In this paper, we report on findings from an ethnographic study of how people use their calendars for personal information management (PIM). Our participants were faculty, staff and students who were not required to use or contribute to any specific calendaring solution, but chose to do so anyway. The study was conducted in three parts: first, an initial survey provided broad insights into how calendars were used; second, this was followed up with personal interviews of a few participants which were transcribed and content-analyzed; and third, examples of calendar artifacts were collected to inform our analysis. Findings from our study include the use of multiple reminder alarms, the reliance on paper calendars even among regular users of electronic calendars, and wide use of calendars for reporting and life-archival purposes. We conclude the paper with a discussion of what these imply for designers of interactive calendar systems and future work in PIM research.
Jones @cite_33 framed the problems in PIM in terms of the canonical tasks of , , and . Keeping any kind of information involves a tradeoff between the likelihood it will be recalled in the future, and the costs of capturing and retaining it. Organizing involves filing it away such that it can be retrieved easily in the future, and while keeping the cost of organizing less than the cost of finding. Re-finding is a different problem from finding, since there are aspects to encountered information that make it personal.
@cite_33
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This paper reports a study of Personal Information Management (PIM), which advances research in two ways: (1) rather than focusing on one tool, we collected cross-tool data relating to file, email and web bookmark usage for each participant, and (2) we collected longitudinal data for a subset of the participants. We found that individuals employ a rich variety of strategies both within and across PIM tools, and we present new strategy classifications that reflect this behaviour. We discuss synergies and differences between tools that may be useful in guiding the design of tool integration. Our longitudinal data provides insight into how PIM behaviour evolves over time, and suggests how the supporting nature of PIM discourages reflection by users on their strategies. We discuss how the promotion of some reflection by tools and organizations may benefit users. We consider the problem of private information retrieval (PIR) over a distributed storage system. The storage system consists of @math non-colluding databases, each storing a coded version of @math messages. In the PIR problem, the user wishes to retrieve one of the available messages without revealing the message identity to any individual database. We derive the information-theoretic capacity of this problem, which is defined as the maximum number of bits of the desired message that can be privately retrieved per one bit of downloaded information. We show that the PIR capacity in this case is @math , where @math is the rate of the @math code used. The capacity is a function of the code rate and the number of messages only regardless of the explicit structure of the storage code. The result implies a fundamental tradeoff between the optimal retrieval cost and the storage cost. The result generalizes the achievability and converse results for the classical PIR with replicating databases to the case of coded databases. Persistent identification is necessary for recognition, dissemination and (external) cross-references to digital objects. Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs) provide an established scheme for this task, but do not guarantee stable and persistent identification. In the context of (personal) archives, stability is needed when references are be stored on a medium where later changes to identifiers cannot be corrected at all or only with a very large overhead, such as WORM media or tape archives. Additionally, resources like contacts or appointments do not have a URI, while other URIs, such as file system paths or the IMAP URI, are unstable by design and cannot represent the dynamic aspects of Personal Information Management (PIM). This paper discusses problems of archiving that arise with entity identification in PIM, especially on the example of the personal file system. Traditionally users access their personal files mainly by usingfolder navigation. We evaluate whether recent improvements indesktop search have changed this fundamental aspect of PersonalInformation Management (PIM). We tested this in two studies usingthe same questionnaire: (a) The Windows Studya longitudinalcomparison of Google Desktop and Windows XP SearchCompanion, and (b) The Mac Studya large scale comparison of MacSpotlight and Sherlock. There were few effects forimproved search. First, regardless of search engine, there was astrong navigation preference: on average, users estimated that theyused navigation for 56-68 of file retrieval events but searchedfor only 4-15 of events. Second, the effect of improving thequality of the search engine on search usage was limited andinconsistent. Third, search was used mainly as a last resort whenusers could not remember file location. Finally, there was noevidence that using improved desktop search engines leads people tochange their filing habits to become less reliant on hierarchicalfile organization. We conclude by offering theoretical explanationsfor navigation preference, relating to differences between PIM andInternet retrieval, and suggest alternative design directions forPIM systems. We consider the problem of private information retrieval (PIR) over a distributed storage system. The storage system consists of N non-colluding databases, each storing an MDS-coded version