Query: Novel Density-Based Clustering Algorithms for Uncertain Data

Relevant passages:
A Density-Based Algorithm for Discovering Clusters in Large Spatial Databases with Noise <=SEP=> Spatial Databases Require to detect knowledge from great amount of data Need to handle with arbitrary shape Requirements of Clustering in Data Mining • Scalability • Dealing with different types of attributes • Discovery of Clusters with arbitrary shape • Minimal requirements for domain knowledge to determine input parameters • Able to deal with noise and outliers • Insensitive to the order of input data • High dimensionality of data • Interpretability and usability Introduction(cont..)

Managing and Mining Uncertain Data <=SEP=> In recent years, uncertain data has become ubiquitous because of new technologies for collecting data which can only measure and collect the data in an imprecise way. Furthermore, many technologies such as privacy-preserving data mining create data which is inherently uncertain in nature. As a result there is a need for tools and techniques for mining and managing uncertain data. This chapter discusses the broad outline of the book and the methods used for various uncertain data applications.

Introduction to Information Retrieval: Index <=SEP=> 

Model-Driven Data Acquisition in Sensor Networks <=SEP=> Declarative queries are proving to be an attractive paradigm for interacting with networks of wireless sensors. The metaphor that “the sensornet is a database” is problematic, however, because sensors do not exhaustively represent the data in the real world. In order to map the raw sensor readings onto physical reality, a modelof that reality is required to complement the readings. In this paper, we enrich interactive sensor querying with statistical modeling techniques. We demonstrate that such models can help provide answers that are both more meaningful, and, by introducing approximations with probabilistic confidences, significantly more efficient to compute in both time and energy. Utilizing the combination of a model and live data acquisition raises the challenging optimization problem of selecting the best sensor readings to acquire, balancing the increase in the confidence of our answer against the communication and data acquisition costs in the network. We describe an exponential time algorithm for finding the optimal solution to this optimization problem, and a polynomial-time heuristic for identifying solutions that perform well in practice. We evaluate our approach on several real-world sensor-network data sets, taking into account the real measured data and communication quality, demonstrating that our model-based approach provides a high-fidelity representation of the real phenomena and leads to significant performance gains versus traditional data acquisition techniques.

ProbView: A Flexible Probabilistic Database System <=SEP=> Probability theory is mathematically the best understood paradigm for modeling and manipulating uncertain information. Probabilities of complex events can be computed from those of basic events on which they depend, using any of a number of strategies. Which strategy is appropriate depends very much on the known interdependencies among the events involved. Previous work on probabilistic databases has assumed a fixed and restrictivecombination strategy (e.g., assuming all events are pairwise independent). In this article, we characterize, using postulates, whole classes of strategies for conjunction, disjunction, and negation, meaningful from the viewpoint of probability theory. (1) We propose a probabilistic relational data model and a genericprobabilistic relational algebra that neatly captures various strategiessatisfying the postulates, within a single unified framework. (2) We show that as long as the chosen strategies can be computed in polynomial time, queries in the positive fragment of the probabilistic relational algebra have essentially the same data complexity as classical relational algebra. (3) We establish various containments and equivalences between algebraic expressions, similar in spirit to those in classical algebra. (4) We develop algorithms for maintaining materialized probabilistic views. (5) Based on these ideas, we have developed a prototype probabilistic database system called ProbView on top of Dbase V.0. We validate our complexity results with experiments and show that rewriting certain types of queries to other equivalent forms often yields substantial savings.

Data augmentation for deep convolutional neural network acoustic modeling <=SEP=> This paper investigates data augmentation based on label-preserving transformations for deep convolutional neural network (CNN) acoustic modeling to deal with limited training data. We show how stochastic feature mapping (SFM) can be carried out when training CNN models with log-Mel features as input and compare it with vocal tract length perturbation (VTLP). Furthermore, a two-stage data augmentation scheme with a stacked architecture is proposed to combine VTLP and SFM as complementary approaches. Improved performance has been observed in experiments conducted on the limited language pack (LLP) of Haitian Creole in the IARPA Babel program.

