TASK DEFINITION: In this task, you are given a part of an article. Your task is to generate headline (title) for this text. Preferred headlines are under fifteen words.
PROBLEM: Distributed controllers are oftentimes used in largescale SDN deployments where they run a myriad of network applications simultaneously. Such applications could have different consistency and availability preferences. These controllers need to communicate via east/west interfaces in order to synchronize their state information. The consistency and the availability of the distributed state information are governed by an underlying consistency model. Earlier, we suggested [1] the use of adaptivelyconsistent controllers that can autonomously tune their consistency parameters in order to meet the performance requirements of a certain application. In this paper, we examine the feasibility of employing adaptive controllers that are built on-top of tunable consistency models similar to that of Apache Cassandra. We present an adaptation strategy that uses clustering techniques (sequential k-means and incremental k-means) in order to map a given application performance indicator (χ) into a feasible consistency level (Φ) that can be used with the underlying tunable consistency model. In the cases that we modeled and tested, our results show that in the case of sequential k-means, with a reasonable number of clusters (≥ 50), a plausible mapping (low RMSE) could be estimated between the application performance indicators (χ) and the consistency level indicator (Φ). In the case of incremental k-means, the results also showed that a plausible mapping (low RMSE) could be estimated using a similar number of clusters (≥ 50) by using a small threshold (≃ 0.01).

SOLUTION: A Clustering-based Consistency Adaptation Strategy for Distributed SDN Controllers

PROBLEM: This paper proposes a deep denoising auto-encoder technique to extract better acoustic features for speech synthesis. The technique allows us to automatically extract low-dimensional features from high dimensional spectral features in a non-linear, data-driven, unsupervised way. We compared the new stochastic feature extractor with conventional mel-cepstral analysis in analysis-by-synthesis and text-to-speech experiments. Our results confirm that the proposed method increases the quality of synthetic speech in both experiments.

SOLUTION: DEEP DENOISING AUTO-ENCODER FOR STATISTICAL SPEECH SYNTHESIS

PROBLEM: In this work we consider the stochastic minimization of nonsmooth convex loss functions, a central problem in machine learning. We propose a novel algorithm called Accelerated Nonsmooth Stochastic Gradient Descent (ANSGD), which exploits the structure of common nonsmooth loss functions to achieve optimal convergence rates for a class of problems including SVMs. It is the first stochastic algorithm that can achieve the optimal O(1/t) rate for minimizing nonsmooth loss functions (with strong convexity). The fast rates are confirmed by empirical comparisons, in which ANSGD significantly outperforms previous subgradient descent algorithms including SGD.

SOLUTION:
Stochastic Smoothing for Nonsmooth Minimizations: Accelerating SGD by Exploiting Structure