of M messages. In the PIR problem, the user wishes to retrieve one of the available messages without revealing the message identity to any individual database. We derive the information-theoretic capacity of this problem, which is defined as the maximum number of bits of the desired message that can be privately retrieved per one bit of downloaded information. We show that the PIR capacity in this case is C = (1 + K N + K2 N2 + ··· + KM−1 NN−1)−1 = (1 + R c + R2 c + ··· + RM c −1)−1 = 1−R c R c M, where R c is the rate of the (N, K) code used. The capacity is a function of the code rate and the number of messages only regardless of the explicit structure of the storage code. The result implies a fundamental tradeoff between the optimal retrieval cost and the storage cost. The result generalizes the achievability and converse results for the classical PIR with replicating databases to the case of coded databases. We study the problem of Private Information Retrieval (PIR) in the presence of prior side information. The problem setup includes a database of @math independent messages possibly replicated on several servers, and a user that needs to retrieve one of these messages. In addition, the user has some prior side information in the form of a subset of @math messages, not containing the desired message and unknown to the servers. This problem is motivated by practical settings in which the user can obtain side information opportunistically from other users or has previously downloaded some messages using classical PIR schemes. The objective of the user is to retrieve the required message without revealing its identity while minimizing the amount of data downloaded from the servers. We focus on achieving information-theoretic privacy in two scenarios: (i) the user wants to protect jointly its demand and side information; (ii) the user wants to protect only the information about its demand, but not the side information. To highlight the role of side information, we focus first on the case of a single server (single database). In the first scenario, we prove that the minimum download cost is @math messages, and in the second scenario it is @math messages, which should be compared to @math messages, the minimum download cost in the case of no side information. Then, we extend some of our results to the case of the database replicated on multiple servers. Our proof techniques relate PIR with side information to the index coding problem. We leverage this connection to prove converse results, as well as to design achievability schemes. The problem of cache enabled private information retrieval (PIR) is considered in which a user wishes to privately retrieve one out of @math messages, each of size @math bits from @math distributed databases. The user has a local cache of storage @math bits which can be used to store any function of the @math messages. The main contribution of this work is the exact characterization of the capacity of cache aided PIR as a function of the storage parameter @math . In particular, for a given cache storage parameter @math , the information-theoretically optimal download cost @math (or the inverse of capacity) is shown to be equal to @math . Special cases of this result correspond to the settings when @math , for which the optimal download cost was shown by Sun and Jafar to be @math , and the case when @math , i.e., cache size is large enough to store all messages locally, for which the optimal download cost is @math . The intermediate points @math can be readily achieved through a simple memory-sharing based PIR scheme. The key technical contribution of this work is the converse, i.e., a lower bound on the download cost as a function of storage @math which shows that memory sharing is information-theoretically optimal. Private information retrieval (PIR) systems allow a user to retrieve a record from a public database without revealing to the server which record is being retrieved. The literature on PIR considers only replication-based systems, wherein each storage node stores a copy of the entire data. However, systems based on erasure codes are gaining increasing popularity due to a variety of reasons. This paper initiates an investigation into PIR in erasure-coded systems by establishing its capacity and designing explicit codes and algorithms. The notion of privacy considered here is information-theoretic, and the metric optimized is the amount of data downloaded by the user during PIR. In this paper, we present four main results. First, we design an explicit erasure code and PIR algorithm that requires only one extra bit of download to provide perfect privacy. In contrast, all existing PIR algorithms require a download of at least twice the size of the requisite data. Second, we derive lower bounds proving the necessity of downloading at least one additional bit. This establishes the precise capacity of PIR with respect to the metric of download. These results are also applicable to PIR in replication-based systems, which are a special case of erasure codes. Our third contribution is a negative result showing that capacity-achieving codes necessitate super-linear storage overheads. This motivates the fourth contribution of this paper: an erasure code and PIR algorithm that requires a linear storage overhead, provides high reliability to the data, and is a small factor away from the capacity. The notion of a Private Information Retrieval (PIR) code was recently introduced by Fazeli, Vardy and Yaakobi [1] who showed that this class of codes permit PIR at reduced levels of storage overhead in comparison with rephcated-server PIR. In the present paper, the construction of an (n, k) τ-server binary linear PIR code having parameters n = lΣ i=0 (m i ), k = (m i ) and τ = 2l for any