In a heterogeneous cloud environment, the manual grading of computing assets is the first step in the process of configuring IT infrastructures to ensure optimal utilization of resources. Grading the efficiency of computing assets is however, a difficult, subjective and time consuming manual task. Thus, an automatic efficiency grading algorithm is highly desirable. In this paper, we compare the effectiveness of the different criteria used in the manual grading task for automatically determining the efficiency grading of a computing asset. We report results on a dataset of 1,200 assets from two different data centers in IBM Toronto. Our preliminary results show that electrical costs (associated with power and cooling) appear to be even more informative than hardware and age based criteria as a means of determining the efficiency grade of an asset. Our analysis also indicates that the effectiveness of the various efficiency criteria is dependent on the asset demographic of the data centre under consideration.

Server consolidation is an important problem in any enterprise, where capital allocators (CAs) must approve any cost saving plans involving the acquisition or allocation of new assets and the decommissioning of inefficient assets. Our paper describes iVMp an interactive VM placement algorithm, that allows CAs to become 'agile' capital allocators that can interactively propose and update constraints and preferences as placements are recommended by the system. To the best of our knowledge this is the first time that this interactive VM placement recommendation problem has been addressed in the academic literature. Our results show that the proposed algorithm finds near optimal solutions in a highly efficient manner.

Natural language processing (NLP) techniques, such as toponym detection and resolution, are an integral part of most geographic information retrieval (GIR) architectures. Without these components, synonym detection, ambiguity resolution and accurate toponym expansion would not be possible. However, there are many important factors affecting the success of an NLP approach to GIR, including toponym detection errors, toponym resolution errors and query overloading. The aim of this paper is to determine how severe these errors are in state‐of‐the‐art systems, and to what extent they affect GIR performance. We show that a careful choice of weighting schemes in the IR engine can minimize the negative impact of these errors on GIR accuracy. We provide empirical evidence from the GeoCLEF 2005 and 2006 datasets to support our observations.

The Text REtrieval Conference (TREC), a yearly workshop hosted by the US government's National Institute of Standards and Technology, provides the infrastructure necessary for large-scale evaluation of text retrieval methodologies. With the goal of accelerating research in this area, TREC created the first large test collections of full-text documents and standardized retrieval evaluation. The impact has been significant; since TREC's beginning in 1992, retrieval effectiveness has approximately doubled. TREC has built a variety of large test collections, including collections for such specialized retrieval tasks as cross-language retrieval and retrieval of speech. Moreover, TREC has accelerated the transfer of research ideas into commercial systems, as demonstrated in the number of retrieval techniques developed in TREC that are now used in Web search engines.This book provides a comprehensive review of TREC research, summarizing the variety of TREC results, documenting the best practices in experimental information retrieval, and suggesting areas for further research. The first part of the book describes TREC's history, test collections, and retrieval methodology. Next, the book provides track reports -- describing the evaluations of specific tasks, including routing and filtering, interactive retrieval, and retrieving noisy text. The final part of the book offers perspectives on TREC from such participants as Microsoft Research, University of Massachusetts, Cornell University, University of Waterloo, City University of New York, and IBM. The book will be of interest to researchers in information retrieval and related technologies, including natural language processing.

In this paper, we describe a News Story Gisting system that generates a 10-word short summary of a news story. This system uses a machine learning technique to combine linguistic, statistical and positional information in order to generate an appropriate summary. We also present the results of an automatic evaluation of this system with respect to the performance of other baseline summarisers using the new ROUGE evaluation metric.

In this paper we describe a type of data fusion involving the combination of evidence derived from multiple document representations. Our aim is to investigate if a composite representation can improve the online detection of novel events in a stream of broadcast news stories. This classification process otherwise known as first story detection FSD (or in the Topic Detection and Tracking pilot study as online new event detection [1]), is one of three main classification tasks defined by the TDT initiative. Our composite document representation consists of a semantic representation (based on the lexical chains derived from a text) and a syntactic representation (using proper nouns). Using the TDT1 evaluation methodology, we evaluate a number of document representation combinations using these document classifiers.

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