Serverless computing offers attractive scalability, elasticity and cost-effectiveness. However, constraints on memory, CPU and function runtime have hindered its adoption for dataintensive applications and machine learning (ML) workloads. Traditional ‘server-ful’ platforms enable distributed computation via fast networks and well-established inter-process communication (IPC) mechanisms such as MPI and shared memory. In the absence of such solutions in the serverless domain, parallel computation with significant IPC requirements is challenging. We present FSD-Inference, the first fully serverless and highly scalable system for distributed ML inference. We explore poten-tial communication channels, in conjunction with Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) compute, to design a state-of-the-art solution for distributed ML within the context of serverless data-intensive computing. We introduce novel fully serverless communication schemes for ML inference workloads, leveraging both cloud-based publish-subscribe/queueing and object storage offerings. We demonstrate how publish-subscribe/queueing services can be adapted for FaaS IPC with comparable performance to object storage, while offering significantly reduced cost at high parallelism levels. We conduct in-depth experiments on benchmark DNNs of various sizes. The results show that when compared to server-based alternatives, FSD-Inference is significantly more cost-effective and scalable, and can even achieve competitive performance against optimized HPC solutions. Experiments also confirm that our serverless solution can handle large distributed workloads and leverage high degrees of FaaS parallelism.

Abstract Building a real-time spatio-temporal forecasting system is a challenging problem with many practical applications such as traffic and road network management. Most forecasting research focuses on achieving (often marginal) improvements in evaluation metrics such as MAE/MAPE on static benchmark datasets, with less attention paid to building practical pipelines which achieve timely and accurate forecasts when the network is under heavy load. Transport authorities also need to leverage dynamic data sources such as roadworks and vehicle-level flow data, while also supporting ad-hoc inference workloads at low cost. Our cloud-based forecasting solution Foresight, developed in collaboration with Transport for the West Midlands (TfWM), is able to ingest, aggregate and process streamed traffic data, enhanced with dynamic vehicle-level flow and urban event information, to produce regularly scheduled forecasts with high accuracy. In this work, we extend Foresight with several novel enhancements, into a new system which we term Foresight Plus. New features include an efficient method for extending the forecasting scale, enabling predictions further into the future. We also augment the inference architecture with a new, fully serverless design which offers a more cost-effective solution and which seamlessly handles sporadic inference workloads over multiple forecasting scales. We observe that Graph Neural Network (GNN) forecasting models are robust to extensions of the forecasting scale, achieving consistent performance up to 48 hours ahead. This is in contrast to the 1 hour forecasting periods popularly considered in this context. Further, our serverless inference solution is shown to be more cost-effective than provisioned alternatives in corresponding use-cases. We identify the optimal memory configuration of serverless resources to achieve an attractive cost-to-performance ratio.

Graph Neural Network (GNN) models on streaming graphs entail algorithmic challenges to continuously capture its dynamic state, as well as systems challenges to optimize latency, memory, and throughput during both inference and training. We present D3-GNN, the first distributed, hybrid-parallel, streaming GNN system designed to handle real-time graph updates under online query setting. Our system addresses data management, algorithmic, and systems challenges, enabling continuous capturing of the dynamic state of the graph and updating node representations with fault-tolerance and optimal latency, load-balance, and throughput. D3-GNN utilizes streaming GNN aggregators and an unrolled, distributed computation graph architecture to handle cascading graph updates. To counteract data skew and neighborhood explosion issues, we introduce inter-layer and intra-layer windowed forward pass solutions. Experiments on large-scale graph streams demonstrate that D3-GNN achieves high efficiency and scalability. Compared to DGL, D3-GNN achieves a significant throughput improvement of about 76x for streaming workloads. The windowed enhancement further reduces running times by around 10x and message volumes by up to 15x at higher parallelism.

Graph Neural Network (GNN) training and inference involve significant challenges of scalability with respect to both model sizes and number of layers, resulting in degradation of efficiency and accuracy for large and deep GNNs. We present an end-to-end solution that aims to address these challenges for efficient GNNs in resource constrained environments while avoiding the oversmoothing problem in deep GNNs. We introduce a quantization based approach for all stages of GNNs, from message passing in training to node classification, compressing the model and enabling efficient processing. The proposed GNN quantizer learns quantization ranges and reduces the model size with comparable accuracy even under low-bit quantization. To scale with the number of layers, we devise a message propagation mechanism in training that controls layer-wise changes of similarities between neighboring nodes. This objective is incorporated into a Lagrangian function with constraints and a differential multiplier method is utilized to iteratively find optimal embeddings. This mitigates oversmoothing and suppresses the quantization error to a bound. Significant improvements are demonstrated over state-of-the-art quantization methods and deep GNN approaches in both full-precision and quantized models. The proposed quantizer demonstrates superior performance in INT2 configurations across all stages of GNN, achieving a notable level of accuracy. In contrast, existing quantization approaches fail to generate satisfactory accuracy levels. Finally, the inference with INT2 and INT4 representations exhibits a speedup of 5.11 × and 4.70 × compared to full precision counterparts, respectively.

Identifying similar products in e-commerce is useful in discovering relationships between products, making recommendations, and increasing diversity in search results. Product representation learning is the first step to define a generalized product similarity metric for search. The second step is to extend similarity search to a large scale (e.g., e-commerce catalog scale) without sacrificing quality. In this work, we present a solution that interweaves both steps, i.e., learn representations suited to high quality retrieval using contrastive learning (CL) and retrieve similar items from a large search space using approximate nearest neighbor search (ANNS) to trade-off quality for speed. We propose a CL training strategy for learning uni-modal encoders suited to multi-modal similarity search for e-commerce. We study ANNS retrieval by generating Pareto Frontiers (PFs) without requiring labels. Our CL training strategy doubles retrieval@1 metric across categories (e.g., from 36% to 88% in category C). We also demonstrate that ANNS engine optimization using PFs help select configurations appropriately (e.g., we achieve 6.8× search speed with just 2% drop from the maximum retrieval accuracy in medium size datasets).

While machine learning and ranking-based systems are in widespread use for sensitive decision-making processes (e.g., determining job candidates, assigning credit scores), they are rife with concerns over unintended biases in their outcomes, which makes algorithmic fairness (e.g., demographic parity, equal opportunity) an objective of interest. 'Algorithmic recourse' offers feasible recovery actions to change unwanted outcomes through the modification of attributes. We introduce the notion of ranked group-level recourse fairness, and develop a 'recourse-aware ranking' solution that satisfies ranked recourse fairness constraints while minimizing the cost of suggested modifications. Our solution suggests interventions that can reorder the ranked list of database records and mitigate group-level unfairness; specifically, disproportionate representation of sub-groups and recourse cost imbalance. This re-ranking identifies the minimum modifications to data points, with these attribute modifications weighted according to their ease of recourse. We then present an efficient block-based extension that enables re-ranking at any granularity (e.g., multiple brackets of bank loan interest rates, multiple pages of search engine results). Evaluation on real datasets shows that, while existing methods may even exacerbate recourse unfairness, our solution – RAGUEL – significantly improves recourse-aware fairness. RAGUEL outperforms alternatives at improving recourse fairness, through a combined process of counterfactual generation and re-ranking, whilst remaining efficient for large-scale datasets.

Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) are extensively utilized for deep learning on graphs. The large data sizes of graphs and their vertex features make scalable training algorithms and distributed memory systems necessary. Since the convolution operation on graphs induces irregular memory access patterns, designing a memory- and communication-efficient parallel algorithm for GCN training poses unique challenges. We propose a highly parallel training algorithm that scales to large processor counts. In our solution, the large adjacency and vertex-feature matrices are partitioned among processors. We exploit the vertex-partitioning of the graph to use non-blocking point-to-point communication operations between processors for better scalability. To further minimize the parallelization overheads, we introduce a sparse matrix partitioning scheme based on a hypergraph partitioning model for full-batch training. We also propose a novel stochastic hypergraph model to encode the expected communication volume in mini-batch training. We show the merits of the hypergraph model, previously unexplored for GCN training, over the standard graph partitioning model which does not accurately encode the communication costs. Experiments performed on real-world graph datasets demonstrate that the proposed algorithms achieve considerable speedups over alternative solutions. The optimizations achieved on communication costs become even more pronounced at high scalability with many processors. The performance benefits are preserved in deeper GCNs having more layers as well as on billion-scale graphs.

SimRank is an attractive link-based similarity measure used in fertile fields of Web search and sociometry. However, the existing deterministic method by Kusumoto et al. [ 24 ] for retrieving SimRank does not always produce high-quality similarity results, as it fails to accurately obtain diagonal correction matrix D. Moreover, SimRank has a “connectivity trait” problem: increasing the number of paths between a pair of nodes would decrease its similarity score. The best-known remedy, SimRank++ [ 1 ], cannot completely fix this problem, since its score would still be zero if there are no common in-neighbors between two nodes. In this article, we study fast high-quality link-based similarity search on billion-scale graphs. (1) We first devise a “varied-D” method to accurately compute SimRank in linear memory. We also aggregate duplicate computations, which reduces the time of [ 24 ] from quadratic to linear in the number of iterations. (2) We propose a novel “cosine-based” SimRank model to circumvent the “connectivity trait” problem. (3) To substantially speed up the partial-pairs “cosine-based” SimRank search on large graphs, we devise an efficient dimensionality reduction algorithm,PSR#, with guaranteed accuracy. (4) We give mathematical insights to the semantic difference between SimRank and its variant, and correct an argument in [ 24 ] that “ifDis replaced by a scaled identity matrix (1-Ɣ)I, their top-K rankings will not be affected much”. (5) We propose a novel method that can accurately convert from Li et al. SimRank ~{S} to Jeh and Widom’s SimRankS. (6) We proposeGSR#, a generalisation of our “cosine-based” SimRank model, to quantify pairwise similarities across two distinct graphs, unlike SimRank that would assess nodes across two graphs as completely dissimilar. Extensive experiments on various datasets demonstrate the superiority of our proposed approaches in terms of high search quality, computational efficiency, accuracy, and scalability on billion-edge graphs.

Abstract RoleSim and SimRank are among the popular graph-theoretic similarity measures with many applications in, e.g., web search, collaborative filtering, and sociometry. While RoleSim addresses the automorphic (role) equivalence of pairwise similarity which SimRank lacks, it ignores the neighboring similarity information out of the automorphically equivalent set. Consequently, two pairs of nodes, which are not automorphically equivalent by nature, cannot be well distinguished by RoleSim if the averages of their neighboring similarities over the automorphically equivalent set are the same. To alleviate this problem: 1) We propose a novel similarity model, namely RoleSim*, which accurately evaluates pairwise role similarities in a more comprehensive manner. RoleSim* not only guarantees the automorphic equivalence that SimRank lacks, but also takes into account the neighboring similarity information outside the automorphically equivalent sets that are overlooked by RoleSim. 2) We prove the existence and uniqueness of the RoleSim* solution, and show its three axiomatic properties (i.e., symmetry, boundedness, and non-increasing monotonicity). 3) We provide a concise bound for iteratively computing RoleSim* formula, and estimate the number of iterations required to attain a desired accuracy. 4) We induce a distance metric based on RoleSim* similarity, and show that the RoleSim* metric fulfills the triangular inequality, which implies the sum-transitivity of its similarity scores. 5) We present a threshold-based RoleSim* model that reduces the computational time further with provable accuracy guarantee. 6) We propose a single-source RoleSim* model, which scales well for sizable graphs. 7) We also devise methods to scale RoleSim* based search by incorporating its triangular inequality property with partitioning techniques. Our experimental results on real datasets demonstrate that RoleSim* achieves higher accuracy than its competitors while scaling well on sizable graphs with billions of edges.

The state-of-the-art deep neural networks (DNNs) have significant computational and data management requirements. The size of both training data and models continue to increase. Sparsification and pruning methods are shown to be effective in removing a large fraction of connections in DNNs. The resulting sparse networks present unique challenges to further improve the computational efficiency of training and inference in deep learning. Both the feedforward (inference) and backpropagation steps in stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm for training sparse DNNs involve consecutive sparse matrix-vector multiplications (SpMVs). We first introduce a distributed-memory parallel SpMV-based solution for the SGD algorithm to improve its scalability. The parallelization approach is based on row-wise partitioning of weight matrices that represent neuron connections between consecutive layers. We then propose a novel hypergraph model for partitioning weight matrices to reduce the total communication volume and ensure computational load-balance among processors. Experiments performed on sparse DNNs demonstrate that the proposed solution is highly efficient and scalable. By utilizing the proposed matrix partitioning scheme, the performance of our solution is further improved significantly.

Sharing sensitive data is vital in enabling many modern data analysis and machine learning tasks. However, current methods for data release are insufficiently accurate or granular to provide meaningful utility, and they carry a high risk of deanonymization or membership inference attacks. In this paper, we propose a differentially private synthetic data generation solution with a focus on the compelling domain of location data. We present two methods with high practical utility for generating synthetic location data from real locations, both of which protect the existence and true location of each individual in the original dataset. Our first, partitioning-based approach introduces a novel method for privately generating point data using kernel density estimation, in addition to employing private adaptations of classic statistical techniques, such as clustering, for private partitioning. Our second, network-based approach incorporates public geographic information, such as the road network of a city, to constrain the bounds of synthetic data points and hence improve the accuracy of the synthetic data. Both methods satisfy the requirements of differential privacy, while also enabling accurate generation of synthetic data that aims to preserve the distribution of the real locations. We conduct experiments using three large-scale location datasets to show that the proposed solutions generate synthetic location data with high utility and strong similarity to the real datasets. We highlight some practical applications for our work by applying our synthetic data to a range of location analytics queries, and we demonstrate that our synthetic data produces near-identical answers to the same queries compared to when real data is used. Our results show that the proposed approaches are practical solutions for sharing and analyzing sensitive location data privately.

Sharing trajectories is beneficial for many real-world applications, such as managing disease spread through contact tracing and tailoring public services to a population's travel patterns. However, public concern over privacy and data protection has limited the extent to which this data is shared. Local differential privacy enables data sharing in which users share a perturbed version of their data, but existing mechanisms fail to incorporate user-independent public knowledge (e.g., business locations and opening times, public transport schedules, geo-located tweets). This limitation makes mechanisms too restrictive, gives unrealistic outputs, and ultimately leads to low practical utility. To address these concerns, we propose a local differentially private mechanism that is based on perturbing hierarchically-structured, overlapping n -grams (i.e., contiguous subsequences of length n ) of trajectory data. Our mechanism uses a multi-dimensional hierarchy over publicly available external knowledge of real-world places of interest to improve the realism and utility of the perturbed, shared trajectories. Importantly, including real-world public data does not negatively affect privacy or efficiency. Our experiments, using real-world data and a range of queries, each with real-world application analogues, demonstrate the superiority of our approach over a range of alternative methods.