integer m ≥ l ≥ 0 is presented. These codes are obtained through homogeneous-polynomial evaluation and correspond to the binary. Projective Reed Muller (PRM) code. The construction can be extended to yield PIR codes for any τ = ∊ 2l, 2l − 1 | l ∊ Z, l ≥ 0 and any value of k, through a combination of single-symbol puncturing and shortening of the PRM code. Each of these code constructions above, have smaller storage overhead in comparison with known short block length codes in [1]. For the particular case of τ = 3,4, we show that the codes constructed here are optimal, systematic PIR codes by providing an improved lower bound on the block length n k, τ) of a systematic PIR code. It follows from a result by Vardy and Yaakobi [2], that these codes also yield optimal, systematic primitive multi-set n, k, τ) B batch codes for τ = 3,4. The PIR code constructions presented here also yield upper bounds on the generahzed Hamming weights of binary PRM codes. To keep or not to keep? People continually face variations of this decision as they encounter information. A large percentage of information encountered is clearly useless — junk e–mail, for example. Another portion of encountered information can be "used up" and disposed of in a single read — the weather report or a sports score, for example. That leaves a great deal of information in a middle ground. The information might be useful somewhere at sometime in the future. Decisions concerning whether and how to keep this information are an essential part of personal information management. Bad decisions either way can be costly. Information not kept or not kept properly may be unavailable later when it is needed. But keeping too much information can also be costly. The wrong information competes for attention and may obscure information more appropriate to the current task. These are the logical costs of a signal detection task. From this perspective, one approach in tool support is to try to decrease the costs of a false positive (keeping useless information) and a miss (not keeping useful information). But this reduction in the costs of keeping mistakes is likely to be bounded by fundamental limitations in the human ability to remember and to attend. A second approach suggested by the theory of signal detectability is relatively less explored: Develop tools that decrease the likelihood that "keeping" mistakes are made in the first place. Private information retrieval (PIR) is the problem of retrieving as efficiently as possible, one out of @math messages from @math non-communicating replicated databases (each holds all @math messages) while keeping the identity of the desired message index a secret from each individual database. The information theoretic capacity of PIR (equivalently, the reciprocal of minimum download cost) is the maximum number of bits of desired information that can be privately retrieved per bit of downloaded information. @math -private PIR is a generalization of PIR to include the requirement that even if any @math of the @math databases collude, the identity of the retrieved message remains completely unknown to them. Robust PIR is another generalization that refers to the scenario where we have @math databases, out of which any @math may fail to respond. For @math messages and @math databases out of which at least some @math must respond, we show that the capacity of @math -private and Robust PIR is @math . The result includes as special cases the capacity of PIR without robustness ( @math ) or @math -privacy constraints ( @math ). In this paper, we address the incremental classifier learning problem, which suffers from catastrophic forgetting. The main reason for catastrophic forgetting is that the past data are not available during learning. Typical approaches keep some exemplars for the past classes and use distillation regularization to retain the classification capability on the past classes and balance the past and new classes. However, there are four main problems with these approaches. First, the loss function is not efficient for classification. Second, there is unbalance problem between the past and new classes. Third, the size of pre-decided exemplars is usually limited and they might not be distinguishable from unseen new classes. Forth, the exemplars may not be allowed to be kept for a long time due to privacy regulations. To address these problems, we propose (a) a new loss function to combine the cross-entropy loss and distillation loss, (b) a simple way to estimate and remove the unbalance between the old and new classes , and (c) using Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) to generate historical data and select representative exemplars during generation. We believe that the data generated by GANs have much less privacy issues than real images because GANs do not directly copy any real image patches. We evaluate the proposed method on CIFAR-100, Flower-102, and MS-Celeb-1M-Base datasets and extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. The advent of the Internet has made the transmission of personally identifiable information more common and often unintended by the user. As personal information becomes more accessible, individuals worry that businesses misuse the information that is collected while they are online. Organizations have tried to mitigate this concern in two ways: (1) by offering privacy policies regarding the handling and use of personal information and (2) by offering benefits such as financial gains or convenience. In this paper, we interpret these actions in the context of the information-processing theory of motivation. Information-processing theories, also known as expectancy theories in the context of motivated behavior, are built on the premise that people process information