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Defining the metaverse
(2023)
The term Metaverse is emerging as a result of the late push by multinational technology conglomerates and a recent surge of interest in Web 3.0, Blockchain, NFT, and Cryptocurrencies. From a scientific point of view, there is no definite consensus on what the Metaverse will be like. This paper collects, analyzes, and synthesizes scientific definitions and the accompanying major characteristics of the Metaverse using the methodology of a Systematic Literature Review (SLR). Two revised definitions for the Metaverse are presented, both condensing the key attributes, where the first one is rather simplistic holistic describing “a three-dimensional online environment in which users represented by avatars interact with each other in virtual spaces decoupled from the real physical world”. In contrast, the second definition is specified in a more detailed manner in the paper and further discussed. These comprehensive definitions offer specialized and general scholars an application within and beyond the scientific context of the system science, information system science, computer science, and business informatics, by also introducing open research challenges. Furthermore, an outlook on the social, economic, and technical implications is given, and the preconditions that are necessary for a successful implementation are discussed.
This special issue contains extended versions of four selected papers from the 11th International Conference on Graph Transformation (ICGT 2018). The articles cover a tool for computing core graphs via SAT/SMT solvers (graph language definition), graph transformation through graph surfing in reaction systems (a new graph transformation formalism), the essence and initiality of conflicts in M-adhesive transformation systems, and a calculus of concurrent graph-rewriting processes (theory on conflicts and parallel independence).
Here we present an exome-wide rare genetic variant association study for 30 blood biomarkers in 191,971 individuals in the UK Biobank. We compare gene- based association tests for separate functional variant categories to increase interpretability and identify 193 significant gene-biomarker associations. Genes associated with biomarkers were ~ 4.5-fold enriched for conferring Mendelian disorders. In addition to performing weighted gene-based variant collapsing tests, we design and apply variant-category-specific kernel-based tests that integrate quantitative functional variant effect predictions for mis- sense variants, splicing and the binding of RNA-binding proteins. For these tests, we present a computationally efficient combination of the likelihood- ratio and score tests that found 36% more associations than the score test alone while also controlling the type-1 error. Kernel-based tests identified 13% more associations than their gene-based collapsing counterparts and had advantages in the presence of gain of function missense variants. We introduce local collapsing by amino acid position for missense variants and use it to interpret associations and identify potential novel gain of function variants in PIEZO1. Our results show the benefits of investigating different functional mechanisms when performing rare-variant association tests, and demonstrate pervasive rare-variant contribution to biomarker variability.
Reading traces
(2020)
Through a design study, we develop an approach to data exploration that utilizes elastic visualizations designed to support varying degrees of detail and abstraction. Examining the notions of scalability and elasticity in interactive visualizations, we introduce a visualization of personal reading traces such as marginalia or markings inside the reference library of German realist author Theodor Fontane. To explore such a rich and extensive collection, meaningful visual forms of abstraction and detail are as important as the transitions between those states. Following a growing research interest in the role of fluid interactivity and animations between views, we are particularly interested in the potential of carefully designed transitions and consistent representations across scales. The resulting prototype addresses humanistic research questions about the interplay of distant and close reading with visualization research on continuous navigation along several granularity levels, using scrolling as one of the main interaction mechanisms. In addition to presenting the design process and resulting prototype, we present findings from a qualitative evaluation of the tool, which suggest that bridging between distant and close views can enhance exploration, but that transitions between views need to be crafted very carefully to facilitate comprehension.
M-rate 0L systems are interactionless Lindenmayer systems together with a function assigning to every string a set of multisets of productions that may be applied simultaneously to the string. Some questions that have been left open in the forerunner papers are examined, and the computational power of deterministic M-rate 0L systems is investigated, where also tabled and extended variants are taken into consideration.
This paper shows that the law, in subtle ways, may set hitherto unrecognized incentives for the adoption of explainable machine learning applications. In doing so, we make two novel contributions. First, on the legal side, we show that to avoid liability, professional actors, such as doctors and managers, may soon be legally compelled to use explainable ML models. We argue that the importance of explainability reaches far beyond data protection law, and crucially influences questions of contractual and tort liability for the use of ML models. To this effect, we conduct two legal case studies, in medical and corporate merger applications of ML. As a second contribution, we discuss the (legally required) trade-off between accuracy and explainability and demonstrate the effect in a technical case study in the context of spam classification.