Faster and more cost-efficient, crowdsourced delivery is needed to meet the growing customer demands of many industries, including online shopping, on-demand local delivery, and on-demand transportation. The power of crowdsourced delivery stems from the large number of workers potentially available to provide services and reduce costs. It has been shown in social psychology literature that fairness is key to ensuring high worker participation. However, existing assignment solutions fall short on modeling the dynamic fairness metric. In this work, we introduce a new assignment strategy for crowdsourced delivery tasks. This strategy takes fairness towards workers into consideration, while maximizing the task allocation ratio. Since redundant assignments are not possible in delivery tasks, we first introduce a 2-phase allocation model that increases the reliability of a worker to complete a given task. To realize the effectiveness of our model in practice, we present both offline and online versions of our proposed algorithm called F-Aware. Given a task-to-worker bipartite graph, F-Aware assigns each task to a worker that minimizes unfairness, while allocating tasks to use worker capacities as much as possible. We present an evaluation of our algorithms with respect to running time, task allocation ratio (TAR), as well as unfairness and assignment ratio. Experiments show that F-Aware runs around 107× faster than the TAR-optimal solution and allocates 96.9 percent of the tasks that can be allocated by it. Moreover, it is shown that, F-Aware is able to provide a much fair distribution of tasks to workers than the best competitor algorithm.

We present a scalable solution to link entities across mobility datasets using their spatio-temporal information. This is a fundamental problem in many applications such as linking user identities for security, understanding privacy limitations of location based services, or producing a unified dataset from multiple sources for urban planning. Such integrated datasets are also essential for service providers to optimise their services and improve business intelligence. In this paper, we first propose a mobility based representation and similarity computation for entities. An efficient matching process is then developed to identify the final linked pairs, with an automated mechanism to decide when to stop the linkage. We scale the process with a locality-sensitive hashing (LSH) based approach that significantly reduces candidate pairs for matching. To realize the effectiveness and efficiency of our techniques in practice, we introduce an algorithm called SLIM. In the experimental evaluation, SLIM outperforms the two existing state-of-the-art approaches in terms of precision and recall. Moreover, the LSH-based approach brings two to four orders of magnitude speedup.

We present PPQ-trajectory, a spatio-temporal quantization based solution for querying large dynamic trajectory data. PPQ-trajectory includes a partition-wise predictive quantizer (PPQ) that generates an error-bounded codebook with autocorrelation and spatial proximity-based partitions. The codebook is indexed to run approximate and exact spatio-temporal queries over compressed trajectories. PPQ-trajectory includes a coordinate quadtree coding for the codebook with support for exact queries. An incremental temporal partition-based index is utilised to avoid full reconstruction of trajectories during queries. An extensive set of experimental results for spatio-temporal queries on real trajectory datasets is presented. PPQ-trajectory shows significant improvements over the alternatives with respect to several performance measures, including the accuracy of results when the summary is used directly to provide approximate query results, the spatial deviation with which spatio-temporal path queries can be answered when the summary is used as an index, and the time taken to construct the summary. Superior results on the quality of the summary and the compression ratio are also demonstrated.

Today, vast amounts of location data are collected by various service providers. These location data owners have a good idea of where their users are most of the time. Other businesses also want to use this information for location analytics, such as finding the optimal location for a new branch. However, location data owners cannot share their data with other businesses, mainly due to privacy and legal concerns. In this paper, we propose privacy-preserving solutions in which location-based queries can be answered by data owners without sharing their data with other businesses and without accessing sensitive information such as the customer list of the businesses that send the query. We utilize a partially homomorphic cryptosystem as the building block of the proposed protocols. We prove the security of the protocols in semi-honest threat model. We also explain how to achieve differential privacy in the proposed protocols and discuss its impact on utility. We evaluate the performance of the protocols with real and synthetic datasets and show that the proposed solutions are highly practical. The proposed solutions will facilitate an effective sharing of sensitive data between entities and joint analytics in a wide range of applications without violating their customers' privacy.

As social networks are constantly changing and evolving, methods to analyze dynamic social networks are becoming more important in understanding social trends. However, due to the restrictions imposed by the social network service providers, the resources available to fetch the entire contents of a social network are typically very limited. As a result, analysis of dynamic social network data requires maintaining an approximate copy of the social network for each time period, locally. In this paper, we study the problem of dynamic network and text fetching with limited probing capacities, for identifying and maintaining influential users as the social network evolves. We propose an algorithm to probe the relationships (required for global influence computation) as well as posts (required for topic-based influence computation) of a limited number of users during each probing period, based on the influence trends and activities of the users. We infer the current network based on the newly probed user data and the last known version of the network maintained locally. Additionally, we propose to use link prediction methods to further increase the accuracy of our network inference. We employ PageRank as the metric for influence computation. We illustrate how the proposed solution maintains accurate PageRank scores for computing global influence, and topic-sensitive weighted PageRank scores for topic-based influence. The latter relies on a topic-based network constructed via weights determined by semantic analysis of posts and their sharing statistics. We evaluate the effectiveness of our algorithms by comparing them with the true influence scores of the full and up-to-date version of the network, using data from the micro-blogging service Twitter. Results show that our techniques significantly outperform baseline methods (80 percent higher accuracy for network fetching and 77 percent for text fetching) and are superior to state-of-the-art techniques from the literature (21 percent higher accuracy).

Graph partitioning is an essential task for scalable data management and analysis. The current partitioning methods utilize the structure of the graph, and the query log if available. Some queries performed on the database may trigger further operations. For example, the query workload of a social network application may contain re-sharing operations in the form of cascades. It is beneficial to include the potential cascades in the graph partitioning objectives. In this paper, we introduce the problem of cascade-aware graph partitioning that aims to minimize the overall cost of communication among parts/servers during cascade processes. We develop a randomized solution that estimates the underlying cascades, and use it as an input for partitioning of large-scale graphs. Experiments on 17 real social networks demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed solution in terms of the partitioning objectives.

The social media explosion has populated the Internet with a wealth of images. There are two existing paradigms for image retrieval: 1)content-based image retrieval (BIR), which has traditionally used visual features for similarity search (e.g., SIFT features), and 2) tag-based image retrieval (TBIR), which has relied on user tagging (e.g., Flickr tags). CBIR now gains semantic expressiveness by advances in deep-learning-based detection of visual labels. TBIR benefits from query-and-click logs to automatically infer more informative labels. However, learning-based tagging still yields noisy labels and is restricted to concrete objects, missing out on generalizations and abstractions. Click-based tagging is limited to terms that appear in the textual context of an image or in queries that lead to a click. This paper addresses the above limitations by semantically refining and expanding the labels suggested by learning-based object detection. We consider the semantic coherence between the labels for different objects, leverage lexical and commonsense knowledge, and cast the label assignment into a constrained optimization problem solved by an integer linear program. Experiments show that our method, called VISIR, improves the quality of the state-of-the-art visual labeling tools like LSDA and YOLO.

We present a relevance feedback based browsing methodology using different representations for time series data. The outperforming representation type, e.g., among dual-tree complex wavelet transformation, Fourier, symbolic aggregate approximation (SAX), is learned based on user annotations of the presented query results with representation feedback. We present the use of autoencoder type neural networks to summarize time series or its representations into sparse vectors, which serves as another representation learned from the data. Experiments on 85 real data sets confirm that diversity in the result set increases precision, representation feedback incorporates item diversity and helps to identify the appropriate representation. The results also illustrate that the autoencoders can enhance the base representations, and achieve comparably accurate results with reduced data sizes.

We are witnessing an enormous growth in the volume of data generated by various online services. An important portion of this data contains geographic references, since many of these services are location-enhanced and thus produce spatio-temporal records of their usage. We postulate that the spatio-temporal usage records belonging to the same real-world entity can be matched across records from different location-enhanced services. Linking spatio-temporal records enables data analysts and service providers to obtain information that they cannot derive by analyzing only one set of usage records. In this paper, we develop a new linkage model that can be used to match entities from two sets of spatio-temporal usage records belonging to two different location-enhanced services. This linkage model is based on the concept of k-l diversity-that we developed to capture both spatial and temporal aspects of the linkage. To realize this linkage model in practice, we develop a scalable linking algorithm called ST-Link, which makes use of effective spatial and temporal filtering mechanisms that significantly reduce the search space for matching users. Furthermore, ST-Link utilizes sequential scan procedures to avoid random disk access and thus scales to large datasets. We evaluated our work with respect to accuracy and performance using several datasets. Experiments show that ST-Link is effective in practice for performing spatio-temporal linkage and can scale to large datasets.

