We present a metacognitive, integrated, dual-cycle architecture whose function is to provide agents with a greater capacity for acting robustly in a dynamic environment and managing unexpected events. We present MIDCA 1.3, an implementation of this architecture which explores a novel approach to goal generation, planning and execution given surprising situations. We formally define the mechanism and report empirical results from this goal generation algorithm. Finally, we describe the similarity between its choices at the cognitive level with those at the metacognitive.

Euclidean embedding algorithms transform data defined in an arbitrary metric space to the Euclidean space, which is critical to many visualization techniques. At big-data scale, these algorithms need to be scalable to massive data-parallel infrastructures. Designing such scalable algorithms and understanding the factors affecting the algorithms are important research problems for visually analyzing big data. We propose a framework that extends the existing Euclidean embedding algorithms to scalable ones. Specifically, it decomposes an existing algorithm into naturally parallel components and non-parallelizable components. Then, data parallel implementations such as MapReduce and data reduction techniques are applied to the two categories of components, respectively. We show that this can be possibly done for a collection of embedding algorithms. Extensive experiments are conducted to understand the important factors in these scalable algorithms: scalability, time cost, and the effect of data reduction to result quality. The result on sample algorithms: Fast Map-MR and LMDS-MR shows that with the proposed approach the derived algorithms can preserve result quality well, while achieving desirable scalability.

Hosting data query services in public clouds is an attractive solution for its great scalability and significant cost savings. However, data owners also have concerns on data privacy due to the lost control of the infrastructure. This demonstration shows a prototype for efficient and confidential range/kNN query services built on top of the random space perturbation (RASP) method. The RASP approach provides a privacy guarantee practical to the setting of cloud-based computing, while enabling much faster query processing compared to the encryption-based approach. This demonstration will allow users to more intuitively understand the technical merits of the RASP approach via interactive exploration of the visual interface.