Indexing and Retrieval of Historical Aggregate Information about Moving Objects
Spatio-temporal databases store information about the positions of individual objects over time. In many applications however, such as traffic supervision or mobile communication systems, only summarized data, like the average number of cars in an area for a specific period, or phones serviced by a cell each day, is required. Although this information can be obtained from operational databases, its computation is expensive, rendering online processing inapplicable. A vital solution is the construction of a spatiotemporal data warehouse. In this paper, we describe a framework for supporting OLAP operations over spatiotemporal data. We argue that the spatial and temporal dimensions should be modeled as a combined dimension on the data cube and present data structures, which integrate spatiotemporal indexing with pre-aggregation. While the well-known materialization techniques require a-priori knowledge of the grouping hierarchy, we develop methods that utilize the proposed structures for efficient execution of ad-hoc group-bys. Our techniques can be used for both static and dynamic dimensions.

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: Neighborhood formation 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 (Neighborhood formation), and 2) finding abnormal nodes (Anomaly detection). And we propose algorithms to compute the neighborhood for each node using random walk with restarts and graph partitioning; we also propose algorithms to identify abnormal nodes, using neighborhood information. We evaluate the quality of neighborhoods 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: 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: 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: 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: Synthesis of Distributed Processes from Scenario-Based Specifications
abstract: Given a set of sequence diagrams, the problem of synthesis is of deciding whether there exists a satisfying object system and if so, synthesize one automatically. It is crucial in the development of complex systems, since sequence diagrams serve as the manifestation of use cases and if synthesizable they could lead directly to implementation. It is even more interesting (and harder) if the synthesized object system is distributed. In this paper, we propose a systematic way of synthesizing distributed processes from Live Sequence Charts. The basic idea is to first construct a CSP specification from the LSC specification, and then use CSP algebraic laws to group the behaviors of each object effectively. The key point is that the behaviors of each object can be decided locally without constructing the global state machine.

title: A Z Approach in Validating ORA-SS Data Models
abstract: The rapid growth of the World Wide Web has resulted in more data being accessed over the Internet. In turn there is an increase in the use of semistructured data, which plays a crucial role in many web applications particularly with the introduction of XML and its related technologies. This increase in use makes the design of good semistructured data structures essential. The Object Relationship Attribute model for Semistructured data (ORA-SS) is a graphical notation for designing and representing semistructured data. In this paper, we demonstrate an approach to formally validate the ORA-SS data models in order to enhance the correctness of semistructured data design. A mathematical semantics for the ORA-SS notation is defined using the Z formal language, and further validation processes are carried out to check the correctness of the semistructured data models at both the schema and instance levels.

title: Validating Semistructured Data Using OWL
abstract: Semistructured data has become prevalent in both web applications and database systems. This rapid growth in use makes the design of good semistructured data essential. Formal semantics and automated reasoning tools enable us to reveal the inconsistencies in a semistructured data model and its instances. The Object Relationship Attribute model for Semistructured data (ORA-SS) is a graphical notation for designing and representing semistructured data. This paper presents a methodology of encoding the semantics of ORA-SS in the Web Ontology Language (OWL) and automatically validating the semistructured data design using the OWL reasoning tool – RACER. Our methodology provides automated consistency checking of an ORA-SS data model at both the schema and instance levels.

title: Latent semantic analysis for multiple-type interrelated data objects
abstract: Co-occurrence data is quite common in many real applications. Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) has been successfully used to identify semantic relations in such data. However, LSA can only handle a single co-occurrence relationship between two types of objects. In practical applications, there are many cases where multiple types of objects exist and any pair of these objects could have a pairwise co-occurrence relation. All these co-occurrence relations can be exploited to alleviate data sparseness or to represent objects more meaningfully. In this paper, we propose a novel algorithm, M-LSA, which conducts latent semantic analysis by incorporating all pairwise co-occurrences among multiple types of objects. Based on the mutual reinforcement principle, M-LSA identifies the most salient concepts among the co-occurrence data and represents all the objects in a unified semantic space. M-LSA is general and we show that several variants of LSA are special cases of our algorithm. Experiment results show that M-LSA outperforms LSA on multiple applications, including collaborative filtering, text clustering, and text categorization.

title: Design synthesis from interaction and state-based specifications
abstract: Interaction-based and state-based modeling are two complementary approaches of behavior modeling. The former focuses on global interactions between system components. The latter concentrates on the internal states of individual components. Both approaches have been proven useful in practice. One challenging and important research objective is to combine the modeling power of both effectively and then use the combination as the basis for automatic design synthesis. We present a combination of interaction-based and state-based modeling, namely, live sequence charts and Z, for system specification. We then propose a way of generating distributed design from the combinations. Our approach handles systems with intensive interactive behaviors as well as complex state structures