about behavior-outcome relationships. By doing so, they are forming expectations and making decisions about what behavior to choose. Using an experimental setting, we empirically validate predictions that the means to mitigate privacy concerns are associated with positive valences resulting in an increase in motivational score. In a conjoint analysis exercise, 268 participants from the United States and Singapore face trade-off situations, where an organization may only offer incomplete privacy protection or some benefits. While privacy protections (against secondary use, improper access, and error) are associated with positive valences, we also find that financial gains and convenience can significantly increase individuals' motivational score of registering with a Web site. We find that benefits-monetary reward and future convenience-significantly affect individuals' preferences over Web sites with differing privacy policies. We also quantify the value of Web site privacy protection. Among U.S. subjects, protection against errors, improper access, and secondary use of personal information is worth @math 44.62. Finally, our approach also allows us to identify three distinct segments of Internet users-privacy guardians, information sellers, and convenience seekers. The explosion of digital data and the ever-growing need for fast data analysis have made in-memory big-data processing in computer systems increasingly important. In particular, large-scale graph processing is gaining attention due to its broad applicability from social science to machine learning. However, scalable hardware design that can efficiently process large graphs in main memory is still an open problem. Ideally, cost-effective and scalable graph processing systems can be realized by building a system whose performance increases proportionally with the sizes of graphs that can be stored in the system, which is extremely challenging in conventional systems due to severe memory bandwidth limitations. In this work, we argue that the conventional concept of processing-in-memory (PIM) can be a viable solution to achieve such an objective. The key modern enabler for PIM is the recent advancement of the 3D integration technology that facilitates stacking logic and memory dies in a single package, which was not available when the PIM concept was originally examined. In order to take advantage of such a new technology to enable memory-capacity-proportional performance, we design a programmable PIM accelerator for large-scale graph processing called Tesseract. Tesseract is composed of (1) a new hardware architecture that fully utilizes the available memory bandwidth, (2) an efficient method of communication between different memory partitions, and (3) a programming interface that reflects and exploits the unique hardware design. It also includes two hardware prefetchers specialized for memory access patterns of graph processing, which operate based on the hints provided by our programming model. Our comprehensive evaluations using five state-of-the-art graph processing workloads with large real-world graphs show that the proposed architecture improves average system performance by a factor of ten and achieves 87 average energy reduction over conventional systems. We consider the problem of single-round private information retrieval (PIR) from @math replicated databases. We consider the case when @math databases are outdated (unsynchronized), or even worse, adversarial (Byzantine), and therefore, can return incorrect answers. In the PIR problem with Byzantine databases (BPIR), a user wishes to retrieve a specific message from a set of @math messages with zero-error, irrespective of the actions performed by the Byzantine databases. We consider the @math -privacy constraint in this paper, where any @math databases can collude, and exchange the queries submitted by the user. We derive the information-theoretic capacity of this problem, which is the maximum number of that can be retrieved privately (under the @math -privacy constraint) for every symbol of the downloaded data. We determine the exact BPIR capacity to be @math , if @math . This capacity expression shows that the effect of Byzantine databases on the retrieval rate is equivalent to removing @math databases from the system, with a penalty factor of @math , which signifies that even though the number of databases needed for PIR is effectively @math , the user still needs to access the entire @math databases. The result shows that for the unsynchronized PIR problem, if the user does not have any knowledge about the fraction of the messages that are mis-synchronized, the single-round capacity is the same as the BPIR capacity. Our achievable scheme extends the optimal achievable scheme for the robust PIR (RPIR) problem to correct the introduced by the Byzantine databases as opposed to in the RPIR problem. Our converse proof uses the idea of the cut-set bound in the network coding problem against adversarial nodes. Processing-in-memory (PIM) is rapidly rising as a viable solution for the memory wall crisis, rebounding from its unsuccessful attempts in 1990s due to practicality concerns, which are alleviated with recent advances in 3D stacking technologies. However, it is still challenging to integrate the PIM architectures with existing systems in a seamless manner due to two common characteristics: unconventional programming models for in-memory computation units and lack of ability to utilize large on-chip caches. In this paper, we propose a new PIM architecture that (1) does not change the existing sequential programming models and (2) automatically decides whether to execute PIM operations in memory or processors depending on the locality of data. The key idea is to implement simple in-memory