Author summary <br /> The use of orally inhaled drugs for treating lung diseases is appealing since they have the potential for lung selectivity, i.e. high exposure at the site of action -the lung- without excessive side effects. However, the degree of lung selectivity depends on a large number of factors, including physiochemical properties of drug molecules, patient disease state, and inhalation devices. To predict the impact of these factors on drug exposure and thereby to understand the characteristics of an optimal drug for inhalation, we develop a predictive mathematical framework (a "pharmacokinetic model"). In contrast to previous approaches, our model allows combining knowledge from different sources appropriately and its predictions were able to adequately predict different sets of clinical data. Finally, we compare the impact of different factors and find that the most important factors are the size of the inhaled particles, the affinity of the drug to the lung tissue, as well as the rate of drug dissolution in the lung. In contrast to the common belief, the solubility of a drug in the lining fluids is not found to be relevant. These findings are important to understand how inhaled drugs should be designed to achieve best treatment results in patients. <br /> The fate of orally inhaled drugs is determined by pulmonary pharmacokinetic processes such as particle deposition, pulmonary drug dissolution, and mucociliary clearance. Even though each single process has been systematically investigated, a quantitative understanding on the interaction of processes remains limited and therefore identifying optimal drug and formulation characteristics for orally inhaled drugs is still challenging. To investigate this complex interplay, the pulmonary processes can be integrated into mathematical models. However, existing modeling attempts considerably simplify these processes or are not systematically evaluated against (clinical) data. In this work, we developed a mathematical framework based on physiologically-structured population equations to integrate all relevant pulmonary processes mechanistically. A tailored numerical resolution strategy was chosen and the mechanistic model was evaluated systematically against data from different clinical studies. Without adapting the mechanistic model or estimating kinetic parameters based on individual study data, the developed model was able to predict simultaneously (i) lung retention profiles of inhaled insoluble particles, (ii) particle size-dependent pharmacokinetics of inhaled monodisperse particles, (iii) pharmacokinetic differences between inhaled fluticasone propionate and budesonide, as well as (iv) pharmacokinetic differences between healthy volunteers and asthmatic patients. Finally, to identify the most impactful optimization criteria for orally inhaled drugs, the developed mechanistic model was applied to investigate the impact of input parameters on both the pulmonary and systemic exposure. Interestingly, the solubility of the inhaled drug did not have any relevant impact on the local and systemic pharmacokinetics. Instead, the pulmonary dissolution rate, the particle size, the tissue affinity, and the systemic clearance were the most impactful potential optimization parameters. In the future, the developed prediction framework should be considered a powerful tool for identifying optimal drug and formulation characteristics.
There is an increasing interest in fusing data from heterogeneous sources. Combining data sources increases the utility of existing datasets, generating new information and creating services of higher quality. A central issue in working with heterogeneous sources is data migration: In order to share and process data in different engines, resource intensive and complex movements and transformations between computing engines, services, and stores are necessary.
Muses is a distributed, high-performance data migration engine that is able to interconnect distributed data stores by forwarding, transforming, repartitioning, or broadcasting data among distributed engines' instances in a resource-, cost-, and performance-adaptive manner. As such, it performs seamless information sharing across all participating resources in a standard, modular manner. We show an overall improvement of 30 % for pipelining jobs across multiple engines, even when we count the overhead of Muses in the execution time. This performance gain implies that Muses can be used to optimise large pipelines that leverage multiple engines.
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.
Cyber warfare is a timely and relevant issue and one of the most controversial in international humanitarian law (IHL). The aim of IHL is to set rules and limits in terms of means and methods of warfare. In this context, a key question arises: Has digital warfare rules or limits, and if so, how are these applicable? Traditional principles, developed over a long period, are facing a new dimension of challenges due to the rise of cyber warfare. This paper argues that to overcome this new issue, it is critical that new humanity-oriented approaches is developed with regard to cyber warfare. The challenge is to establish a legal regime for cyber-attacks, successfully addressing human rights norms and standards. While clarifying this from a legal perspective, the authors can redesign the sensitive equilibrium between humanity and military necessity, weighing the humanitarian aims of IHL and the protection of civilians-in combination with international human rights law and other relevant legal regimes-in a different manner than before.
Several numerical tools designed to overcome the challenges of smoothing in a non-linear and non-Gaussian setting are investigated for a class of particle smoothers. The considered family of smoothers is induced by the class of linear ensemble transform filters which contains classical filters such as the stochastic ensemble Kalman filter, the ensemble square root filter, and the recently introduced nonlinear ensemble transform filter. Further the ensemble transform particle smoother is introduced and particularly highlighted as it is consistent in the particle limit and does not require assumptions with respect to the family of the posterior distribution. The linear update pattern of the considered class of linear ensemble transform smoothers allows one to implement important supplementary techniques such as adaptive spread corrections, hybrid formulations, and localization in order to facilitate their application to complex estimation problems. These additional features are derived and numerically investigated for a sequence of increasingly challenging test problems.
