TY - JOUR A1 - Mattis, Toni A1 - Beckmann, Tom A1 - Rein, Patrick A1 - Hirschfeld, Robert T1 - First-class concepts BT - Reified architectural knowledge beyond dominant decompositions JF - Journal of object technology : JOT / ETH Zürich, Department of Computer Science N2 - Ideally, programs are partitioned into independently maintainable and understandable modules. As a system grows, its architecture gradually loses the capability to accommodate new concepts in a modular way. While refactoring is expensive and not always possible, and the programming language might lack dedicated primary language constructs to express certain cross-cutting concerns, programmers are still able to explain and delineate convoluted concepts through secondary means: code comments, use of whitespace and arrangement of code, documentation, or communicating tacit knowledge.
Secondary constructs are easy to change and provide high flexibility in communicating cross-cutting concerns and other concepts among programmers. However, such secondary constructs usually have no reified representation that can be explored and manipulated as first-class entities through the programming environment.
In this exploratory work, we discuss novel ways to express a wide range of concepts, including cross-cutting concerns, patterns, and lifecycle artifacts independently of the dominant decomposition imposed by an existing architecture. We propose the representation of concepts as first-class objects inside the programming environment that retain the capability to change as easily as code comments. We explore new tools that allow programmers to view, navigate, and change programs based on conceptual perspectives. In a small case study, we demonstrate how such views can be created and how the programming experience changes from draining programmers' attention by stretching it across multiple modules toward focusing it on cohesively presented concepts. Our designs are geared toward facilitating multiple secondary perspectives on a system to co-exist in symbiosis with the original architecture, hence making it easier to explore, understand, and explain complex contexts and narratives that are hard or impossible to express using primary modularity constructs. KW - software engineering KW - modularity KW - exploratory programming KW - program KW - comprehension KW - remodularization KW - architecture recovery Y1 - 2022 U6 - https://doi.org/10.5381/jot.2022.21.2.a6 SN - 1660-1769 VL - 21 IS - 2 SP - 1 EP - 15 PB - ETH Zürich, Department of Computer Science CY - Zürich ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Schmidl, Sebastian A1 - Papenbrock, Thorsten T1 - Efficient distributed discovery of bidirectional order dependencies JF - The VLDB journal N2 - Bidirectional order dependencies (bODs) capture order relationships between lists of attributes in a relational table. They can express that, for example, sorting books by publication date in ascending order also sorts them by age in descending order. The knowledge about order relationships is useful for many data management tasks, such as query optimization, data cleaning, or consistency checking. Because the bODs of a specific dataset are usually not explicitly given, they need to be discovered. The discovery of all minimal bODs (in set-based canonical form) is a task with exponential complexity in the number of attributes, though, which is why existing bOD discovery algorithms cannot process datasets of practically relevant size in a reasonable time. In this paper, we propose the distributed bOD discovery algorithm DISTOD, whose execution time scales with the available hardware. DISTOD is a scalable, robust, and elastic bOD discovery approach that combines efficient pruning techniques for bOD candidates in set-based canonical form with a novel, reactive, and distributed search strategy. Our evaluation on various datasets shows that DISTOD outperforms both single-threaded and distributed state-of-the-art bOD discovery algorithms by up to orders of magnitude; it can, in particular, process much larger datasets. KW - Bidirectional order dependencies KW - Distributed computing KW - Actor KW - programming KW - Parallelization KW - Data profiling KW - Dependency discovery Y1 - 2021 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1007/s00778-021-00683-4 SN - 1066-8888 SN - 0949-877X VL - 31 IS - 1 SP - 49 EP - 74 PB - Springer CY - Berlin ; Heidelberg ; New York ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Bonifati, Angela A1 - Mior, Michael J. A1 - Naumann, Felix A1 - Noack, Nele Sina T1 - How inclusive are we? BT - an analysis of gender diversity in database venues JF - SIGMOD record / Association for Computing Machinery, Special Interest Group on Management of Data N2 - ACM SIGMOD, VLDB and other database organizations have committed to fostering an inclusive and diverse community, as do many other scientific organizations. Recently, different measures have been taken to advance these goals, especially for underrepresented groups. One possible measure is double-blind reviewing, which aims to hide gender, ethnicity, and other properties of the authors.