Search engines in online communities such as Twitter or Facebook not only return matching posts, but also provide links to the profiles of the authors. Thus, when a user appears in the top-k results for a sensitive keyword query, she becomes widely exposed in a sensitive context. The effects of such exposure can result in a serious privacy violation, ranging from embarrassment all the way to becoming a victim of organizational discrimination.

Deriving meaningful insights from location data helps businesses make better decisions. One critical decision made by a business is choosing a location for its new facility. Optimal location queries ask for a location to build a new facility that optimizes an objective function. Most of the existing works on optimal location queries propose solutions to return best location when the set of existing facilities and the set of customers are given. However, most businesses do not know the locations of their customers. In this paper, we introduce a new problem setting for optimal location queries by removing the assumption that the customer locations are known. We propose an optimal location predictor which accepts partial information about customer locations and returns a location for the new facility. The predictor generates synthetic customer locations by using given partial information and it runs optimal location queries with generated location data. Experiments with real data show that the predictor can find the optimal location when sufficient information is provided.

Among different components of urban mobility, urban freight transport is usually considered as the least sustainable. Limited traffic infrastructures and increasing demands in dense urban regions lead to frequent delivery runs with smaller freight vehicles. This increases the traffic in urban areas and has negative impacts upon the quality of life in urban populations. Data driven optimizations are essential to better utilize existing urban transport infrastructures and to reduce the negative effects of freight deliveries for the cities. However, there is limited work and data driven research on urban delivery areas and freight transportation networks. In this paper, we collect and analyse data on urban freight deliveries and parking areas towards an optimized urban freight transportation system. Using a new check-in based mobile parking system for freight vehicles, we aim to understand and optimize freight distribution processes. We explore the relationship between areas' availability patterns and underlying traffic behaviour in order to understand the trends in urban freight transport. By applying the detected patterns we predict the availabilities of loading/unloading areas, and thus open up new possibilities for delivery route planning and better managing of freight transport infrastructures.

Many analytic applications require analyzing user interaction data. In particular, such data can be aggregated over a window to build user activity profiles. Clustering such aggregate profiles is useful for grouping together users with similar behaviors, so that common models could be built for them. In this paper, we present an approach for clustering profiles that are incrementally maintained over a stream of updates. Owing to the potentially large number of users and high rate of interactions, maintaining profile clusters can have high processing and memory resource requirements. To tackle this problem, we apply distributed stream processing. However, in the presence of distributed state, it is a major challenge to partition the profiles over nodes such that memory and computation balance is maintained, while keeping the clustering accuracy high. Furthermore, in order to adapt to potentially changing user interaction patterns, the partitioning of profiles to nodes should be continuously revised, yet one should minimize the migration of profiles so as not to disturb the online processing of updates. We develop a re-partitioning technique that achieves all these goals. To achieve this, we keep micro-cluster summaries at each node and periodically collect these summaries at a central node to perform re-partitioning. We use a greedy algorithm with novel affinity heuristics to revise the partitioning and update the routing tables without introducing a lengthy pause. We showcase the effectiveness of our approach using an application that clusters customers of a telecommunications company based on their aggregate calling profiles.

This article describes LineKing, a crowdsensing system for monitoring and forecasting coffee shop line wait times. LineKing consists of a smartphone component that provides automatic and accurate wait-time detection, and a cloud backend that uses the collected data to provide accurate wait-time estimation. LineKing is used on a daily basis by hundreds of users to monitor the wait-times of a coffee shop in the University at Buffalo, SUNY. The novel wait-time estimation algorithms of LineKing deployed at the cloud backend provide median absolute errors of less than 3 minutes.

Most frequent and expensive queries in social networks involve multi-user operations such as requesting the latest tweets or news-feeds of friends. The performance of such queries are heavily dependent on the data partitioning and replication methodologies adopted by the underlying systems. Existing solutions for data distribution in these systems involve hashor graph-based approaches that ignore the multi-way relations among data. In this work, we propose a novel data partitioning and selective replication method that utilizes the temporal information in prior workloads to predict future query patterns. Our method utilizes the social network structure and the temporality of the interactions among its users to construct a hypergraph that correctly models multi-user operations. It then performs simultaneous partitioning and replication of this hypergraph to reduce the query span while respecting load balance and I/O load constraints under replication. To test our model, we enhance the Cassandra NoSQL system to support selective replication and we implement a social network application (a Twitter clone) utilizing our enhanced Cassandra. We conduct experiments on a cloud computing environment (Amazon EC2) to test the developed systems. Comparison of the proposed method with hash- and enhanced graph-based schemes indicate that it significantly improves latency and throughput.

Many telco analytics require maintaining call profiles based on recent customer call patterns. Such call profiles are typically organized as aggregations computed at different time scales over the recent customer interactions. Customer call profiles are key inputs for analytics targeted at improving operations, marketing, and sales of telco providers. Many of these analytics require clustering customer call profiles, so that customers with similar calling patterns can be modeled as a group. Example applications include optimizing tariffs, customer segmentation, and usage forecasting. In this demo, we present our system for scalable aggregate profile clustering in a streaming setting. We focus on managing anonymized segments of customers for tariff optimization. Due to the large number of customers, maintaining profile clusters have high processing and memory resource requirements. In order to tackle this problem, we apply distributed stream processing. However, in the presence of distributed state, it is a major challenge to partition the profiles over machines (nodes) such that memory and computation balance is maintained, while keeping the clustering accuracy high. Furthermore, to adapt to potentially changing customer calling patterns, the partitioning of profiles to machines should be continuously revised, yet one should minimize the migration of profiles so as not to disturb the online processing of updates. We provide a re-partitioning technique that achieves all these goals. We keep micro-cluster summaries at each node, collect these summaries at a centralize node, and use a greedy algorithm with novel affinity heuristics to revise the partitioning. We present a demo that showcases our Storm and Hbase based implementation of the proposed solution in the context of a customer segmentation application.

We propose a diversity based relevance feedback approach for time series data to improve the accuracy of search results. We first develop the concept of relevance feedback for time series based on dual-tree complex wavelet (CWT) and SAX based approaches. We aim to enhance the search quality by incorporating diversity in the results presented to the user for feedback. We then propose a method which utilizes the representation type as part of the feedback, as opposed to a human choosing based on a preprocessing or training phase. The proposed methods utilize a weighting to handle the relevance feedback of important properties for both single and multiple representation cases. Our experiments on a large variety of time series data sets show that the proposed diversity based relevance feedback improves the retrieval performance. Results confirm that representation feedback incorporates item diversity implicitly and achieves good performance even when using simple nearest neighbor as the retrieval method. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study on diversification of time series search to improve retrieval accuracy and representation feedback.

Traditional search methods try to obtain the most relevant information and rank it according to the degree of similarity to the queries. Diversity in query results is also preferred by a variety of applications since results very similar to each other cannot capture all aspects of the queried topic. In this paper, we focus on the \lambda-diverse k-nearest neighbor search problem on spatial and multidimensional data. Unlike the approach of diversifying query results in a postprocessing step, we naturally obtain diverse results with the proposed geometric and index-based methods. We first make an analogy with the concept of Natural Neighbors (NatN) and propose a natural neighbor-based method for 2D and 3D data and an incremental browsing algorithm based on Gabriel graphs for higher dimensional spaces. We then introduce a diverse browsing method based on the distance browsing feature of spatial index structures, such as R-trees. The algorithm maintains a Priority Queue with mindivdist of the objects depending on both relevancy and angular diversity and efficiently prunes nondiverse items and nodes. We experiment with a number of spatial and high-dimensional data sets, including Factual's (http://www.factual.com/) US points-of-interest data set of 13M entries. On the experimental setup, the diverse browsing method is shown to be more efficient (regarding disk accesses) than k-NN search on R-trees, and more effective (regarding Maximal Marginal Relevance (MMR)) than the diverse nearest neighbor search techniques found in the literature.

