Through this interaction, the demo introduces users to the challenges of Markovian stream processing as well as technical contributions developed to address these challenges.

Cascadia is a system that provides RFID-based pervasive computing applications with an infrastructure for specifying, extracting and managing meaningful high-level events from raw RFID data. Cascadia provides three important services. First, it allows application developers and even users to specify events using either a declarative query language or an intuitive visual language based on direct manipulation. Second, it provides an API that facilitates the development of applications which rely on RFID-based events. Third, it automatically detects the specified events, forwards them to registered applications and stores them for later use (e.g., for historical queries).

The Cascadia system provides RFID-based pervasive computing applications with an infrastructure for specifying, extracting and managing meaningful high-level events from raw RFID data. Cascadia allows users to specify events of interest using a graphical interface with an intuitive visual language. Cascadia also effectively extracts these events from data in spite of the unreliability of RFID technology and the inherent ambiguity in event extraction. We demonstrate Cascadia’s technique through a digital diary application in the form of a calendar. Cascadia automatically populates the calendar with meaningful events for the user. We use data collected in a building-wide RFID deployment.

A major problem in detecting events in streams of data is that the data can be imprecise (e.g. RFID data). However, current state-ofthe-art event detection systems such as Cayuga [14], SASE [46] or SnoopIB[1], assume the data is precise. Noise in the data can be captured using techniques such as hidden Markov models. Inference on these models creates streams of probabilistic events which cannot be directly queried by existing systems. To address this challenge we propose Lahar1, an event processing system for probabilistic event streams. By exploiting the probabilistic nature of the data, Lahar yields a much higher recall and precision than deterministic techniques operating over only the most probable tuples. By using a novel static analysis and novel algorithms, Lahar processes data orders of magnitude more efficiently than a naïve approach based on sampling. In this paper, we present Lahar's static analysis and core algorithms. We demonstrate the quality and performance of our approach through experiments with our prototype implementation and comparisons with alternate methods.