We report the preliminary results of a gender diversity analysis of publications of the database community across several peer-reviewed venues, and also compare women's authorship percentages in both single-blind and double-blind venues along the years. We also obtained a cross comparison of the obtained results in data management with other relevant areas in Computer Science. Y1 - 2022 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1145/3516431.3516438 SN - 0163-5808 SN - 1943-5835 VL - 50 IS - 4 SP - 30 EP - 35 PB - Association for Computing Machinery CY - New York ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Roostapour, Vahid A1 - Neumann, Aneta A1 - Neumann, Frank A1 - Friedrich, Tobias T1 - Pareto optimization for subset selection with dynamic cost constraints JF - Artificial intelligence N2 - We consider the subset selection problem for function f with constraint bound B that changes over time. Within the area of submodular optimization, various greedy approaches are commonly used. For dynamic environments we observe that the adaptive variants of these greedy approaches are not able to maintain their approximation quality. Investigating the recently introduced POMC Pareto optimization approach, we show that this algorithm efficiently computes a phi=(alpha(f)/2)(1 - 1/e(alpha)f)-approximation, where alpha(f) is the submodularity ratio of f, for each possible constraint bound b <= B. Furthermore, we show that POMC is able to adapt its set of solutions quickly in the case that B increases. Our experimental investigations for the influence maximization in social networks show the advantage of POMC over generalized greedy algorithms. We also consider EAMC, a new evolutionary algorithm with polynomial expected time guarantee to maintain phi approximation ratio, and NSGA-II with two different population sizes as advanced multi-objective optimization algorithm, to demonstrate their challenges in optimizing the maximum coverage problem. Our empirical analysis shows that, within the same number of evaluations, POMC is able to perform as good as NSGA-II under linear constraint, while EAMC performs significantly worse than all considered algorithms in most cases. KW - Subset selection KW - Submodular function KW - Multi-objective optimization KW - Runtime analysis Y1 - 2022 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.artint.2021.103597 SN - 0004-3702 SN - 1872-7921 VL - 302 PB - Elsevier CY - Amsterdam ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Gévay, Gábor E. A1 - Rabl, Tilmann A1 - Breß, Sebastian A1 - Madai-Tahy, Loránd A1 - Quiané-Ruiz, Jorge-Arnulfo A1 - Markl, Volker T1 - Imperative or functional control flow handling BT - why not the best of both worlds? JF - SIGMOD record / Association for Computing Machinery, Special Interest Group on Management of Data N2 - Modern data analysis tasks often involve control flow statements, such as the iterations in PageRank and K-means. To achieve scalability, developers usually implement these tasks in distributed dataflow systems, such as Spark and Flink. Designers of such systems have to choose between providing imperative or functional control flow constructs to users. Imperative constructs are easier to use, but functional constructs are easier to compile to an efficient dataflow job. We propose Mitos, a system where control flow is both easy to use and efficient. Mitos relies on an intermediate representation based on the static single assignment form. This allows us to abstract away from specific control flow constructs and treat any imperative control flow uniformly both when building the dataflow job and when coordinating the distributed execution. Y1 - 2022 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1145/3542700.3542715 SN - 0163-5808 VL - 51 IS - 1 SP - 60 EP - 67 PB - Association for Computing Machinery CY - New York ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Schneider, Johannes A1 - Wenig, Phillip A1 - Papenbrock, Thorsten T1 - Distributed detection of sequential anomalies in univariate time series JF - The VLDB journal : the international journal on very large data bases N2 - The automated detection of sequential anomalies in time series is an essential task for many applications, such as the monitoring of technical systems, fraud detection in high-frequency trading, or the early detection of disease symptoms. All these applications require the detection to find all sequential anomalies possibly fast on potentially very large time series. In other words, the detection needs to be effective, efficient and scalable w.r.t. the input size. Series2Graph is an effective solution based on graph embeddings that are robust against re-occurring anomalies and can discover sequential anomalies of arbitrary length and works without training data. Yet, Series2Graph is no t scalable due to its single-threaded approach; it cannot, in particular, process arbitrarily large sequences due to the memory constraints of a single machine. In this paper, we propose our distributed anomaly detection system, short DADS, which is an efficient and scalable adaptation of Series2Graph. Based on the actor programming model, DADS distributes the input time sequence, intermediate state and the computation to all processors of a cluster in a way that minimizes communication costs and synchronization barriers. Our evaluation shows that DADS is orders of magnitude faster than S2G, scales almost linearly with the number of processors in the cluster and can process much larger input sequences due to its scale-out property. KW - Distributed programming KW - Sequential anomaly KW - Actor model KW - Data mining KW - Time series Y1 - 2021 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1007/s00778-021-00657-6 SN - 1066-8888 SN - 0949-877X VL - 30 IS - 4 SP - 579 EP - 602 PB - Springer CY - Berlin ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Pfitzner, Bjarne A1 - Steckhan, Nico A1 - Arnrich, Bert T1 - Federated learning in a medical context BT - a systematic literature review JF - ACM transactions on internet technology : TOIT / Association for Computing N2 - Data privacy is a very important issue. Especially in fields like medicine, it is paramount to abide by the existing privacy regulations to preserve patients' anonymity. However, data is required for research and training machine learning models that could help gain insight into complex correlations or personalised treatments that may otherwise stay undiscovered. Those