Real world anomaly management systems oversee thousands of dynamic data streams and generate an overwhelming number of alerts. As a consequence, important alerts often go unnoticed until there is a crisis. The absence of ground truth, and the fact that the streams are constantly changing (new content, new applications, software and hardware changes) makes assessing the value of alerts difficult. In order to identify groups of important and actionable alerts, we propose: (1) superalerts that reflect characteristics of persistence, pervasiveness and priority, (2) three types of super-alerting based on three types of aggregations and, (3) corresponding metrics for evaluating them. We demonstrate using real-world entertainment data streams.

Mobile devices are ubiquitously used to access web applications. Multimodal mobile interfaces can offer advantages over less flexible approaches, in both usability and range of features. In this study we consider applying speech input to a web-based network management service. The key issue we are interested in is how to perform suitable multidimensional search through web-based interface on mobile devices. We present results from a pilot user evaluation, focusing on the comparison of a novel speech input method with the existing manual (GUI, Graphical User Interface) input for AT&T's Visualizer management service, on an iPhone. Speech input was experimentally shown to be as effective, more efficient, and preferred over GUI input by most users. We foresee that a multimodal approach may be preferable for many applications on mobile devices.

We present LiveRAC, a visualization system that supports the analysis of large collections of system management time-series data consisting of hundreds of parameters across thousands of network devices. LiveRAC provides high information density using a reorderable matrix of charts, with semantic zooming adapting each chart's visual representation to the available space. LiveRAC allows side-by-side visual comparison of arbitrary groupings of devices and parameters at multiple levels of detail. A staged design and development process culminated in the deployment of LiveRAC in a production environment. We conducted an informal longitudinal evaluation of LiveRAC to better understand which proposed visualization techniques were most useful in the target environment.

In this paper, we present an algorithm and a system to perform dynamic view dependent simplification of large geographical maps through a novel use of graphics hardware. Given a map as a collection of non-intersecting chains and a tolerance parameter for each chain, we produce a simplified map that resembles the original map, satisfying the condition that the distance between each point on the simplified chain and the original chain is within the given tolerance parameter, and that no two chains intersect. We also present an interactive map visualization system which uses frame-to-frame coherence to perform dynamic view-dependent simplification. Our initial results indicate that we get a 3-4 fold increase in the frame rates using our simplification algorithm on maps with 1.5-2 million vertices on an SGI Onyx workstation.

Visual exploration of massive datasets arising from telecommunication networks and services is a challenge. This paper describes SWIFT-3D, an integrated data visualization and exploration system created at AT&T Labs for large scale network analysis. SWIFT-3D integrates a collection of interactive tools that includes pixel-oriented 2D maps, interactive 3D maps, statistical displays, network topology diagrams and an interactive drill-down query interface. Example applications are described, demonstrating a successful application to analyze unexpected network events (high volumes of unanswered calls), and comparison of usage of an Internet service with voice network traffic and local access coverage.

A software repository provides a central information source for understanding and reengineering code in a software project. Complex reverse engineering tools can be built by analyzing information stored in the repository without reparsing the original source code. The most critical design aspect of a repository is its data model, which directly affects how effectively the repository supports various analysis tasks. This paper focuses on the design rationales behind a data model for a C++ software repository that supports reachability analysis and dead code detection at the declaration level. These two tasks are frequently needed in large software projects to help remove excess software baggage, select regression tests and support software reuse studies. The language complexity introduced by class inheritance, friendship, and template instantiation in C++ requires a carefully designed model to catch all necessary dependencies for correct reachability analysis. We examine the major design decisions and their consequences in our model and illustrate how future software repositories can be evaluated for completeness at a selected abstraction level. Examples are given to illustrate how our model also supports variants of reachability analysis: impact analysis, class visibility analysis, and dead code detection. Finally, we discuss the implementation and experience of our analysis tools on a few C++ software projects.

Although routing is a well-studied problem in various contexts, there remain unsolved problems in routing edges for graph layouts. In contrast with techniques from other domains such as VLSI CAD and robotics, where physical constraints play a major role, aesthetics play the more important role in graph layout. For graphs, we seek paths that are easy to follow and add meaning to the layout. We describe a collection of aesthetic attributes applicable to drawing edges in graphs, and present a general approach for routing individual edges subject to these principles. We also give implementation details and survey difficulties that arise in an implementation. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Through a research/development collaboration, we have applied the FAST domain engineering process to the audits software in Lucent Technologies' 5ESS telephone switching system. Our collaboration has developed an application-oriented language, toolset, and accompanying process for specifying the requirements and generating the code for the 5ESS audits software. We describe the FAST process, our language, and the expected benefits of this project.

Programmers frequently have to retrieve and link information from various software documents to accomplish a maintenance task. Ciao is a graph-based navigator that helps programmers query and browse structural connections embedded in different software and document repositories. A repository consists of a collection of source documents with an associated database that describes their structure. Ciao supports repositories organized in an architecture style called Aero, which exploits the duality between a class of entity-relationship (ER) databases and directed attributed graphs (DAG). Database queries and graph analysis operators in Aero are plug-compatible because they all take an ER database and produce yet another ER database by default. Various presentation filters generate graph views, source views, and relational views from any compatible ER database. The architecture promotes the construction of successively more complex operators using a notion of virtual database pipelines. Ciao has been instantiated for C and C++ program databases, and program difference databases. The latter allows programmers to explore program structure changes by browsing and expanding graphs that highlight changed, deleted, and added entities and relationships. The unifying ER model under ciao also allows users to navigate different software repositories and make necessary connections. We have linked program difference databases and modification request (MR) databases so that users can investigate the connections between MRs and affected entities. Ciao has been applied to several large communications software projects and we report experiences and lessons learned from these applications.

A four-pass algorithm for drawing directed graphs is presented. The fist pass finds an optimal rank assignment using a network simplex algorithm. The seconds pass sets the vertex order within ranks by an iterative heuristic, incorporating a novel weight function and local transpositions to reduce crossings. The third pass finds optimal coordinates for nodes by constructing and ranking an auxiliary graph. The fourth pass makes splines to draw edges. The algorithm creates good drawings and is fast.>