Pointwise Prediction and Sequence-Based Reranking for Adaptable Part-of-Speech Tagging <=SEP=> This paper proposes an accurate method for partof-speech (POS) tagging that is highly domain-adaptable. The method is based on an assumption that the POS transition tendencies do not depend on domains, and has the following three characteristics: 1) it is trainable from partially annotated data, 2) it uses efficiently trainable pointwise POS taggers to allow for active learning, and 3) is more accurate than the pointwise or sequence-based POS taggers. The proposed method estimates POS tags by stacking pointwise and sequence-based predictors. In the experiments we deal with the joint problem of word segmentation and POS tagging in Japanese. We show that our proposed stacking process improves over pointwise and sequence-based methods (hidden Markov models and conditional random fields) both in the general domain and the target domain. In addition we show the learning curve in a domain adaptation scenario. The result shows that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods in the same domain as the training data and is better than them in domain adaptation situations as well. Keywords-Active learning; Reranking; Word segmentation; Part-of-speech tagging; Pointwise prediction;

Smart RDF Data Storage in Graph Databases <=SEP=> Graph Database Management Systems (GDBMs) provide an effective and efficient solution to data storage in current scenarios where data are more and more connected, graph models are widely used, and systems need to scale to large data sets. In particular, the conversion of the persistent layer of an application from a RDF to a graph data store can be convenient but it is usually an hard task for database administrators. In this paper we propose a methodology to convert a RDF data store to a graph database by exploiting the ontology and the constraints of the source. We provide experimental results that show the feasibility of our solution and the efficiency of query answering over the target database.

ESPAC: Enabling Security and Patient-centric Access Control for eHealth in cloud computing <=SEP=> We consider the problem of patient self-controlled access privilege to highly sensitive Personal Health Information (PHI), where PHI is expected to be securely stored in cloud storage for uninterrupted anytime, anywhere remote access. In order to assure the privacy of PHI, we propose Efficient and Secure Patient-centric Access Control (ESPAC) scheme which allows data requesters to have different access privileges based on their roles, and then assigns different attribute sets to them. Extensive security and performance analyses demonstrate that the ESPAC scheme is able to achieve desired security requirements with acceptable communication delay.

Application in Market Basket Research Based on FP-Growth Algorithm <=SEP=> Market basket analysis gives us insight into the merchandise by telling us which products tend to be purchased together and which are most enable to purchase. The market basket analysis is a powerful tool especially in retailing it is essential to discover large baskets, since it deals with thousands of items. FP-growth algorithm is an efficient algorithm for mining frequent patterns. It does not need to produce the candidate sets and that is quite time consuming. It scans database only twice and frequent item set is mining by using of FP tree. In this paper, Visual C++ is applied to design the program to mine the frequent item sets using FP-growth algorithm. According to the mining result, the merchandise in the supermarket is arranged together in the same place well-suited for customer.

Visual analysis of self-organizing maps <=SEP=> Abstract. In the article, an additional visualization of self-organizing maps (SOM) has been investigated. The main objective of self-organizing maps is data clustering and their graphical presentation. Opportunities of SOM visualization in four systems (NeNet, SOM-Toolbox, Databionic ESOM and Viscovery SOMine) have been investigated. Each system has its additional tools for visualizing SOM. A comparative analysis has been made for two data sets: Fisher’s iris data set and the economic indices of the European Union countries. A new SOM system is also introduced and researched. The system has a specific visualization tool. It is missing in other SOM systems. It helps to see the proportion of neurons, corresponding to the data items, belonging to the different classes, and fallen in the same SOM cell.