Sentiment extraction from online web documents has recently been an active research topic due to its potential use in commercial applications. By sentiment analysis, we refer to the problem of assigning a quantitative positive/negative mood to a short bit of text. Most studies in this area are limited to the identification of sentiments and do not investigate the interplay between sentiments and other factors. In this work, we use a sentiment extraction tool to investigate the influence of factors such as gender, age, education level, the topic at hand, or even the time of the day on sentiments in the context of a large online question answering site. We start our analysis by looking at direct correlations, e.g., we observe more positive sentiments on weekends, very neutral ones in the Science & Mathematics topic, a trend for younger people to express stronger sentiments, or people in military bases to ask the most neutral questions. We then extend this basic analysis by investigating how properties of the (asker, answerer) pair affect the sentiment present in the answer. Among other things, we observe a dependence on the pairing of some inferred attributes estimated by a user's ZIP code. We also show that the best answers differ in their sentiments from other answers, e.g., in the Business & Finance topic, best answers tend to have a more neutral sentiment than other answers. Finally, we report results for the task of predicting the attitude that a question will provoke in answers. We believe that understanding factors influencing the mood of users is not only interesting from a sociological point of view, but also has applications in advertising, recommendation, and search.

Availability of an effective tool for protein multiple structural alignment (MSTA) is essential for discovery and analysis of biologically significant structural motifs that can help solve functional annotation and drug design problems. Existing MSTA methods collect residue correspondences mostly through pairwise comparison of consecutive fragments, which can lead to suboptimal alignments, especially when the similarity among the proteins is low. We introduce a novel strategy based on: building a contact-window based motif library from the protein structural data, discovery and extension of common alignment seeds from this library, and optimal superimposition of multiple structures according to these alignment seeds by an enhanced partial order curve comparison method. The ability of our strategy to detect multiple correspondences simultaneously, to catch alignments globally, and to support flexible alignments, endorse a sensitive and robust automated algorithm that can expose similarities among protein structures even under low similarity conditions. Our method yields better alignment results compared to other popular MSTA methods, on several protein structure data sets that span various structural folds and represent different protein similarity levels. A web-based alignment tool, a downloadable executable, and detailed alignment results for the data sets used here are available at http://sacan.biomed. drexel.edu/Smolign and http://bio.cse.ohio-state.edu/Smolign.

In microblogging services such as Twitter, the users may become overwhelmed by the raw data. One solution to this problem is the classification of short text messages. As short texts do not provide sufficient word occurrences, traditional classification methods such as "Bag-Of-Words" have limitations. To address this problem, we propose to use a small set of domain-specific features extracted from the author's profile and text. The proposed approach effectively classifies the text to a predefined set of generic classes such as News, Events, Opinions, Deals, and Private Messages.

Despite the availability of the sensor and smart-phone devices to fulfill the ubiquitous computing vision, the-state-of-the-art falls short of this vision. We argue that the reason for this gap is the lack of an infrastructure to task/utilize these devices for collaboration. We propose that microblogging services like Twitter can provide an "open" publish-subscribe infrastructure for sensors and smartphones, and pave the way for ubiquitous crowd-sourced sensing and collaboration applications. We design and implement a crowd-sourced sensing and collaboration system over Twitter, and showcase our system in the context of two applications: a crowd-sourced weather radar, and a participatory noise-mapping application. Our results from real-world Twitter experiments give insights into the feasibility of this approach and outline the research challenges in sensor/smartphone integration to Twitter.

Traditional bitmap indexes are utilized as a special type of primary or clustered indexes where the queries are answered by performing fast logical operations supported by hardware. Answers are mapped to the physical data by using the row id of each tuple. Bitmaps represent the i-th tuple in the original table with the i-th bit position of the index. Run-length compression is used to reduce the size of the bitmaps and it has been shown that ordered data is significantly better compressed. However, for large-scale and dynamic datasets it is infeasible to keep the data always sorted. Partitioning can be used to keep the data in smaller and manageable chunks, where a different bitmap index is built for each chunk. We propose a novel bitmap index design with partitioning which serves as basis for non-clustered bitmap indexes. Individual bitmaps are not stored, only an Existence Bitmap (EB) for the existing ranks of the full table is maintained. This approach improves update performance of sorted bitmaps and does not require maintaining a heap as the underlying table, nor the same ordering for all the partitions. A one dimensional index is used over the ranks to map the bits in the EB to the physical order of the data, which allows queries to run even faster. The proposed approach, called ranked Non-Clustered Bitmaps (rNCB), is compared against traditional bitmaps using FastBit and shows significant performance gains. 1.

BACKGROUND: Dual-channel microarray experiments are commonly employed for inference of differential gene expressions across varying organisms and experimental conditions. The design of dual-channel microarray experiments that can help minimize the errors in the resulting inferences has recently received increasing attention. However, a general and scalable search tool and a corresponding database of optimal designs were still missing. DESCRIPTION: An efficient and scalable search method for finding near-optimal dual-channel microarray designs, based on a greedy hill-climbing optimization strategy, has been developed. It is empirically shown that this method can successfully and efficiently find near-optimal designs. Additionally, an improved interwoven loop design construction algorithm has been developed to provide an easily computable general class of near-optimal designs. Finally, in order to make the best results readily available to biologists, a continuously evolving catalog of near-optimal designs is provided. CONCLUSION: A new search algorithm and database for near-optimal microarray designs have been developed. The search tool and the database are accessible via the World Wide Web at http://db.cse.ohio-state.edu/MicroarrayDesigner. Source code and binary distributions are available for academic use upon request.

New protein structures are continuously being determined with the hope of deriving insights into the function and mechanisms of proteins, and consequently, protein structure repositories are growing by leaps and bounds. However, we are still far from having the right methods for sensitive and effective use of the available structural data. The fact that current structural analysis tools are impractical for large-scale applications have given rise to several approaches that try to quickly identify candidate proteins worthy of further analysis. Nonetheless, these approaches do not provide the desired sensitivity of identifying important structural similarities. In this study, we propose a new protein structure retrieval method (RCIndex: Residue-Contacts Index) that is based on accurate and efficient identification of similar residue contacts from a database of available protein structures. By defining a metric distance function for biologically meaningful comparison of residue contacts, distance-based indexing is made applicable for quick retrieval of similar residue contact seeds. These seeds are extended into high scoring segment pairs, which induce structural superpositions. The results show that RCIndex is effective in not only identifying related proteins, but also producing remarkably high quality structural alignments that are comparable to or better than those produced by popular pairwise alignment tools. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time the protein structure retrieval and alignment tasks are successfully handled together.

MOTIVATION: Cell motility is a critical part of many important biological processes. Automated and sensitive cell tracking is essential to cell motility studies where the tracking results can be used for diagnostic or curative decisions and where mathematical models can be developed to deepen our understanding of the mechanisms underlying cell motility. RESULTS: We have developed CellTrack: a self-contained, extensible, and cross-platform software package for cell tracking and motility analysis. Besides the general purpose image enhancement, object segmentation and tracking algorithms, we have implemented a novel edge-based method for sensitive tracking of the cell boundaries, and constructed an ensemble of methods that achieves refined tracking results even under large displacements or deformations of the cells. AVAILABILITY: CellTrack is an Open Source project and is freely available at http://db.cse.ohio-state.edu/CellTrack.

