Transaction Time Support Inside a Database Engine
Transaction time databases retain and provide access to prior states of a database. An update "inserts" a new record while preserving the old version. Immortal DB builds transaction time database support into a database engine, not in middleware. It supports as of queries returning records current at the specified time. It also supports snapshot isolation concurrency control. Versions are stamped with the "clock times" of their updating transactions. The timestamp order agrees with transaction serialization order. Lazy timestamping propagates timestamps to transaction updates after commit. Versions are kept in an integrated storage structure, with historical versions initially stored with current data. Time-splits of pages permit large histories to be maintained, and enable time based indexing, which is essential for high performance historical queries. Experiments show that Immortal DB introduces little overhead for accessing recent database states while providing access to past states.

title: Online B-tree merging
abstract: Many scenarios involve merging of two B-tree indexes, both covering the same key range. Increasing demand for continuous availability and high performance requires that such merging be done online, with minimal interference to normal user transactions. In this paper we present an online B-tree merging method, in which the merging of leaf pages in two B-trees are piggybacked lazily with normal user transactions, thus making the merging I/O efficient and allowing user transactions to access only one index instead of both. The concurrency control mechanism is designed to interfere as little as possible with ongoing user transactions. Merging is made forward recoverable by following a conventional logging protocol, with a few extensions. Should a system failure occur, both indexes being merged can be recovered to a consistent state and no merging work is lost. Experiments and analysis show the I/O savings and the performance, and compare variations on the basic algorithm.

title: Immortal DB: transaction time support for SQL server
abstract: Immortal DB builds transaction time database support into the SQL Server engine, not in middleware. Transaction time databases retain and provide access to prior states of a database. An update "inserts" a new record while preserving the old version. The system supports as of queries returning records current at the specified time. It also supports snapshot isolation concurrency control. Versions are stamped with the times of their updating transactions. The timestamp order agrees with transaction serialization order. Lazy timestamping propagates timestamps to all updates of a transaction after commit. All versions are kept in an integrated storage structure, with historical versions initially stored with current data. Time-splits of pages permit large histories to be maintained, and enable time based indexing. We demonstrate Immortal DB with a moving objects application that tracks cars in the Seattle area.

title: Log-based recovery for middleware servers
abstract: We have developed new methods for log-based recovery for middleware servers which involve thread pooling, private in-memory states for clients, shared in-memory state and message interactions among middleware servers. Due to the observed rareness of crashes, relatively small size of shared state and infrequency of shared state read/write accesses, we are able to reduce the overhead of message logging and shared state logging while maintaining recovery independence. Checkpointing has a very small impact on ongoing activities while still reducing recovery time. Our recovery mechanism enables client private states to be recovered in parallel after a crash. On a commercial middleware server platform, we have implemented a recovery infrastructure prototype, which demonstrates the manageability of system complexity and shows promising performance results.

title: On the Performance of Three Kinds of Channel Code Used in Turbo-BLAST
abstract: A MIMO system named Turbo-BLAST was introduced recently. We investigate the structure of Turbo- BLAST, and study its three kinds structures using different channel codes. Some necessary deductions and new structures are proposed: the decoding algorithm of trellis coded modulation (TCM) is modified to provide the detector with extrinsic information, and a new decoder structure for Turbo code is also given. Simulation results show that the structure using Turbo code can achieve better performance and faster convergence rate for high-order modulation. And the performance improvement of the structure using TCM is also obvious. Since TCM can bring high spectral efficiency, it would be useful to apply TCM in Turbo-BLAST.

title: Solving P2P Traffic Identification Problems Via Optimized Support Vector Machines
abstract: Since the emergence of peer-to-peer (P2P) networking in the last 90s, P2P traffic has become one of the most significant portions of the network traffic. Accurate identification of P2P traffic makes great sense for efficient network management and reasonable utility of network resources. Application level classification of P2P traffic, especially without payload feature detection, is still a challenging problem. This paper proposes a new method for P2P traffic identification and application level classification, which merely uses transport layer information. The method uses support vector machines which have been optimized for performing large learning tasks, rendering that this method become more suitable for large network traffic. The experimental results show that this method achieved high efficiency and is suitable for real-time identification. And carefully tuning the parameters could make the method achieve high accuracy.

title: Hybrid Constituent and Dependency Parsing with Tsinghua Chinese Treebank
abstract: In this paper, we describe our hybrid parsing model on Mandarin Chinese processing. The model combines the mainstream constitute and dependency parsing and the dataset we use it the Tsinghua Chinese Treebank, whose annotation has both constitutes and head information. We show the adaption of this annotation scheme to the normal constitute structure, dependency structure, and the integration of both. We achieve a f1-score of 85.23% for the constitute parsing, 82.35% for the partial head information, and 74.27% for the complete head information.

title: A Market-Based Adaptation for Resolving Competing Needs for Scarce Resources
abstract: The dynamic nature of many real-world domains (e.g., military, emergency first response and hurricane relief, etc) requires adaptive resource allocation to respond to changes in the environment that trigger additional resource requirements. Since the total resources are limited, there are often conflicts among various tasks regarding their resource needs. Thus, resources must be reallocated in order to maximize global utility for the current situation. This problem is further complicated when scarce resources are owned by distributed teams, each of which needs to allocate resources among tasks assigned to them, because each team has limited information about the other teams' resources and states. In this paper, we propose a market-based approach that uses an agent-based auction mechanism to enable teams to communicate and coordinate their utility information about possibly competing resource needs. As a result, the teams can collaboratively assess trade-offs among competing needs to allocate resources efficiently.

title: Using Recognizing Textual Entailment as a Core Engine for Answer Validation
abstract: This paper is about our approach to answer validation, which centered by a Recognizing Textual Entailment (RTE) core engine. We first combined the question and the answer into Hypothesis (H) and view the document as Text (T); then, we used our RTE system to check whether the entailment relation holds between them. Our system was evaluated on the Answer Validation Exercise (AVE) task and achieved f-measures of 0.46 and 0.55 for two submission runs, which both outperformed others' results for the English language.