10962942
Towards bringing database management task in the realm of IT non-experts
Internet enabled services have led to an increase in the size and complexity of the database making the database administration task very complex. This necessitates the hiring of skilled personnel for the management of data, which is a bane for industries, especially in developing countries. We at IBM India research Lab, have been developing technologies (i.e. database administration tools), wherein the database administrator, who may be inexperienced person, can define error-free policies for managing and maintaining the distributed information repositories, and can define data access privileges to users at fine as well as at coarse-grained level using natural language like constructs. These policies represent the actions that need to be carried out when specific database/temporal events occur within the system or externally and are notified to the system. In this paper, we discuss the architecture of our policy based database administration and access control system and outline some of the technical challenges in this area.
7664269
Management of Conflicting Obligations in Self-Protecting Policy-Based Systems
Policy-based management of business systems is increasingly becoming the norm for autonomic computing since these systems can adapt to the changing needs and increasing complexity of the underlying organizations or enterprises. One of the vital characteristics of these systems is self-protection, ie., the ability to secure information and resources, by anticipating, detecting, identifying and protecting against any form of unauthorised access and permitting all authorised accesses based on the users' roles and pre-established policies. In this paper, we focus on one aspect of self-protecting autonomous systems, which is, how to automatically enforce privacy policies related to data handling, for compliance and auditing purposes. The automatic management of privacy sensitive information based on enterprise policies that are driven by a combination of user preferences, internal objectives and external regulations is a key aspect to any enterprise to prevent misuse of this information. These policies extend beyond simple authorization rules, and also mandate obligations to be enforced under certain conditions. One issue in the automatic enforcement of obligations is the presence of conflicts among different obligations which mandate different actions on the same resource, based on different conditions in which the resource is accessed. In this paper we propose algorithms for detecting and resolving conflicts among obligations in both static and runtime environments. We then briefly describe our prototype obligation management system with the conflict resolution module that achieves the automated enforcement of obligations for data-handling based on privacy policies
46325618
Policy Framework for Autonomic Data Managemen
5989555
Enhanced Business Intelligence using EROCS
The EROCS technology automatically links unstructured data with relevant structured data from an external relational database. We demonstrate how EROCS can be used for enhancing business intelligence by allowing OLAP tools to analyze structured and unstructured data in a consolidated manner. Our demonstration showcases the use of EROCS in exploiting latent information in customer emails, which helps in building a complete view of the customer. This results in new insights about the business which are not possible with the existing state of the art.
195894838
Dynamic Access Control Framework Based On Events.
30968721
Tracking Deformable Templates Using a Shortest Path Algorithm
This paper proposes a new technique to track deformable templates. We extend the typical graph algorithms that have been used for active contour recovery to incorporate shape information. The advantage of graph algorithms is that they are guaranteed to find the global minimum of the energy function. The difficulty with their traditional use for active contours is that they consider only two pixels at a time when recovering the contour, making it impossible to enforce shape constraints. We define the deformable template as a polygonal contour, demonstrate the proper mapping between the image, the contour, and a graph, and show how to apply Dijkstra's algorithm to track contours in image sequences. Examples are shown for deforming contours, articulated objects, and smooth contours being tracked in simple and complicated backgrounds. We also provide an analysis of the computational requirements.
8951467
Heuristics for selecting robust database structures with dynamic query patterns
The success of a company increasingly depends on timely information (internal or external) being available to the right person at the right time for crucial managerial decision-making. Achieving such a ‘‘right time/right place’’ duet depends directly on database performance. A database system has been a core component that supports modern business system such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) system that integrates and supports all enterprise processes including product designing and engineering, manufacturing, and other business functions to achieve highest efficiency and effectiveness of operations. We develop and demonstrate through a proof-of-concept case study, a new ‘‘query-driven’’ heuristics for database design that seeks to identify database structures that perform robustly in dynamic settings with dynamic queries. Our focus is the design of efficient structures to process read-only queries in complex environments. Our heuristics begins with detailed analysis of relationships between diverse queries and the performance of different database structures. These relationships are then used in a series of steps that identify ‘‘robust’’ database structures that maintain high performance levels for a wide range of query patterns. We conjecture that our heuristics can facilitate efficient operations and effective decision-making of companies in todays dynamic environment. � 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
17940272
Segmentation versus object representation—are they separable?
When vision is used for moving through the environment, for manipulating or for recognizing objects, it has to simplify the visual input to the level that is required for the specific task. To simplify means to partition images into entities that correspond to individual regions, objects and parts in the real world and to describe those entities only in detail sufficient for performing a required task. For visual discrimination, shape is probably the most important property. After all, line drawings of scenes and objects are usually sufficient for description and subsequent recognition. In computer vision literature this partitioning of images and description of individual parts is called segmentation and shape representation. Segmentation and shape representation appear to be distinct problems and are treated as such in most computer vision systems. In this paper we try to disperse this notion and show that there is no clear division between segmentation and shape representation. Solving any one of those two problems separately is very difficult. On the other hand, if any one of the two problems is solved first, the other one becomes much easier. For example, if the image is correctly divided into parts, the subsequent shape description of those parts gets easier. The opposite is also true when the shapes of parts are known, the partitioning of the image gets simpler.
32641793
Document Summarization using Wikipedia
Although most of the developing world is likely to first access the Internet through mobile phones, mobile devices are constrained by screen space, bandwidth and limited attention span. Single document summarization techniques have the potential to simplify information consumption on mobile phones by presenting only the most relevant information contained in the document. In this paper we present a language independent single-document summarization method. We map document sentences to semantic concepts in Wikipedia and select sentences for the summary based on the frequency of the mapped-to concepts. Our evaluation on English documents using the ROUGE package indicates our summarization method is competitive with the state of the art in single document summarization.
155165
Multivariate Integration on Hypercubic and Mesh Networks
Abstract We analyze a class of adaptive algorithms for integration over N-dimensional hyper-rectangular or simplical regions, on distributed systems. An adaptive algorithm attempts to achieve the requested accuracy by refining the subdivision of the integration region, thus allowing for a concentration of subdivisions near singularities. At the subdivision of a region, the error behaves according to a prescribed model, relating the error of the parent region to that of its children. The analysis can also be applied to problems in other areas, as long as the task selection is based on a priority function which behaves according to a suitable model. Using an efficient management of the subregions, we show that an O (p/ log p) speedup can be achieved on a p-processor hypercubic network, such as shuffle exchange, butterfly and hypercube. Furthermore, a speedup of O ( p ) can be achieved on a p × p mesh network. We also show that our algorithms compare favorably with well-known dynamic load balancing strategies.