Car-like robot navigation at high speed <=SEP=> This paper investigates the use of dynamic window approach (DWA) to solve the high speed autonomous navigation problem for mobile robots. In this paper, our main interest is to adapt the DWA to a car-like robot Robucar. This latter can moves with high speed. It is characterized also by its bounded steering angle imposed by its mechanical structure which thereby implies that the robot always moves on circular trajectories whose radius is upper than a certain extent. This approach considers the car-like robot shape, kinematics and dynamics in the determination of translational velocity and steering angle in one step. The approach has been tested in simulation for different environments and demonstrates its practicability.

Appropriating and assessing heuristics for mobile computing <=SEP=> Mobile computing presents formidable challenges not only to the design of applications but also to each and every phase of the systems lifecycle. In particular, the HCI community is still struggling with the challenges that mobile computing poses to evaluation. Expert-based evaluation techniques are well known and they do enable a relatively quick and easy evaluation. Heuristic evaluation, in particular, has been widely applied and investigated, most likely due to its efficiency in detecting most of usability flaws at front of a rather limited investment of time and human resources in the evaluation. However, the capacity of expert-based techniques to capture contextual factors in mobile computing is a major concern. In this paper, we report an effort for realizing usability heuristics appropriate for mobile computing. The effort intends to capture contextual requirements while still drawing from the inexpensive and flexible nature of heuristic-based techniques. This work has been carried out in the context of a research project task geared toward developing a heuristic-based evaluation methodology for mobile computing. This paper describes the methodology that we adopted toward realizing mobile heuristics. It also reports a study that we carried out in order to assess the relevance of the realized mobile heuristics by comparing their performance with that of the standard/traditional usability heuristics. The study yielded positive results in terms of the number of usability flaws identified and the severity ranking assigned.

The Connected Car in the Cloud: A Platform for Prototyping Telematics Services <=SEP=> The Connected-Car Prototyping Platform provides both a back end for applications interacting with connected cars and an abstraction of such connected devices for developers. It also provides services such as identity management and data storage. Its main purposes are experimentation, prototyping, evaluation of ideas, and reduction of time-to-market for successful applications.

Gradual synthesis for static parallelization of single-pass array-processing programs <=SEP=> Parallelizing of software improves its effectiveness and productivity. To guarantee correctness, the parallel and serial versions of the same code must be formally verified to be equivalent. We present a novel approach, called GRASSP, that automatically synthesizes parallel single-pass array-processing programs by treating the given serial versions as specifications. Given arbitrary segmentation of the input array, GRASSP synthesizes a code to determine a new segmentation of the array that allows computing partial results for each segment and merging them. In contrast to other parallelizers, GRASSP gradually considers several parallelization scenarios and certifies the results using constrained Horn solving. For several classes of programs, we show that such parallelization can be performed efficiently. The C++ translations of the GRASSP solutions sped performance by up to 5X relative to serial code on an 8-thread machine and Hadoop translations by up to 10X on a 10-node Amazon EMR cluster.

Milli-HRG inertial navigation system <=SEP=> The Hemispherical Resonator Gyro (HRG) has proven itself to be an ultra-reliable technology for space application with over 20 million operation hours and 100% mission success. Northrop Grumman Navigation Systems Division is developing a terrestrial inertial navigation system, INS, based on the proven space technology that can be used for precision pointing applications. The Precision Pointing System (PPS) design yields a small size and lightweight system and will require only a few watts of power to operate. To achieve this small sized INS, the PPS utilizes a new golf-ball sized milli-HRG (mHRG) that is based on the current HRG 130P production gyro design used in extremely accurate space pointing systems. The power reduction is derived from a new electronics design based around low power elements. The new mHRG gyro design has demonstrated bias stability performance better than the navigation grade gyros and will quickly attain this accuracy due to the extremely low noise characteristics of the HRG. Instrumental in the success of the mHRG performance has been the implementation of a calibration mechanization that eliminates the requirement for thermal control or modeling. This implementation will allow the INS to align quickly and will be advantageous for applications that have a quick response time requirement. Additionally, due to the stability of the mHRG the system can operate without GPS aiding for greater than an hour, while maintaining the attitude accuracy required for precision pointing, before an internal realignment is needed. The simplified design of mHRG, has reduced the parts count by roughly 90% when compared to the current space qualified HRG production unit. With the major parts reduction it is projected that the mHRG can be produced efficiently and at a cost making it a viable choice for terrestrial applications.

