29553031
S-Club: an overlay based efficient service discovery mechanism in CROWN grid
Information service plays a key role in grid system, handles resource discovery and management process. Employing existing information service architectures suffers from poor scalability, long search response time, and large traffic overhead. In this paper, we propose a service club mechanism, called S-Club, for efficient service discovery. In S-Club, an overlay based on existing GIS mesh network of CROWN is built, so that GISs are organized as service clubs. Each club serves for a certain type of service while each GIS may join one or more clubs. S-Club is adopted in RLDS as the information service in CROWN grid and the performance of S-Club is evaluated by comprehensive simulations. The results show that S-Club scheme significantly improves search performance and outperforms existing approaches
18230
Indexable PLA for Efficient Similarity Search
Similarity-based search over time-series databases has been a hot research topic for a long history, which is widely used in many applications, including multimedia retrieval, data mining, web search and retrieval, and so on. However, due to high dimensionality (i.e. length) of the time series, the similarity search over directly indexed time series usually encounters a serious problem, known as the "dimensionality curse". Thus, many dimensionality reduction techniques are proposed to break such curse by reducing the dimensionality of time series. Among all the proposed methods, only Piecewise Linear Approximation (PLA) does not have indexing mechanisms to support similarity queries, which prevents it from efficiently searching over very large time-series databases. Our initial studies on the effectiveness of different reduction methods, however, show that PLA performs no worse than others. Motivated by this, in this paper, we re-investigate PLA for approximating and indexing time series. Specifically, we propose a novel distance function in the reduced PLA-space, and prove that this function indeed results in a lower bound of the Euclidean distance between the original time series, which can lead to no false dismissals during the similarity search. As a second step, we develop an effective approach to index these lower bounds to improve the search efficiency. Our extensive experiments over a wide spectrum of real and synthetic data sets have demonstrated the efficiency and effectiveness of PLA together with the newly proposed lower bound distance, in terms of both pruning power and wall clock time, compared with two state-of-the-art reduction methods, Adaptive Piecewise Constant Approximation (APCA) and Chebyshev Polynomials (CP).
35965067
Dynamic Layer Management in Superpeer Architectures
Superpeer unstructured P2P systems have been found to be very effective by dividing the peers into two layers, superlayer and leaf-layer, in which message flooding is only conducted among superlayer and all leaf-peers are represented by corresponding superpeers. However, current superpeer systems do not employ any effective layer management schemes, so the transient and low-capacity peers are allowed to act as superpeers. Moreover, the lack of an appropriate size ratio maintenance mechanism on superlayer to leaf-layer makes the system's search performance far from being optimal. We present one workload model aimed at reducing the weighted overhead of a network. Using our proposed workload model, a network can determine an optimal layer size ratio between leaf-layer and superlayer. We then propose a dynamic layer management algorithm, DLM, which can maintain an optimal layer size ratio and adaptively elect and adjust peers between superlayer and leaf-layer. DLM is completely distributed in the sense that each peer decides to be a superpeer or a leaf-peer independently without global knowledge. DLM could effectively help a superpeer P2P system maintain the optimal layer size ratio and designate peers with relatively long lifetime and large capacities as superpeers, and the peers with short lifetime and low capacities as leaf-peers under highly dynamic network situations. We demonstrate that the quality of a superpeer system is significantly improved under the DLM scheme by comprehensive simulations.
6911930
LANDMARC: Indoor Location Sensing Using Active RFID
Growing convergence among mobile computing devices and embedded technology sparks the development and deployment of “context-aware” applications, where location is the most essential context. In this paper we present LANDMARC, a location sensing prototype system that uses Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology for locating objects inside buildings. The major advantage of LANDMARC is that it improves the overall accuracy of locating objects by utilizing the concept of reference tags. Based on experimental analysis, we demonstrate that active RFID is a viable and cost-effective candidate for indoor location sensing. Although RFID is not designed for indoor location sensing, we point out three major features that should be added to make RFID technologies competitive in this new and growing market.
