Spatio-temporal join selectivity
Given two sets S1, S2 of moving objects, a future timestamp tq, and a distance threshold d, a spatio-temporal join retrieves all pairs of objects that are within distance d at tq. The selectivity of a join equals the number of retrieved pairs divided by the cardinality of the Cartesian product S1 × S2. This paper develops a model for spatio-temporal join selectivity estimation based on rigorous probabilistic analysis, and reveals the factors that affect the selectivity. Initially, we solve the problem for ID (point and rectangle) objects whose location and velocities distribute uniformly, and then extend the results to multi-dimensional spaces. Finally, we deal with non-uniform distributions using a specialized spatio-temporal histogram. Extensive experiments confirm that the proposed formulae are highly accurate (average error below 10%).

title: InteMon: intelligent system monitoring on large clusters
abstract: InteMon is a prototype monitoring and mining system for large clusters. Currently, it monitors over 100 hosts of a prototype data center at CMU. It uses the SNMP protocol and it stores the monitoring data in an mySQL database. Then, it allows for visualization of the time-series data using a JSP web-based frontend interface for users.What sets it apart from other cluster monitoring systems is its ability to automatically analyze the monitoring data in real time and alert the users for potential anomalies. It uses state of the art stream mining methods, it has a sophisticated definition of anomalies (broken correlations among input streams), and it can also pinpoint the reason of the anomaly. InteMon has a user-friendly GUI, it allows the users to perform interactive mining tasks, and it is fully operational.

title: Beyond streams and graphs: dynamic tensor analysis
abstract: How do we find patterns in author-keyword associations, evolving over time? Or in Data Cubes, with product-branch-customer sales information? Matrix decompositions, like principal component analysis (PCA) and variants, are invaluable tools for mining, dimensionality reduction, feature selection, rule identification in numerous settings like streaming data, text, graphs, social networks and many more. However, they have only two orders, like author and keyword, in the above example.We propose to envision such higher order data as tensors,and tap the vast literature on the topic. However, these methods do not necessarily scale up, let alone operate on semi-infinite streams. Thus, we introduce the dynamic tensor analysis (DTA) method, and its variants. DTA provides a compact summary for high-order and high-dimensional data, and it also reveals the hidden correlations. Algorithmically, we designed DTA very carefully so that it is (a) scalable, (b) space efficient (it does not need to store the past) and (c) fully automatic with no need for user defined parameters. Moreover, we propose STA, a streaming tensor analysis method, which provides a fast, streaming approximation to DTA.We implemented all our methods, and applied them in two real settings, namely, anomaly detection and multi-way latent semantic indexing. We used two real, large datasets, one on network flow data (100GB over 1 month) and one from DBLP (200MB over 25 years). Our experiments show that our methods are fast, accurate and that they find interesting patterns and outliers on the real datasets.

title: Relevance search and anomaly detection in bipartite graphs
abstract: Many real applications can be modeled using bipartite graphs, such as users vs. files in a P2P system, traders vs. stocks in a financial trading system, conferences vs. authors in a scientific publication network, and so on. We introduce two operations on bipartite graphs: 1) identifying similar nodes (relevance search), and 2) finding nodes connecting irrelevant nodes (anomaly detection). And we propose algorithms to compute the relevance score for each node using random walk with restarts and graph partitioning; we also propose algorithms to identify anomalies, using relevance scores. We evaluate the quality of relevance search based on semantics of the datasets, and we also measure the performance of the anomaly detection algorithm with manually injected anomalies. Both effectiveness and efficiency of the methods are confirmed by experiments on several real datasets.

title: Selectivity estimation for predictive spatio-temporal queries
abstract: We propose a cost model for selectivity estimation of predictive spatio-temporal window queries. Initially, we focus on uniform data proposing formulae that capture both points and rectangles, and any type of object/query mobility combination (i.e., dynamic objects, dynamic queries or both). Then, we apply the model to nonuniform datasets by introducing spatio-temporal histograms, which in addition to the spatial, also consider the velocity distributions during partitioning. The advantages of our techniques are (i) high accuracy (1-2 orders of magnitude lower error than previous techniques), (ii) ability to handle all query types, and (iii) efficient handling of updates.