Critical Success Factors for Effective IT Governance in the Public Sector Organizations in a Developing Country: The Case of Tanzania <=SEP=> Today in many organisations in the public sector, the use of IT has become pervasive in every facet of the organisations’ endeavours in supporting and evolving public service delivery. This pervasive use of technology has caused a critical dependency on IT, which in this environment involves a complex mix of political, organisational, technical and cultural concerns that call for a specific focus on effective IT governance. Much research has been done on IT governance effectiveness in these organisations. However adequate focus has not been given to such organisations in a developing country environment like Tanzania, which on one hand is characterised by IT resources, knowledge, and culture constraints and on the other hand by the increase of IT investment and applications. In this paper specifically we address such a gap by identifying the critical success factors (CSFs) for effective IT governance in this environment. The study is based mainly on IT governance focus areas in analysing the relevant CSFs from the literature and five organizations in the Tanzanian public sector. Moreover we have taken into account the fact that the IT value to be achieved due to effective IT governance is related to efficient and cost effective IT delivery, innovation and business impact. As a result of this research we have identified eleven CSFs that should be considered for effective IT governance practice in Tanzanian public sector organizations.

Clustering cancer gene expression data: a comparative study <=SEP=> The use of clustering methods for the discovery of cancer subtypes has drawn a great deal of attention in the scientific community. While bioinformaticians have proposed new clustering methods that take advantage of characteristics of the gene expression data, the medical community has a preference for using "classic" clustering methods. There have been no studies thus far performing a large-scale evaluation of different clustering methods in this context. We present the first large-scale analysis of seven different clustering methods and four proximity measures for the analysis of 35 cancer gene expression data sets. Our results reveal that the finite mixture of Gaussians, followed closely by k-means, exhibited the best performance in terms of recovering the true structure of the data sets. These methods also exhibited, on average, the smallest difference between the actual number of classes in the data sets and the best number of clusters as indicated by our validation criteria. Furthermore, hierarchical methods, which have been widely used by the medical community, exhibited a poorer recovery performance than that of the other methods evaluated. Moreover, as a stable basis for the assessment and comparison of different clustering methods for cancer gene expression data, this study provides a common group of data sets (benchmark data sets) to be shared among researchers and used for comparisons with new methods. The data sets analyzed in this study are available at http://algorithmics.molgen.mpg.de/Supplements/CompCancer/ .

Frequency Response Analysis and Bandwidth Extension of the Doherty Amplifier <=SEP=> A complete frequency response analysis of the Doherty amplifier is presented with the conventional output combining network consisting of two quarter-wavelength (λ/4) transmission lines at a center frequency f0 . Expressions for output power and efficiency were derived over the whole dynamic range and at any frequency f. The analysis shows that the amount of efficiency enhancement, as well as the maximum output power, reduce as the deviation from f0 increases. For instance, the derived expressions show that a conventional Doherty amplifier has a drain efficiency of η ≥ 52.7%, which represents at least 13.4% efficiency enhancement over a class B amplifier, and up to 33.3% fractional bandwidth. A modified output combining network, using λ/4 lines with reduced impedance transformation ratio, is also analyzed, which results in a bandwidth extension of the Doherty amplifier when compared to the conventional design. To verify the derived analyses, three unsymmetrical GaN Doherty power amplifiers (DPAs) were designed and characterized; the first DPA was based on the conventional output combining network, while the second DPA was based on the proposed network. Measurements showed that the first DPA had, at 5-6-dB back-off, a drain efficiency of η ≥ 44% and over 28% fractional bandwidth (1.7-2.25 GHz), while the DPA with the proposed output combining network had a better wideband performance than the third reference conventional DPA, with a back-off drain efficiency of η ≥ 41%, and over 42% fractional bandwidth (1.7-2.6 GHz). To the best of authors' knowledge, the designed DPAs have the highest bandwidths reported thus far.