models generally scale with the amount of data available, but the current situation often prohibits building large databases across sites. So it would be beneficial to be able to combine similar or related data from different sites all over the world while still preserving data privacy. Federated learning has been proposed as a solution for this, because it relies on the sharing of machine learning models, instead of the raw data itself. That means private data never leaves the site or device it was collected on. Federated learning is an emerging research area, and many domains have been identified for the application of those methods. This systematic literature review provides an extensive look at the concept of and research into federated learning and its applicability for confidential healthcare datasets. KW - Federated learning Y1 - 2021 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1145/3412357 SN - 1533-5399 SN - 1557-6051 VL - 21 IS - 2 SP - 1 EP - 31 PB - Association for Computing Machinery CY - New York ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Lambers, Leen A1 - Orejas, Fernando T1 - Transformation rules with nested application conditions BT - critical pairs, initial conflicts & minimality JF - Theoretical computer science N2 - Recently, initial conflicts were introduced in the framework of M-adhesive categories as an important optimization of critical pairs. In particular, they represent a proper subset such that each conflict is represented in a minimal context by a unique initial one. The theory of critical pairs has been extended in the framework of M-adhesive categories to rules with nested application conditions (ACs), restricting the applicability of a rule and generalizing the well-known negative application conditions. A notion of initial conflicts for rules with ACs does not exist yet. In this paper, on the one hand, we extend the theory of initial conflicts in the framework of M-adhesive categories to transformation rules with ACs. They represent a proper subset again of critical pairs for rules with ACs, and represent each conflict in a minimal context uniquely. They are moreover symbolic because we can show that in general no finite and complete set of conflicts for rules with ACs exists. On the other hand, we show that critical pairs are minimally M-complete, whereas initial conflicts are minimally complete. Finally, we introduce important special cases of rules with ACs for which we can obtain finite, minimally (M-)complete sets of conflicts. KW - Graph transformation KW - Critical pairs KW - Initial conflicts KW - Application KW - conditions Y1 - 2021 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tcs.2021.07.023 SN - 0304-3975 SN - 1879-2294 VL - 884 SP - 44 EP - 67 PB - Elsevier CY - Amsterdam ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Koßmann, Jan A1 - Papenbrock, Thorsten A1 - Naumann, Felix T1 - Data dependencies for query optimization BT - a survey JF - The VLDB journal : the international journal on very large data bases / publ. on behalf of the VLDB Endowment N2 - Effective query optimization is a core feature of any database management system. While most query optimization techniques make use of simple metadata, such as cardinalities and other basic statistics, other optimization techniques are based on more advanced metadata including data dependencies, such as functional, uniqueness, order, or inclusion dependencies. This survey provides an overview, intuitive descriptions, and classifications of query optimization and execution strategies that are enabled by data dependencies. We consider the most popular types of data dependencies and focus on optimization strategies that target the optimization of relational database queries. The survey supports database vendors to identify optimization opportunities as well as DBMS researchers to find related work and open research questions. KW - Query optimization KW - Query execution KW - Data dependencies KW - Data profiling KW - Unique column combinations KW - Functional dependencies KW - Order dependencies KW - Inclusion dependencies KW - Relational data KW - SQL Y1 - 2021 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1007/s00778-021-00676-3 SN - 1066-8888 SN - 0949-877X VL - 31 IS - 1 SP - 1 EP - 22 PB - Springer CY - Berlin ; Heidelberg ; New York ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Quinzan, Francesco A1 - Göbel, Andreas A1 - Wagner, Markus A1 - Friedrich, Tobias T1 - Evolutionary algorithms and submodular functions BT - benefits of heavy-tailed mutations JF - Natural computing : an innovative journal bridging biosciences and computer sciences ; an international journal N2 - A core operator of evolutionary algorithms (EAs) is the mutation. Recently, much attention has been devoted to the study of mutation operators with dynamic and non-uniform mutation rates. Following up on this area of work, we propose a new mutation operator and analyze its performance on the (1 + 1) Evolutionary Algorithm (EA). Our analyses show that this mutation operator competes with pre-existing ones, when used by the (1 + 1) EA on classes of problems for which results on the other mutation operators are available. We show that the (1 + 1) EA using our mutation operator finds a (1/3)-approximation ratio on any non-negative submodular function in polynomial time. We also consider the problem of maximizing a symmetric submodular function under a single matroid constraint and show that the (1 + 1) EA using our operator finds a (1/3)-approximation within polynomial time. This performance matches that of combinatorial local search algorithms specifically designed to solve these problems and outperforms them with constant probability. Finally, we evaluate the performance of the (1 + 1) EA using our operator experimentally by considering two applications: (a) the maximum directed cut problem on real-world graphs of different origins, with up to 6.6 million vertices and 56 million edges and (b) the symmetric mutual information problem using a four month period air pollution data set. In comparison with uniform mutation and a recently proposed dynamic scheme, our operator comes out on top on these instances. KW - Evolutionary algorithms KW - Mutation operators KW - Submodular functions KW - Matroids Y1 - 2021 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1007/s11047-021-09841-7 SN - 1572-9796 VL - 20 IS - 3 SP - 561 EP - 575 PB - Springer Science + Business Media B.V. CY - Dordrecht ER -