MOTIVATION: Identification and comparison of similar three-dimensional (3D) protein structures has become an even greater challenge in the face of the rapidly growing structure databases. Here, we introduce Vorometric, a new method that provides efficient search and alignment of a query protein against a database of protein structures. Voronoi contacts of the protein residues are enriched with the secondary structure information and a metric substitution matrix is developed to allow efficient indexing. The contact hits obtained from a distance-based indexing method are extended to obtain high-scoring segment pairs, which are then used to generate structural alignments. RESULTS: Vorometric is the first to address both search and alignment problems in the protein structure databases. The experimental results show that Vorometric is simultaneously effective in retrieving similar protein structures, producing high-quality structure alignments, and identifying cross-fold similarities. Vorometric outperforms current structure retrieval methods in search accuracy, while requiring com-parable running times. Furthermore, the structural superpositions produced are shown to have better quality and coverage, when compared with those of the popular structure alignment tools. AVAILABILITY: Vorometric is available as a web service at http://bio.cse.ohio-state.edu/Vorometric

BACKGROUND: Understanding how proteins fold is essential to our quest in discovering how life works at the molecular level. Current computation power enables researchers to produce a huge amount of folding simulation data. Hence there is a pressing need to be able to interpret and identify novel folding features from them. RESULTS: In this paper, we model each folding trajectory as a multi-dimensional curve. We then develop an effective multiple curve comparison (MCC) algorithm, called the enhanced partial order (EPO) algorithm, to extract features from a set of diverse folding trajectories, including both successful and unsuccessful simulation runs. The EPO algorithm addresses several new challenges presented by comparing high dimensional curves coming from folding trajectories. A detailed case study on miniprotein Trp-cage 1 demonstrates that our algorithm can detect similarities at rather low level, and extract biologically meaningful folding events. CONCLUSION: The EPO algorithm is general and applicable to a wide range of applications. We demonstrate its generality and effectiveness by applying it to aligning multiple protein structures with low similarities. For user's convenience, we provide a web server for the algorithm at http://db.cse.ohio-state.edu/EPO.

We propose a novel approach based on predictive quantization (PQ) for online summarization of multiple time-varying data streams. A synopsis over a sliding window of most recent entries is computed in one pass and dynamically updated in constant time. The correlation between consecutive data elements is effectively taken into account without the need for preprocessing. We extend PQ to multiple streams and propose structures for real-time summarization and querying of a massive number of streams. Queries on any subsequence of a sliding window over multiple streams are processed in real time. We examine each component of the proposed approach, prediction, and quantization separately and investigate the space-accuracy trade-off for synopsis generation. Complementing the theoretical optimality of PQ-based approaches, we show that the proposed technique, even for very short prediction windows, significantly outperforms the current techniques for a wide variety of query types on both synthetic and real data sets.

High-dimensional databases pose a challenge with respect to efficient access. High-dimensional indexes do not work because of the often-cited "curse of dimensionality." However, users are usually interested in querying data over a relatively small subset of the entire attribute set at a time. A potential solution is to use lower dimensional indexes that accurately represent the user access patterns. A query response using the physical database design that is developed based on a static snapshot of the query workload may significantly degrade if the query patterns change. To address these issues, we introduce a parameterizable technique to recommend indexes based on index types that are frequently used for high-dimensional data sets and to dynamically adjust indexes as the underlying query workload changes. We incorporate a query pattern change detection mechanism to determine when the access patterns have changed enough to warrant change in the physical database design. By adjusting analysis parameters, we trade off analysis speed against analysis resolution. We perform experiments with a number of data sets, query sets, and parameters to show the effect that varying these characteristics has on analysis results.

Clustering has been shown to be effective in analyzing functional relationships of genes. However, no single clustering method with single distance metric is capable of capturing all types of relationships that a gene may have with other genes. In this paper we introduce a framework which groups genes around a query gene, and ranks them in order corresponding to different levels of similarity utilizing multiple metrics. The focus of our efforts is to create gene centric clusters. The notion of Strong Group (SG) is presented as a cluster definition where no two genes are distant from each other, greater than a threshold value. The genes are then ranked on their frequency of co-occurrence. The grouping and rankings are drawn by applying set operations over results of multiple distance metrics, each capturing particular similarities such as shifted relationships, negative correlations and strong positive relationships. The effectiveness of the algorithm is demonstrated on two case studies. In the first one, a single yeast cell cycle dataset is used. It is shown that different combination of set operations reveals different kinds of interactions between genes. Finally, to provide further analysis on our techniques, we have tested them on multiple microarray datasets obtained from Stanford Microarray Database.

Bitmap indices have been widely used in several domains such as data warehousing and scientific applications due to their efficiency in answering certain query types over large data sets. However, their utilization has been largely limited to read-only data sets or to static snapshots of data due to the cost associated with the update and append of new data. Typically, several bitmaps are associated with each indexed attribute in a table, i.e. one for each attribute value, bin, or range. Each one of these bitmaps needs to be updated to reflect a new, appended row. Since a given table could be represented by hundreds or even thousands of bitmaps, the insertion of a single record can be prohibitively costly. In order to transfer the fast query response times offered by bitmap indices to dynamic database domains, we propose an update conscious bitmap index that provides a mechanism to quickly update bitmaps to reflect dynamic database changes. For an insert operation only the bitmaps that represent the values being inserted need to be updated. We formalize the insert and delete operations of the proposed technique and provide a cost model for bitmap updates. We compare the update conscious bitmaps to traditional bitmaps in terms of storage space, update performance, and query execution time.

MOTIVATION: The rapidly growing protein structure repositories have opened up new opportunities for discovery and analysis of functional and evolutionary relationships among proteins. Detecting conserved structural sites that are unique to a protein family is of great value in identification of functionally important atoms and residues. Currently available methods are computationally expensive and fail to detect biologically significant local features. RESULTS: We propose Local Feature Mining in Proteins (LFM-Pro) as a framework for automatically discovering family-specific local sites and the features associated with these sites. Our method uses the distance field to backbone atoms to detect geometrically significant structural centers of the protein. A feature vector is generated from the geometrical and biochemical environment around these centers. These features are then scored using a statistical measure, for their ability to distinguish a family of proteins from a background set of unrelated proteins, and successful features are combined into a representative set for the protein family. The utility and success of LFM-Pro are demonstrated on trypsin-like serine proteases family of proteins and on a challenging classification dataset via comparison with DALI. The results verify that our method is successful both in identifying the distinctive sites of a given family of proteins, and in classifying proteins using the extracted features. AVAILABILITY: The software and the datasets are freely available for academic research use at http://bioinfo.ceng.metu.edu.tr/Pub/LFMPro.

An effective analysis of clinical trials data involves analyzing different types of data such as heterogeneous and high dimensional time series data. The current time series analysis methods generally assume that the series at hand have sufficient length to apply statistical techniques to them. Other ideal case assumptions are that data are collected in equal length intervals, and while comparing time series, the lengths are usually expected to be equal to each other. However, these assumptions are not valid for many real data sets, especially for the clinical trials data sets. An addition, the data sources are different from each other, the data are heterogeneous, and the sensitivity of the experiments varies by the source. Approaches for mining time series data need to be revisited, keeping the wide range of requirements in mind. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for information mining that involves two major steps: applying a data mining algorithm over homogeneous subsets of data, and identifying common or distinct patterns over the information gathered in the first step. Our approach is implemented specifically for heterogeneous and high dimensional time series clinical trials data. Using this framework, we propose a new way of utilizing frequent itemset mining, as well as clustering and declustering techniques with novel distance metrics for measuring similarity between time series data. By clustering the data, we find groups of analytes (substances in blood) that are most strongly correlated. Most of these relationships already known are verified by the clinical panels, and, in addition, we identify novel groups that need further biomedical analysis. A slight modification to our algorithm results an effective declustering of high dimensional time series data, which is then used for "feature selection." Using industry-sponsored clinical trials data sets, we are able to identify a small set of analytes that effectively models the state of normal health.