The Colletotrichum boninense species complex <=SEP=> UNLABELLED
Although only recently described, Colletotrichum boninense is well established in literature as an anthracnose pathogen or endophyte of a diverse range of host plants worldwide. It is especially prominent on members of Amaryllidaceae, Orchidaceae, Proteaceae and Solanaceae. Reports from literature and preliminary studies using ITS sequence data indicated that C. boninense represents a species complex. A multilocus molecular phylogenetic analysis (ITS, ACT, TUB2, CHS-1, GAPDH, HIS3, CAL) of 86 strains previously identified as C. boninense and other related strains revealed 18 clades. These clades are recognised here as separate species, including C. boninense s. str., C. hippeastri, C. karstii and 12 previously undescribed species, C. annellatum, C. beeveri, C. brassicicola, C. brasiliense, C. colombiense, C. constrictum, C. cymbidiicola, C. dacrycarpi, C. novae-zelandiae, C. oncidii, C. parsonsiae and C. torulosum. Seven of the new species are only known from New Zealand, perhaps reflecting a sampling bias. The new combination C. phyllanthi was made, and C. dracaenae Petch was epitypified and the name replaced with C. petchii. Typical for species of the C. boninense species complex are the conidiogenous cells with rather prominent periclinal thickening that also sometimes extend to form a new conidiogenous locus or annellations as well as conidia that have a prominent basal scar. Many species in the C. boninense complex form teleomorphs in culture.


TAXONOMIC NOVELTIES
New combination - Colletotrichum phyllanthi (H. Surendranath Pai) Damm, P.F. Cannon & Crous. Name replacement - C. petchii Damm, P.F. Cannon & Crous. New species - C. annellatum Damm, P.F. Cannon & Crous, C. beeveri Damm, P.F. Cannon, Crous, P.R. Johnst. & B. Weir, C. brassicicola Damm, P.F. Cannon & Crous, C. brasiliense Damm, P.F. Cannon, Crous & Massola, C. colombiense Damm, P.F. Cannon, Crous, C. constrictum Damm, P.F. Cannon, Crous, P.R. Johnst. & B. Weir, C. cymbidiicola Damm, P.F. Cannon, Crous, P.R. Johnst. & B. Weir, C. dacrycarpi Damm, P.F. Cannon, Crous, P.R. Johnst. & B. Weir, C. novae-zelandiae Damm, P.F. Cannon, Crous, P.R. Johnst. & B. Weir, C. oncidii Damm, P.F. Cannon & Crous, C. parsonsiae Damm, P.F. Cannon, Crous, P.R. Johnst. & B. Weir, C. torulosum Damm, P.F. Cannon, Crous, P.R. Johnst. & B. Weir. Typifications: Epitypifications - C. dracaenae Petch.

A centralized detection and prevention technique against ARP poisoning <=SEP=> The Man-in-the-Middle (MITM) attack on ARP is presently a common attack and nuisance to the typical LAN environment. This type of MITM is brought to effect by ARP cache poisoning which is achieved using forged ARP packets. ARP poisoning is a mechanism in which a node poisons ARP cache table of another node forcing it to send packets to a destination other than the intended one. This paper presents a feasible solution to the ARP cache poisoning, removing inconsistencies from all ARP tables of all hosts in the network. This paper uses a centralized system and ARP Central Server (ACS) to manage ARP table entries in all hosts. All hosts in the network uses the ACS to validate their ARP table entries. The ACS validates and corrects the poisoned ARP entries of the attacked hosts and hence prevents ARP poisoning in the network.

