Multi-variate Time Series (MTS) forecasting has made large strides (with very negligible errors) through recent advancements in neural networks, e.g., Transformers. However, in critical situations like predicting gaming overindulgence that affects one's mental well-being; an accurate forecast without a contributing evidence (explanation) is irrelevant. Hence, it becomes important that the forecasts are Interpretable - intermediate representation of the forecasted trajectory is comprehensible; as well as Explainable - attentive input features and events are accessible for a personalized and timely intervention of players at risk. While the contributing state of the art research on interpretability primarily focuses on temporally-smooth single-process driven time series data, our online multi-player gameplay data demonstrates intractable temporal randomness due to intrinsic orthogonality between player's game outcome and their intent to engage further. We introduce a novel deep Actionable Forecasting Network (AFN), which addresses the inter-dependent challenges associated with three exclusive objectives - 1) forecasting accuracy; 2) smooth comprehensible trajectory and 3) explanations via multi-dimensional input features while tackling the challenges introduced by our non-smooth temporal data, together in one single solution. AFN establishes a new benchmark via: (i) achieving 25% improvement on the MSE of the forecasts on player data in comparison to the SOM-VAE based SOTA networks; (ii) attributing unfavourable progression of a player's time series to a specific future time step(s), with the premise of eliminating near-future overindulgent player volume by over 18% with player specific actionable inputs feature(s) and (iii) proactively detecting over 23% (100% jump from SOTA) of the to-be overindulgent, players on an average, 4 weeks in advance.

Games are one of the safest source of realizing self-esteem and relaxation at the same time. An online gaming platform typically has massive data coming in, e.g., in-game actions, player moves, clickstreams, transactions etc. It is rather interesting, as something as simple as data on gaming moves can help create a psychological imprint of the user at that moment, based on her impulsive reactions and response to a situation in the game. Mining this knowledge can: (a) immediately help better explain observed and predicted player behavior; and (b) consequently propel deeper understanding towards players' experience, growth and protection.

This paper introduces ScarceGAN which focuses on identification of extremely rare or scarce samples from multi-dimensional longitudinal telemetry data with small and weak label prior. We specifically address: (i) severe scarcity in positive class, stemming from both underlying organic skew in the data, as well as extremely limited labels; (ii) multi-class nature of the negative samples, with uneven density distributions and partially overlapping feature distributions; and (iii) massively unlabelled data leading to tiny and weak prior on both positive and negative classes, and possibility of unseen or unknown behavior in the unlabelled set, especially in the negative class. Although related to PU learning problems, we contend that knowledge (or lack of it) on the negative class can be leveraged to learn the compliment of it (i.e., the positive class) better in a semi-supervised manner. To this effect, ScarceGAN re-formulates semi-supervised GAN by accommodating weakly labelled multi- class negative samples and the available positive samples. It relaxes the supervised discriminator's constraint on exact differentiation be- tween negative samples by introducing a 'leeway' term for samples with noisy prior. We propose modifications to the cost objectives of discriminator, in supervised and unsupervised path as well as that of the generator. For identifying risky players in skill gaming, this formulation in whole gives us a recall of over 85% (~60% jump over vanilla semi-supervised GAN) on our scarce class with very minimal verbosity in the unknown space. Further ScarceGAN out- performs the recall benchmarks established by recent GAN based specialized models for the positive imbalanced class identification and establishes a new benchmark in identifying one of rare attack classes (0.09%) in the intrusion dataset from the KDDCUP99 challenge. We establish ScarceGAN to be one of new competitive benchmark frameworks in the rare class identification for longitudinal telemetry data.

Games of skill are an excellent source of recreation and relaxation. Games are also the safest and readily accessible constructs for social interaction and community affairs which potentially opens up new avenues for realising personal worth, social acceptance, respect & recognition. However, when these games are played with real money, ensuring game prudence, whereby users play real-money skill games only for entertainment purposes, and do so well within their resourceful means, becomes necessary. It becomes paramount for the wellness of players and also to ensure online gaming is only available for sheer entertainment. In this proposal, we present an automated, data driven, AI powered, Responsible Game Play (RGP) framework cum tool which has been integrated in our online skill gaming platform. RGP pipeline is a combination of: a) a couple of anomaly detection Rule Based Engines; b) a Deep Learning Pipeline which models the game play characteristics of healthy and engaged players to identify potentially risky players, and c) a ML based Local Expert which leverages users' longitudinal behavioral patterns and constructs new features using the adjacent AI OPS and Signal Processing Domains. We integrate the psychometric assessment to nudge and coarse correct at-risk players proactively, ahead of time

As the news around cloud repatriations gets real, many cloud technologists associate them with poor understanding of the applications and their usage patterns by the enterprises. Our solution, Yodea, is a tool cum methodology to analyze work-load patterns in the light of cloud suitability. We bring forward compute patterns which can benefit from cloud economics with on-demand compute scaling. Yodea further ranks workloads in terms of their cloud suitability on the basis of these metrics. After the fact analysis of storage workloads for a customer install-base, features 38% of the "already in cloud" volumes in the top 100 ranked list by Yodea.

Misconfigurations in the storage systems can lead to business losses due to system downtime with substantial people resources invested into troubleshooting. Hence, faster troubleshooting of software misconfigurations has been critically important for the customers as well as the vendors.

Configuration problems are not only prevalent, but also severely impair the reliability of today's system software. One fundamental reason is the ever-increasing complexity of configuration, reflected by the large number of configuration parameters ("knobs"). With hundreds of knobs, configuring system software to ensure high reliability and performance becomes a daunting, error-prone task. This paper makes a first step in understanding a fundamental question of configuration design: "do users really need so many knobs?" To provide the quantitatively answer, we study the configuration settings of real-world users, including thousands of customers of a commercial storage system (Storage-A), and hundreds of users of two widely-used open-source system software projects. Our study reveals a series of interesting findings to motivate software architects and developers to be more cautious and disciplined in configuration design. Motivated by these findings, we provide a few concrete, practical guidelines which can significantly reduce the configuration space. Take Storage-A as an example, the guidelines can remove 51.9% of its parameters and simplify 19.7% of the remaining ones with little impact on existing users. Also, we study the existing configuration navigation methods in the context of "too many knobs" to understand their effectiveness in dealing with the over-designed configuration, and to provide practices for building navigation support in system software.

Designers of storage and file systems use I/O traces to emulate application workloads while designing new algorithms and for testing bug fixes. However, since traces are large, they are hard to store and moreover inflexible to manipulate. Thus, researchers have proposed techniques to create trace models in order to alleviate these concerns. However, the prior trace modeling approaches are limited with respect to 1) number of trace parameters they can model, and hence, the accuracy of the model and 2) with respect to manipulating the trace model in both temporal and spatial domains (that is, changing the burstiness of a workload, or scaling the size of the data supporting the workload). In this paper we present a new algorithm/tool called Paragone that addresses the above mentioned problems by fundamentally re-thinking how traces should be modeled and replayed.