12060317
DiCAS: An Efficient Distributed Caching Mechanism for P2P Systems
Peer-to-peer networks are widely criticized for their inefficient flooding search mechanism. Distributed hash table (DHT) algorithms have been proposed to improve the search efficiency by mapping the index of a file to a unique peer based on predefined hash functions. However, the tight coupling between indices and hosting peers incurs high maintenance cost in a highly dynamic network. To properly balance the tradeoff between the costs of indexing and searching, we propose the distributed caching and adaptive search (DiCAS) algorithm, where indices are passively cached in a group of peers based on a predefined hash function. Guided by the same function, adaptive search selectively forwards queries to "matched" peers with a high probability of caching the desired indices. The search cost is reduced due to shrunk searching space. Different from the DHT solutions, distributed caching loosely maps the index of a file to a group of peers in a passive fashion, which saves the cost of updating indices. Our simulation study shows that the DiCAS protocol can significantly reduce the network search traffic with the help of small cache space contributed by each individual peer
848425
Location awareness in unstructured peer-to-peer systems
Peer-to-peer (P2P) computing has emerged as a popular model aiming at further utilizing Internet information and resources. However, the mechanism of peers randomly choosing logical neighbors without any knowledge about underlying physical topology can cause a serious topology mismatch between the P2P overlay network and the physical underlying network. The topology mismatch problem brings great stress in the Internet infrastructure. It greatly limits the performance gain from various search or routing techniques. Meanwhile, due to the inefficient overlay topology, the flooding-based search mechanisms cause a large volume of unnecessary traffic. Aiming at alleviating the mismatching problem and reducing the unnecessary traffic, we propose a location-aware topology matching (LTM) technique. LTM builds an efficient overlay by disconnecting slow connections and choosing physically closer nodes as logical neighbors while still retaining the search scope and reducing response time for queries. LTM is scalable and completely distributed in the sense that it does not require any global knowledge of the whole overlay network. The effectiveness of LTM is demonstrated through simulation studies.
6802371
Improving web search results using affinity graph
In this paper, we propose a novel ranking scheme named Affinity Ranking (AR) to re-rank search results by optimizing two metrics: (1) diversity -- which indicates the variance of topics in a group of documents; (2) information richness -- which measures the coverage of a single document to its topic. Both of the two metrics are calculated from a directed link graph named Affinity Graph (AG). AG models the structure of a group of documents based on the asymmetric content similarities between each pair of documents. Experimental results in Yahoo! Directory, ODP Data, and Newsgroup data demonstrate that our proposed ranking algorithm significantly improves the search performance. Specifically, the algorithm achieves 31% improvement in diversity and 12% improvement in information richness relatively within the top 10 search results.
5743866
The powerrank web link analysis algorithm
The web graph follows the power law distribution and has a hierarchy structure. But neither the PageRank algorithm nor any of its improvements leverage these attributes. In this paper, we propose a novel link analysis algorithm "the PowerRank algorithm", which makes use of the power law distribution attribute and the hierarchy structure of the web graph. The algorithm consists two parts. In the first part, special treatment is applied to the web pages with low "importance" score. In the second part, the global "importance" score for each web page is obtained by combining those scores together. Our experimental results show that: 1) The PowerRank algorithm computes 10%-30% faster than PageRank algorithm. 2) Top web pages in PowerRank algorithm remain similar to that of the PageRank algorithm.
6989862
Using Prosody for Automatic Sentence Segmentation of Multi-party Meetings
We explore the use of prosodic features beyond pauses, including duration, pitch, and energy features, for automatic sentence segmentation of ICSI meeting data We examine two different approaches to boundary classification: score-level combination of independent language and prosodic models using HMMs, and feature-level combination of models using a boosting-based method (BoosTexter) We report classification results for reference word transcripts as well as for transcripts from a state-of-the-art automatic speech recognizer (ASR) We also compare results using the lexical model plus a pause-only prosody model, versus results using additional prosodic features Results show that (1) information from pauses is important, including pause duration both at the boundary and at the previous and following word boundaries; (2) adding duration, pitch, and energy features yields significant improvement over pause alone; (3) the integrated boosting-based model performs better than the HMM for ASR conditions; (4) training the boosting-based model on recognized words yields further improvement.
7923791
Discontinuity-Based Simplification of Free Form Surface From a Range Image
This paper improves an existing method for more accurate simplification of free form surface represented as dense points. The main improvement lies in two aspects: one is the introduction of a novel transformation of curvatures, the other is to propose sampling points using both curvature information and curvature variation information. The experimental results based on real images show that the original object surface has been better approximated and the majority of the surface discontinuities have been better preserved with considerably few sampled (5%) data points
6898492
Using Conditional Random Fields for Sentence Boundary Detection in Speech
Sentence boundary detection in speech is important for enriching speech recognition output, making it easier for humans to read and downstream modules to process. In previous work, we have developed hidden Markov model (HMM) and maximum entropy (Maxent) classifiers that integrate textual and prosodic knowledge sources for detecting sentence boundaries. In this paper, we evaluate the use of a conditional random field (CRF) for this task and relate results with this model to our prior work. We evaluate across two corpora (conversational telephone speech and broadcast news speech) on both human transcriptions and speech recognition output. In general, our CRF model yields a lower error rate than the HMM and Maxent models on the NIST sentence boundary detection task in speech, although it is interesting to note that the best results are achieved by three-way voting among the classifiers. This probably occurs because each model has different strengths and weaknesses for modeling the knowledge sources.