Microwave Doherty Power Amplifier for High Efficiency and Linearity <=SEP=> This paper explains the basic circuit configuration of microwave Doherty amplifier and additional design methods for wide bandwidth and high power applications. This paper also presents the recent experimental results of the group using the uneven power drive. Most of the previous works about microwave Doherty amplifier have employed identical input drives. In this works, two 1:1(2-way) and a 1:2(3-way) Doherty amplifiers are implemented at 2.14GHz center frequency using LDMOS with a peak envelope power of 180 watt and 285 watt, respectively. The 2-way Doherty amplifiers are optimized at 25 watt average output power for high efficiency and linearity and the 3-way Doherty amplifier at 16 watt average output power for high linearity. The amplifiers are tested using WCDMA 4FA signal. The performances of the 2-way Doherty amplifier are compared with that of the comparable class AB amplifier and the Doherty amplifier with even power drive. The performances of the 3-way Doherty amplifier are compared with that of the comparable class AB amplifier. The experimental results show the superior performances of our Doherty amplifiers

Three-Dimensional Face Recognition <=SEP=> An expression-invariant 3D face recognition approach is presented. Our basic assumption is that facial expressions can be modelled as isometries of the facial surface. This allows to construct expression-invariant representations of faces using the bending-invariant canonical forms approach. The result is an efficient and accurate face recognition algorithm, robust to facial expressions, that can distinguish between identical twins (the first two authors). We demonstrate a prototype system based on the proposed algorithm and compare its performance to classical face recognition methods. The numerical methods employed by our approach do not require the facial surface explicitly. The surface gradients field, or the surface metric, are sufficient for constructing the expression-invariant representation of any given face. It allows us to perform the 3D face recognition task while avoiding the surface reconstruction stage.

Pareto improvement and joint cash management optimisation for banks and cash-in-transit firms <=SEP=> Improving the ATM cash management techniques of banks has already received significant attention in the literature as a separate optimisation problem for banks and the independent firms that supply cash to automated teller machines. This article concentrates instead on a further possibility of cost reduction: optimising the cash management problem as one single problem. Doing so, contractual prices between banks and the cash in transit firms can be in general modified allowing for further cost reduction relative to individual optimisations. In order to show the pertinence of this procedure, we have determined possible Pareto-improvement re-contracting schemes based on a Baumol-type cash demand forecast for a Hungarian commercial bank resulting in substantial cost reduction. © 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Why Teaching Ethics to AI Practitioners Is Important <=SEP=> We argue that it is crucial to the future of AI that our students be trained in multiple complementary modes of ethical reasoning, so that they may make ethical design and implementation choices, ethical career decisions, and that their software will be programmed to take into account the complexities of acting ethically in the world.

Maximizing rumor containment in social networks with constrained time <=SEP=> The spread of rumor or misinformation in social networks may cause bad effects among the public. Thus, it is necessary to find effective strategies to control the spread of rumor. Specifically, in our paper, we consider such a setting: initially, a subset of nodes is chosen as the set of protectors, and the influence of protector diffuses competitively with the diffusion of rumor. However, in real world, we generally have limited budget (limited number of protectors) and time to fight with rumor. Therefore, we study the problem of maximizing rumor containment within a fixed number of initial protectors and a given time deadline. Generalizing two seminal models in the field—the Independent Cascade (IC) model and the Linear Threshold (LT) model—we propose two new models of competitive influence diffusion in social networks with the following three factors: a time deadline for information diffusion, random time delay of information exchange and personal interests regarding the acceptance of information. Under these two models, we show that the optimization problems are NP-hard. Furthermore, we prove that the objective functions are submodular. As a result, the greedy algorithm is used as constant-factor approximation algorithms with performance guarantee $$1-\frac{1}{e}$$ 1 - 1 e for the two optimization problems.