computation using compute-capable memory commands and use specialized instructions, which we call PIM-enabled instructions, to invoke in-memory computation. This allows PIM operations to be interoperable with existing programming models, cache coherence protocols, and virtual memory mechanisms with no modification. In addition, we introduce a simple hardware structure that monitors the locality of data accessed by a PIM-enabled instruction at runtime to adaptively execute the instruction at the host processor (instead of in memory) when the instruction can benefit from large on-chip caches. Consequently, our architecture provides the illusion that PIM operations are executed as if they were host processor instructions. We provide a case study of how ten emerging data-intensive workloads can benefit from our new PIM abstraction and its hardware implementation. Evaluations show that our architecture significantly improves system performance and, more importantly, combines the best parts of conventional and PIM architectures by adapting to data locality of applications. We consider the problem of providing privacy, in the private information retrieval (PIR) sense, to users requesting data from a distributed storage system (DSS). The DSS uses an (n, k) Maximum Distance Separable (MDS) code to store the data reliably on unreliable storage nodes. Some of these nodes can be spies which report to a third party, such as an oppressive regime, which data is being requested by the user. An information theoretic PIR scheme ensures that a user can satisfy its request while revealing, to the spy nodes, no information on which data is being requested. A user can achieve PIR by downloading all the data in the DSS. However, this is not a feasible solution due to its high communication cost. We construct PIR schemes with low download communication cost. When there is b = 1 spy node in the DSS, we construct PIR schemes with download cost 1 1−R per unit of requested data (R = k n is the code rate), achieving the information theoretic limit for linear schemes. The proposed schemes are universal since they depend on the code rate, but not on the generator matrix of the code. When there are 2 ≤ b ≤ n − k spy nodes, we devise linear PIR schemes that have download cost equal to b + k per unit of requested data. This paper introduces a new lifelong learning solution where a single model is trained for a sequence of tasks. The main challenge that vision systems face in this context is catastrophic forgetting: as they tend to adapt to the most recently seen task, they lose performance on the tasks that were learned previously. Our method aims at preserving the knowledge of the previous tasks while learning a new one by using autoencoders. For each task, an under-complete autoencoder is learned, capturing the features that are crucial for its achievement. When a new task is presented to the system, we prevent the reconstructions of the features with these autoencoders from changing, which has the effect of preserving the information on which the previous tasks are mainly relying. At the same time, the features are given space to adjust to the most recent environment as only their projection into a low dimension submanifold is controlled. The proposed system is evaluated on image classification tasks and shows a reduction of forgetting over the state-ofthe-art. Abstract One of the most important problems in information retrieval is determining the order of documents in the answer returned to the user. Many methods and algorithms for document ordering have been proposed. The method introduced in this paper differs from them especially in that it uses a probabilistic model of a document set. In this model documents are regarded as states of a Markov chain, where transition probabilities are directly proportional to similarities between documents. Steady-state probabilities reflect similarities of particular documents to the whole answer set. If documents are ordered according to these probabilities, at the top of a list there will be documents that are the best representatives of the set, and at the bottom those which are the worst representatives. The method was tested against databases INSPEC and Networked Computer Science Technical Reference Library (NCSTRL). Test results are positive. Values of the Kendall rank correlation coefficient indicate high similarity between rankings generated by the proposed method and rankings produced by experts. Results are comparable with rankings generated by the vector model using standard weighting schema tf·idf. There are several computational problems that can be formulated as problems of counting the number of objects having a certain property. Valiant [22] has introduced the class #P which includes a variety of counting problems such as counting the number of perfect matchings in a graph, computing the permanent of a matrix [22], finding the size of a backtrack search tree [14], and computing the probability that a network remains connected when links can fail with a certain probability [23]. We define and study a class of restricted, but very natural, probabilistic sampling methods motivated by the particular counting problems mentioned above. Instead of “singleton sampling” the algorithm is allowed to sample a large set S ample; U in one step; the information returned from the sample is whether S contains any element having the property being counted. We attempt to classify the complexity of computing approximate solutions to problems in #P. The classification is done in terms of the polynomial-time hierarchy (for short, P-hierarchy) [21]. We give a relativization result that complements a recent result of Sipser and Gaacute;c [19] that BPP is contained in the second level of the P-hierarchy.