Angular similarity measures have been utilized by several database applications to define semantic similarity between various data types such as text documents, time-series, images, and scientific data. Although similarity searches based on Euclidean distance have been extensively studied in the database community, processing of angular similarity searches has been relatively untouched. Problems due to a mismatch in the underlying geometry as well as the high dimensionality of the data make current techniques either inapplicable or their use results in poor performance. This brings up the need for effective indexing methods for angular similarity queries. We first discuss how to efficiently process such queries and propose effective access structures suited to angular similarity measures. In particular, we propose two classes of access structures, namely, Angular-sweep and Cone-shell, which perform different types of quantization based on the angular orientation of the data objects. We also develop query processing algorithms that utilize these structures as dense indices. The proposed techniques are shown to be scalable with respect to both dimensionality and the size of the data. Our experimental results on real data sets from various applications show two to three orders of magnitude of speedup over the current techniques.

Many scientific applications generate massive volumes of data through observations or computer simulations, bringing up the need for effective indexing methods for efficient storage and retrieval of scientific data. Unlike conventional databases, scientific data is mostly read-only and its volume can reach to the order of petabytes, making a compact index structure vital. Bitmap indexing has been successfully applied to scientific databases by exploiting the fact that scientific data are enumerated or numerical. Bitmap indices can be compressed with valiants of run length encoding for a compact index structure. However even this may not be enough for the enormous data generated in some applications such as high energy physics. In this paper, we study how to reorganize bitmap tables for improved compression rates. Our algorithms are used just as a preprocessing step, thus there is no need to reuse the current indexing techniques and the query processing algorithms. We introduce the tuple reordering problem, which aims to reorganize database tuples for optimal compression rates. We propose Gray code ordering algorithm for this NP-Complete problem, which is an in-place algorithm, and runs in linear time in the order of the size of the database. We also discuss how the tuple reordering problem can be reduced to the traveling salesperson problem. Our experimental results on real data sets show that the compression ratio can be improved by a factor of 2 to 10.

As the capture and analysis of single-time-point microarray expression data becomes routine, investigators are turning to time-series expression data to investigate complex gene regulation schemes and metabolic pathways. These investigations are facilitated by algorithms that can extract and cluster related behaviors from the full population of time-series behaviors observed. Although traditional clustering techniques have shown to be effective for certain types of expression analysis, they do not take the biological nature of the process into account, and therefore are clearly not optimized for this purpose. Moreover, the current approaches provide internal comparisons for the experiments utilized for clustering, but cross-comparisons between clustered results are qualitative and subjective. We present a combination of current and novel methods for the analysis of time series gene expression data. We focus on an actual study we have performed for Haemophilus influenzae which is a major cause of otitis media in children. We first perform a discretization of the gene expression data that takes both positive and negative correlations into consideration and then develop a clustering algorithm optimized for such data that allows elucidation and searching of time-series patterns. The resulting approach allows time-series data to be usefully compared across multiple experiments. We demonstrate the success of our algorithm by showing some of the genes that it finds to be co-regulated are not detected by current methods. As a result we are able to identify several signal pathways that initiate competence development, and to characterize the transcriptomes of wild-type and an adenylate cyclase mutant (cya) strains under both nutrient-limiting and nutrient-complete growth conditions.

The problem of disk declustering is to distribute data among multiple disks to reduce query response times through parallel I/O. A strictly optimal declustering technique is one that achieves optimal parallel I/O for all possible queries. In this paper, we focus on techniques that are optimized for spatial range queries. Current declustering techniques, which have single copies of the data, have been shown to be suboptimal for range queries. The lower bound on extra disk accesses is proved to be Ω(log N) for N disks even in the restricted case of an N-by-N grid, and all current approaches have been trying to achieve this bound. Replication is a well-known and effective solution for several problems in databases, especially for availability and load balancing. In this paper, we explore the idea of replication in the context of declustering and propose a framework where strictly optimal parallel I/O is achievable using a small amount of replication. We provide some theoretical foundations for replicated declustering, e.g., a bound for number of copies for strict optimality on any number of disks, and propose a class of replicated declustering schemes, periodic allocations, which are shown to be strictly optimal. The results for optimal disk allocation are extended for larger number of disks by increasing replication. Our techniques and results are valid for any arbitrary a-by-b grids, and any declustering scheme can be further improved using our replication framework. Using the framework, we perform experiments to identify a strictly optimal disk access schedule for any given arbitrary range query. In addition to the theoretical bounds, we compare the proposed replication based scheme to other existing techniques by performing experiments on real datasets.

As databases increasingly integrate different types of information such as multimedia, spatial, time-series, and scientific data, it becomes necessary to support efficient retrieval of multidimensional data. Both the dimensionality and the amount of data that needs to be processed are increasing rapidly. Reducing the dimension of the feature vectors to enhance the performance of the underlying technique is a popular solution to the infamous curse of dimensionality. We expect the techniques to have good quality of distance measures when the similarity distance between two feature vectors is approximated by some notion of distance between two lower-dimensional transformed vectors. Thus, it is desirable to develop techniques resulting in accurate approximations to the original similarity distance. We investigate dimensionality reduction techniques that directly target minimizing the errors made in the approximations. In particular, we develop dynamic techniques for efficient and accurate approximation of similarity evaluations between high-dimensional vectors based on inner-product approximations. Inner-product, by itself, is used as a distance measure in a wide area of applications such as document databases. A first order approximation to the inner-product is obtained from the Cauchy-Schwarz inequality. We extend this idea to higher order power symmetric functions of the multidimensional points. We show how to compute fixed coefficients that work as universal weights based on the moments of the probability density function of the data set. We also develop a dynamic model to compute the universal coefficients for data sets whose distribution is not known. Our experiments on synthetic and real data sets show that the similarity between two objects in high-dimensional space can be accurately approximated by a significantly lower-dimensional representation.

We present a multi-dimensional indexing approach for fast sequence similarity search in DNA and protein databases. In particular, we propose effective transformations of subsequences into numerical vector domains and build efficient index structures on the transformed vectors. We then define distance functions in the transformed domain and examine properties of these functions. We experimentally compared their (a) approximation quality for k-Nearest Neighbor (k-NN) queries, (b) pruning ability and (c) approximation quality for E-range queries. Results for k-NN queries, which we present here, show that our proposed distances FD2 and WD2 (i.e. Frequency and Wavelet Distance functions for 2-grams) perform significantly better than the others. We then develop effective index structures, based on R-trees and scalar quantization, on top of transformed vectors and distance functions. Promising results from the experiments on real biosequence data sets are presented.

High dimensional data sets are encountered in many modern database applications. The usual approach is to construct a summary of the data set through a lossy compression technique, and use this lower dimensional synopsis to provide fast, approximate answers to the queries. In this paper, we develop a novel dimensionality reduction technique based on partitioning the high dimensional vector space into orthogonal subspaces. First, we find a relation between the Euclidian distance of two n-dimensional vectors and the Euclidian distances of their projections on the orthogonal subspaces. Then, based on this relation we develop a method to approximate the Euclidian distance using novel inner product approximation. This process allows us to incorporate the shape information of the vectors to this approximation. While the inner product approximation is symmetric, i.e., captures only the magnitude information of the data, the proposed method takes both the magnitude and shape information of the original vectors into account through partitioning. In the experiments, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our technique by comparing it with commonly used methods.

