The popularity of batch-oriented cluster architectures like Hadoop is on the rise. These batch-based systems successfully achieve high degrees of scalability by carefully allocating resources and leveraging opportunities to parallelize basic processing tasks. However, they are known to fall short in certain application domains such as large scale media analysis. In these applications, the utility of a given data element plays a vital role in a particular analysis task, and this utility most often depends on the way the data is collected or interpreted. However, existing batch data processing frameworks do not consider data utility in allocating resources, and hence fail to optimize for ranked/top-k query processing in which the user is interested in obtaining a relatively small subset of the best result instances. A naïve implementation of these operations on an existing system would need to enumerate more candidates than needed, before it can filter out the k best results. We note that such waste can be avoided by utilizing utility-aware task partitioning and resource allocation strategies that can prune unpromising objects from consideration. In this demonstration, we introduce RanKloud, an efficient and scalable utility-aware parallel processing system built for the analysis of large media datasets. RanKloud extends Hadoop's MapReduce paradigm to provide support for ranked query operations, such as k-nearest neighbor and k-closest pair search, skylines, skyline-joins, and top-k join processing.

Complex media fusion operations can be costly in terms of the time they need to process input objects. If data arrive faster to fusion nodes than the speed with which they can consume the inputs, this will result in some input objects not being processed. In this paper, we develop load shedding mechanisms which take into consideration both data quality and expensive nature of media fusion operators. In particular, we present quality assessment models for objects and multistream fusion operators and highlight that such quality assessments may impose partial orders on objects. We highlight that the most effective load control approach for fusion operators involves shedding of (not the individual input objects but) combinations of objects. Yet, identifying suitable combinations of objects in real time will not be possible if efficient combination selection algorithms do not exist. We develop efficient combination selection schemes for scenarios with different quality assessment and target characteristics. We first develop efficient combination-based load shedding when the fusion operator has unambiguously monotone semantics. We then extend this to the more general ambiguously monotone case and present experimental results that show the performance gains using quality-aware combination-based load shedding strategies under the various fusion scenarios.

Most of the Web interfaces are primarily designed for people with sight, with visually rich features that makes effective use of the tools to enhance visual usability but in process making it impossible for users who are blind or visually impaired to use them. In this work, our goal is to improve participation to NSF's National Science Digital Library (NSDL) by teachers, librarians, and learners who are blind. The middleware for accessible information spaces on NSDL (MAISON) is enhancing the accessibility of NSDL, its internal and external resources and existing services (such as strand maps of educational benchmarks). Relying on cutting-edge, context-aware graph segmentation, filtering and summarization, and concept propagation techniques, the middleware provides information space adaptation, reduction, and preview services through open Web-based service APIs to enable implementation of informative navigation interfaces that are able to reduce the complexity of the information space and provide previews to prevent user disorientation.