Wireless sensing attracts significant attention in recent years, due to its ubiquitous nature, individual privacy-preserving ability, and potential for future applications, such as home security and the Internet of Things (IoT). Among the sensed information, the dynamic human target acceleration, which can be used for gait analysis and passive localization, plays an irreplaceable role. Considering the target velocity is composed of initial velocity and acceleration, this paper proposes a model to describe the relationship between the acceleration of the dynamic target and the CSI phase change between adjacent CSI packets. Based on the proposed model, the target acceleration can be estimated directly from CSI via the fractional Fourier transform, which is essentially different from the existing algorithm that derives the acceleration from target velocity. The real-world evaluation shows that the median acceleration estimation error can reach about 0.69 m/s2, verifying the effectiveness of the proposed model.

Lock managers are among the most studied components in concurrency control and transactional systems. However, one question seems to have been generally overlooked: "When there are multiple lock requests on the same object, which one(s) should be granted first?"

Most software profiling tools quantify average performance and rely on a program's control flow graph to organize and report results. However, in interactive server applications, performance predictability is often an equally important measure. Moreover, the end user is often concerned with the performance of a semantically defined interval of execution, such as a request or transaction, which may not directly map to any single function in the call graph, especially in high-performance applications that use asynchrony or event-based programming. It is difficult to distinguish functionality that lies on the critical path of a semantic interval from other activity (e.g., periodic logging or side operations) that may nevertheless appear prominent in a conventional profile. Existing profilers lack the ability to (i) aggregate results for a semantic interval and (ii) attribute its performance variance to individual functions.

While much of the research on transaction processing has focused on improving overall performance in terms of throughput and mean latency, surprisingly less attention has been given to performance predictability: how often individual transactions exhibit execution latency far from the mean. Performance predictability is increasingly important when transactions lie on the critical path of latency-sensitive applications, enterprise software, or interactive web services.

Due to the prevalence of GPS-enabled devices and wireless communication technology, spatial trajectories that describe the movement history of moving objects are being generated and accumulated at an unprecedented pace. However, a raw trajectory in the form of sequence of timestamped locations does not make much sense for humans without semantic representation. In this work we aim to facilitate human's understanding of a raw trajectory by automatically generating a short text to describe it. By formulating this task as the problem of adaptive trajectory segmentation and feature selection, we propose a partition-and-summarization framework. In the partition phase, we first define a set of features for each trajectory segment and then derive an optimal partition with the aim to make the segments within each partition as homogeneous as possible in terms of their features. In the summarization phase, for each partition we select the most interesting features by comparing against the common behaviours of historical trajectories on the same route and generate short text description for these features. For empirical study, we apply our solution to a real trajectory dataset and have found that the generated text can effectively reflect the important parts in a trajectory.

As travel is taking more significant part in our life, route recommendation service becomes a big business and attracts many major players in IT industry. Given a pair of user-specified origin and destination, a route recommendation service aims to provide users with the routes of best travelling experience according to criteria, such as travelling distance, travelling time, traffic condition, etc. However, previous research shows that even the routes recommended by the big-thumb service providers can deviate significantly from the routes travelled by experienced drivers. It means travellers' preferences on route selection are influenced by many latent and dynamic factors that are hard to model exactly with pre-defined formulas. In this work we approach this challenging problem with a very different perspective- leveraging crowds' knowledge to improve the recommendation quality. In this light, CrowdPlanner - a novel crowd-based route recommendation system has been developed, which requests human workers to evaluate candidate routes recommended by different sources and methods, and determine the best route based on their feedbacks. In this paper, we particularly focus on two important issues that affect system performance significantly: (1) how to efficiently generate tasks which are simple to answer but possess sufficient information to derive user-preferred routes; and (2) how to quickly identify a set of appropriate domain experts to answer the questions timely and accurately. Specifically, the task generation component in our system generates a series of informative and concise questions with optimized ordering for a given candidate route set so that workers feel comfortable and easy to answer. In addition, the worker selection component utilizes a set of selection criteria and an efficient algorithm to find the most eligible workers to answer the questions with high accuracy. A prototype system has been deployed to many voluntary mobile clients and extensive tests on real-scenario queries have shown the superiority of CrowdPlanner in comparison with the results given by map services and popular route mining algorithms.

Route recommendation service has become a big business in industry since traveling is now an important part of our daily life. We can travel to unknown places by simply typing in our destination and then following recommendation service's guidance, that a pleasant trip desires them to provide a good route. However, previous research shows that even the routes recommended by the big-thumb service providers can deviate significantly from the routes travelled by experienced drivers since the many latent factors affect drivers' preferences and it is hard for a single route recommendation algorithm to model all of them. In this demo we will present the CrowPlanner system to leverage crowds' knowledge to improve the recommendation quality. It requests human workers to evaluate candidates routes recommended by different sources and methods, and determines the best route based on the feedbacks of these workers. In this demo, we first introduce the core component of our system for smart question generation, and then show several real route recommendation cases and the feedback of users.

Widely adoption of GPS-enabled devices generates large amounts of trajectories every day. The raw trajectory data describes the movement history of moving objects by a sequence of < longitude, latitude, time-stamp > triples, which are nonintuitive for human to perceive the prominent features of the trajectory, such as where and how the moving object travels. In this demo, we present the STMaker system to help users make sense of individual trajectories. Given a trajectory, STMaker can automatically extract the significant semantic behavior of the trajectory, and summarize the behavior by a short human-readable text. In this paper, we first introduce the phrases of generating trajectory summarizations, and then show several real trajectory summarization cases.

Due to the prevalence of GPS-enabled devices and wireless communications technologies, spatial trajectories that describe the movement history of moving objects are being generated and accumulated at an unprecedented pace. Trajectory data in a database are intrinsically heterogeneous, as they represent discrete approximations of original continuous paths derived using different sampling strategies and different sampling rates. Such heterogeneity can have a negative impact on the effectiveness of trajectory similarity measures, which are the basis of many crucial trajectory processing tasks. In this paper, we pioneer a systematic approach to trajectory calibration that is a process to transform a heterogeneous trajectory dataset to one with (almost) unified sampling strategies. Specifically, we propose an anchor-based calibration system that aligns trajectories to a set of anchor points, which are fixed locations independent of trajectory data. After examining four different types of anchor points for the purpose of building a stable reference system, we propose a geometry-based calibration approach that considers the spatial relationship between anchor points and trajectories. Then a more advanced model-based calibration method is presented, which exploits the power of machine learning techniques to train inference models from historical trajectory data to improve calibration effectiveness. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments using real trajectory datasets to demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed calibration system.