Reverse Nearest Neighbor (RNN) queries are of particular interest in a wide range of applications such as decision support systems, profile based marketing, data streaming, document databases, and bioinformatics. The earlier approaches to solve this problem mostly deal with two dimensional data. However most of the above applications inherently involve high dimensions and high dimensional RNN problem is still unexplored. In this paper, we propose an approximate solution to answer RNN queries in high dimensions. Our approach is based on the strong correlation in practice between k-NN and RNN. It works in two phases. In the first phase the k-NN of a query point is found and in the next phase they are further analyzed using a novel type of query Boolean Range Query (BRQ). Experimental results show that BRQ is much more efficient than both NN and range queries, and can be effectively used to answer RNN queries. Performance is further improved by running multiple BRQ simultaneously. The proposed approach can also be used to answer other variants of RNN queries such as RNN of order k, bichromatic RNN, and Matching Query which has many applications of its own. Our technique can efficiently answer NN, RNN, and its variants with approximately same number of I/O as running a NN query.

Sensor networks, that consist of potentially several thousands of nodes each with sensing (heat, sound, light, magnetism, etc.) and wireless communication capabilities, provide great opportunities for monitoring spatial information about a region of interest. Although spatial query execution has been studied extensively in the context of database systems (e.g., indexing technologies), these solutions are not directly applicable in the context of sensor networks due to the decentralized nature of the sensor networks and the limited computational power and energy scarcity of individual sensor nodes. We present a peer-to-peer indexing structure, namely peer-tree, in order to address the problem of energy- and time-efficient execution of spatial queries (such as nearest-neighbor queries) in sensor networks. Loosely speaking, our peer-tree structure can be interpreted as a peer-to-peer version of the centralized R-tree index structure. Using the peer-tree as a building block, we present a peer-to-peer query processing model where a query can be posed in any node of the network without the need of a central server. For achieving minimal energy consumption and minimal response time, our query processing model ensures that only the relevant nodes for the correct execution of a query are involved in the query execution.

Similarity based queries are common in several modern database applications, such as multimedia, scientific, and biomedical databases. In most of these systems, database responds with the tuple with the closest match according to some metric. In this paper we investigate some important security issues related to similarity search in databases. We investigate the vulnerability of such systems against users who try to copy the database by sending automated queries. We analyze two models for similarity search, namely reply model and score model. Reply model responds with the tuple with best match and score model responds with only the score of similarity search. For these models we analyze possible ways of attacks and strategies that can be used to detect attacks. Our analysis shows that in score model it is much easier to plug the vulnerabilities than in reply model. Sophisticated attacks can easily be used in reply model and the database is limited in capability to prevent such attacks.

In this paper, we introduce a novel indexing technique based on efficient compression of the feature space for approximate similarity searching in large multimedia databases. Its main novelty is that state-of-the-art tools from the discipline of data compression are adopted to optimize the complexity-performance tradeoff in large data sets. The design procedure optimizes the query access time by jointly accounting for both database distribution and query statistics. We achieve efficient compression by using appropriate vector quantization (VQ) techniques, namely, multi-stage VQ and split-VQ, which are especially suited for limited memory applications. We partition the data set using the accumulated query history, and each partition of data points is separately compressed using a vector quantizer tailored to its distribution. The employed VQ techniques inherently provide a spectrum of points to choose from on the time/accuracy plane. This property is especially crucial for large multimedia databases where I/O time is a bottleneck, because it offers the flexibility to trade time for better accuracy. Our experiments demonstrate speedups of 20 to 35 over a VA-file technique that has been adapted for approximate nearest neighbor searching.

Conical queries are a novel type of query with an increasing number of applications. Traditional index structures and retrieval mechanisms, in general, have been optimized for rectangular and circular queries, rather than conical queries. In this paper, we focus on conical queries which can be defined as a multi-dimensional cone in a multi-dimensional data space. We develop a model for expressing such queries and suggest efficient techniques for evaluating them. In particular, we explore the retrieval problem in the context of conical query processing and develop multi-disk allocation methods specifically for processing conical queries.

Develops a general framework for approximate nearest-neighbor queries. We categorize the current approaches for nearest-neighbor query processing based on either their ability to reduce the data set that needs to be examined, or their ability to reduce the representation size of each data object. We first propose modifications to well-known techniques to support the progressive processing of approximate nearest-neighbor queries. A user may therefore stop the retrieval process once enough information has been returned. We then develop a new technique based on clustering that merges the benefits of the two general classes of approaches. Our cluster-based approach allows a user to progressively explore the approximate results with increasing accuracy. We propose a new metric for evaluation of approximate nearest-neighbor searching techniques. Using both the proposed and the traditional metrics, we analyze and compare several techniques with a detailed performance evaluation. We demonstrate the feasibility and efficiency of approximate nearest-neighbor searching. We perform experiments on several real data sets and establish the superiority of the proposed cluster-based technique over the existing techniques for approximate nearest-neighbor searching.

We d e v elop dynamic dimensionality reduction based on the appro ximationof the standard inner-product.The innerproduct, by itself, is used as a distance measure in a wide area of applications such as document databases, e.g.latent semantic indexing (LSI).A rst order approximation to the inner-product is usually obtained from the Cauchy-Schw arz inequality.The method proposed in this paper re nes such a n appro ximation b y using higher order pow er symmetric functions of the components of the v ectors, whic h a r e p o w ers of the p-norms of the vectors for p = 1 ; 2; : : : ; m .We s h o w h o w to compute xed coecients that work as universal weights based on the moments of the probability density function assumed for the distribution of the components of the input vectors in the data set.Our experiments on syn thetic and document d a t a s h o w that with this technique, the similarity between tw o objects in high dimensional space for certain applications can be accurately approximated by a signi cantly low er dimensional representation.

With the proliferation of multimedia data, there is increasing need to support the indexing and searching of high dimensional data. Recently, a vector approximation based technique called VA-file has been proposed for indexing high dimensional data. It has been shown that the VA-file is an effective technique compared to the current approaches based on space and data partitioning. The VA-file gives good performance especially when the data set is uniformly distributed. Real data sets are not uniformly distributed, are often clustered, and the dimensions of the feature vectors in real data sets are usually correlated. More careful analysis for nonuniform or correlated data is needed for effectively indexing high dimensional data. We propose a solution to these problems and propose the VA+-file, a new technique for indexing high dimensional data sets based on vector approximations. We conclude with an evaluation of nearest neighbor queries and show that the VA+-file technique res...

Modern databases increasingly integrate new kinds of information, such as multimedia information in the form of image, video, and audio data. Both the dimensionality and the amount of data that need to be processed is increasing rapidly, increasing the demand for the efficient retrieval of large amounts of multi-dimensional data. Declustering techniques for multi-disk architectures have been effectively used for storage. In this paper, we first establish that besides exploiting the parallelism, a careful organization of each disk must be considered for fast searching. We introduce the notion of page allocation and data space mapping which can be used to organize and retrieve multidimensional data. We develop these notions based on three different partitioning strategies: regular grid partitioning, concentric hypercubes and hyperpyramids. We develop techniques that satisfy efficient retrieval by optimizing the number of buckets retrieved by the query, disk arm movement and I/O parallelism. We prove that concentric hypercube-based mapping satisfies the optimal clustering and optimal parallelism. We develop a technique based on hyperpyramid partitioning that reduces the number of buckets retrieved by the query and has efficient inter- and intra-disk organizations. We evaluate the performance of proposed techniques by comparing them with the current approaches. The new techniques lead to very significant improvement over the existing techniques, and result in fast retrieval of multi-dimensional data.

Data partitioning and declustering have been extensively used in the past to parallelize I/O for range queries. Numerous declustering and disk allocation techniques have been proposed in the literature. However most of these techniques were primarily designed for two-dimensional data and for balanced partitioning of the data space. As databases increasingly integrate multimedia information in the form of image, video, and audio data, it is necessary to extend the declustering techniques for multidimensional data. We first establish that traditional declustering techniques do not scale for high-dimensional data. We then propose several new partitioning schemes based on concentric hyperspaces. We then develop disk allocation methods for each of the proposed schemes. We conclude with an evaluation of range queries based on these schemes and show that partitioning based on concentric hyperspaces has a significant advantage over a balanced partitioning approach for parallel I/O.