An Efficient Method for Traffic Sign Recognition Based on Extreme Learning Machine <=SEP=> This paper proposes a computationally efficient method for traffic sign recognition (TSR). This proposed method consists of two modules: 1) extraction of histogram of oriented gradient variant (HOGv) feature and 2) a single classifier trained by extreme learning machine (ELM) algorithm. The presented HOGv feature keeps a good balance between redundancy and local details such that it can represent distinctive shapes better. The classifier is a single-hidden-layer feedforward network. Based on ELM algorithm, the connection between input and hidden layers realizes the random feature mapping while only the weights between hidden and output layers are trained. As a result, layer-by-layer tuning is not required. Meanwhile, the norm of output weights is included in the cost function. Therefore, the ELM-based classifier can achieve an optimal and generalized solution for multiclass TSR. Furthermore, it can balance the recognition accuracy and computational cost. Three datasets, including the German TSR benchmark dataset, the Belgium traffic sign classification dataset and the revised mapping and assessing the state of traffic infrastructure (revised MASTIF) dataset, are used to evaluate this proposed method. Experimental results have shown that this proposed method obtains not only high recognition accuracy but also extremely high computational efficiency in both training and recognition processes in these three datasets.

Goal-oriented requirements engineering: an extended systematic mapping study <=SEP=> Over the last two decades, much attention has been paid to the area of goal-oriented requirements engineering (GORE), where goals are used as a useful conceptualization to elicit, model, and analyze requirements, capturing alternatives and conflicts. Goal modeling has been adapted and applied to many sub-topics within requirements engineering (RE) and beyond, such as agent orientation, aspect orientation, business intelligence, model-driven development, and security. Despite extensive efforts in this field, the RE community lacks a recent, general systematic literature review of the area. In this work, we present a systematic mapping study, covering the 246 top-cited GORE-related conference and journal papers, according to Scopus. Our literature map addresses several research questions: we classify the types of papers (e.g., proposals, formalizations, meta-studies), look at the presence of evaluation, the topics covered (e.g., security, agents, scenarios), frameworks used, venues, citations, author networks, and overall publication numbers. For most questions, we evaluate trends over time. Our findings show a proliferation of papers with new ideas and few citations, with a small number of authors and papers dominating citations; however, there is a slight rise in papers which build upon past work (implementations, integrations, and extensions). We see a rise in papers concerning adaptation/variability/evolution and a slight rise in case studies. Overall, interest in GORE has increased. We use our analysis results to make recommendations concerning future GORE research and make our data publicly available.

Energy-credit scheduler: An energy-aware virtual machine scheduler for cloud systems <=SEP=> Virtualization facilitates the provision of flexible resources and improves energy efficiency through the consolidation of virtualized servers into a smaller number of physical servers. As an increasingly essential component of the emerging cloud computing model, virtualized environments bill their users based on processor time or the number of virtual machine instances. However, accounting based only on the depreciation of server hardware is not sufficient because the cooling and energy costs for data centers will exceed the purchase costs for hardware. This paper suggests a model for estimating the energy consumption of each virtual machine without dedicated measurement hardware. Our model estimates the energy consumption of a virtual machine based on in-processor events generated by the virtual machine. Based on this estimation model, we also propose a virtual machine scheduling algorithm that can provide computing resources according to the energy budget of each virtual machine. The suggested schemes are implemented in the Xen virtualization system, and an evaluation shows that the suggested schemes estimate and provide energy consumption with errors of less than 5% of the total energy

Open Sesame!: a Look at Personal Assistants <=SEP=> Software agents, or softbots, are supposedly intelligent programs that assist the user in performing repetitive , boring, and time-consuming tasks. An overview of software agents, with special attention focused on the so-called personal assistants, is presented as an introduction. Following that, an in-depth look at one of the rst commercially available intelligent agents Open Sesame!, a personal assistant for managing the Macintosh desktop environment, is presented. The existing intelligent agent paradigms, we argue, break down when it comes to actively helping the end user because of aws inherent in the current approaches to intelligent agent design. To that end, we discuss the reasons why this is, particularly with respect to Open Sesame!, and promote the notion of situatedness to be taken into account more seriously for developing software agents that actively support the user for the duration of the task at hand. As an example for a more situated approach to personal assistant design, a quick overview of a project to develop a personal assistant for news ltering is discussed.