title: Hiding in the Crowd: Privacy Preservation on Evolving Streams through Correlation Tracking
abstract: We address the problem of preserving privacy in streams, which has received surprisingly limited attention. For static data, a well-studied and widely used approach is based on random perturbation of the data values. However, streams pose additional challenges. First, analysis of the data has to be performed incrementally, using limited processing time and buffer space, making batch approaches unsuitable. Second, the characteristics of streams evolve over time. Consequently, approaches based on global analysis of the data are not adequate. We show that it is possible to efficiently and effectively track the correlation and autocorrelation structure of multivariate streams and leverage it to add noise which maximally preserves privacy, in the sense that it is very hard to remove. Our techniques achieve much better results than previous static, global approaches, while requiring limited processing time and memory. We provide both a mathematical analysis and experimental evaluation on real data to validate the correctness, efficiency, and effectiveness of our algorithms.

title: CWS: a comparative web search system
abstract: In this paper, we define and study a novel search problem: Comparative Web Search (CWS). The task of CWS is to seek relevant and comparative information from the Web to help users conduct comparisons among a set of topics. A system called CWS is developed to effectively facilitate Web users' comparison needs. Given a set of queries, which represent the topics that a user wants to compare, the system is characterized by: (1) automatic retrieval and ranking of Web pages by incorporating both their relevance to the queries and the comparative contents they contain; (2) automatic clustering of the comparative contents into semantically meaningful themes; (3) extraction of representative keyphrases to summarize the commonness and differences of the comparative contents in each theme. We developed a novel interface which supports two types of view modes: a pair-view which displays the result in the page level, and a cluster-view which organizes the comparative pages into the themes and displays the extracted phrases to facilitate users' comparison. Experiment results show the CWS system is effective and efficient.

title: Stereo Matching Using Belief Propagation
abstract: In this paper, we formulate the stereo matching problem as a Markov network consisting of three coupled Markov random fields (MRF's). These three MRF's model a smooth field for depth/disparity, a line process for depth discontinuity and a binary process for occlusion, respectively. After eliminating the line process and the binary process by introducing two robust functions, we obtain the maximum a posteriori (MAP) estimation in the Markov network by applying a Bayesian belief propagation (BP) algorithm. Furthermore, we extend our basic stereo model to incorporate other visual cues (e.g., image segmentation) that are not modeled in the three MRF's, and again obtain the MAP solution. Experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-art stereo algorithms for most test cases.

title: Stereo Matching Using Belief Propagation
abstract: In this paper, we formulate the stereo matching problem as a Markov network and solve it using Bayesian belief propagation. The stereo Markov network consists of three coupled Markov random fields that model the following: a smooth field for depth/disparity, a line process for depth discontinuity, and a binary process for occlusion. After eliminating the line process and the binary process by introducing two robust functions, we apply the belief propagation algorithm to obtain the maximum a posteriori (MAP) estimation in the Markov network. Other low-level visual cues (e.g., image segmentation) can also be easily incorporated in our stereo model to obtain better stereo results. Experiments demonstrate that our methods are comparable to the state-of-the-art stereo algorithms for many test cases.

title: Efficient Immunization Algorithm for Peer-to-Peer Networks
abstract: In this paper, we present a detail study about the immunization of viruses in Peer-to-Peer networks with power-law degree distributions. By comparing two different immunization strategies, we conclude that it is efficient to immunize the highly connected nodes in order to eradicate viruses from the network. Furthermore, we propose an efficient updating algorithm of global virus database according to the degree-based immunization strategy.

title: Text Classification Improved through Automatically Extracted Sequences
abstract: We propose to use the n-multigram model to help the automatic text classification task. This model could automatically discover the latent semantic sequences contained in the document set of each category. Based on the n-multigram model and the n-gram language model, we put forward two text classification algorithms. The experiments on RCV1 show that our proposed algorithm based on n-multigram model can achieve the similar classification performance compared with the one based on n-gram model. However, the model size of our algorithm is only 4.21% of the latter one. Another proposed algorithm based on the combination of nmultigram model and n-gram model improves the micro- F1 and macro-F1 values by 3.5% and 4.5% respectively which support the validity of our approach.