Argument mining on twitter
(2021)
In the last decade, the field of argument mining has grown notably. However, only relatively few studies have investigated argumentation in social media and specifically on Twitter. Here, we provide the, to our knowledge, first critical in-depth survey of the state of the art in tweet-based argument mining. We discuss approaches to modelling the structure of arguments in the context of tweet corpus annotation, and we review current progress in the task of detecting argument components and their relations in tweets. We also survey the intersection of argument mining and stance detection, before we conclude with an outlook.
Multiplicative Up-Drift
(2020)
Drift analysis aims at translating the expected progress of an evolutionary algorithm (or more generally, a random process) into a probabilistic guarantee on its run time (hitting time). So far, drift arguments have been successfully employed in the rigorous analysis of evolutionary algorithms, however, only for the situation that the progress is constant or becomes weaker when approaching the target. Motivated by questions like how fast fit individuals take over a population, we analyze random processes exhibiting a (1+delta)-multiplicative growth in expectation. We prove a drift theorem translating this expected progress into a hitting time. This drift theorem gives a simple and insightful proof of the level-based theorem first proposed by Lehre (2011). Our version of this theorem has, for the first time, the best-possible near-linear dependence on 1/delta} (the previous results had an at least near-quadratic dependence), and it only requires a population size near-linear in delta (this was super-quadratic in previous results). These improvements immediately lead to stronger run time guarantees for a number of applications. We also discuss the case of large delta and show stronger results for this setting.
First-class concepts
(2022)
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. <br /> 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. <br /> 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.
In this paper, we examine conditioning of the discretization of the Helmholtz problem. Although the discrete Helmholtz problem has been studied from different perspectives, to the best of our knowledge, there is no conditioning analysis for it. We aim to fill this gap in the literature. We propose a novel method in 1D to observe the near-zero eigenvalues of a symmetric indefinite matrix. Standard classification of ill-conditioning based on the matrix condition number is not true for the discrete Helmholtz problem. We relate the ill-conditioning of the discretization of the Helmholtz problem with the condition number of the matrix. We carry out analytical conditioning analysis in 1D and extend our observations to 2D with numerical observations. We examine several discretizations. We find different regions in which the condition number of the problem shows different characteristics. We also explain the general behavior of the solutions in these regions.
We systematically explore the effect of calibration data length on the performance of a conceptual hydrological model, GR4H, in comparison to two Artificial Neural Network (ANN) architectures: Long Short-Term Memory Networks (LSTM) and Gated Recurrent Units (GRU), which have just recently been introduced to the field of hydrology. We implemented a case study for six river basins across the contiguous United States, with 25 years of meteorological and discharge data. Nine years were reserved for independent validation; two years were used as a warm-up period, one year for each of the calibration and validation periods, respectively; from the remaining 14 years, we sampled increasing amounts of data for model calibration, and found pronounced differences in model performance. While GR4H required less data to converge, LSTM and GRU caught up at a remarkable rate, considering their number of parameters. Also, LSTM and GRU exhibited the higher calibration instability in comparison to GR4H. These findings confirm the potential of modern deep-learning architectures in rainfall runoff modelling, but also highlight the noticeable differences between them in regard to the effect of calibration data length.
ATIB
(2021)
Identity management is a principle component of securing online services. In the advancement of traditional identity management patterns, the identity provider remained a Trusted Third Party (TTP). The service provider and the user need to trust a particular identity provider for correct attributes amongst other demands. This paradigm changed with the invention of blockchain-based Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) solutions that primarily focus on the users. SSI reduces the functional scope of the identity provider to an attribute provider while enabling attribute aggregation. Besides that, the development of new protocols, disregarding established protocols and a significantly fragmented landscape of SSI solutions pose considerable challenges for an adoption by service providers. We propose an Attribute Trust-enhancing Identity Broker (ATIB) to leverage the potential of SSI for trust-enhancing attribute aggregation. Furthermore, ATIB abstracts from a dedicated SSI solution and offers standard protocols. Therefore, it facilitates the adoption by service providers. Despite the brokered integration approach, we show that ATIB provides a high security posture. Additionally, ATIB does not compromise the ten foundational SSI principles for the users.
Data errors represent a major issue in most application workflows. Before any important task can take place, a certain data quality has to be guaranteed by eliminating a number of different errors that may appear in data. Typically, most of these errors are fixed with data preparation methods, such as whitespace removal. However, the particular error of duplicate records, where multiple records refer to the same entity, is usually eliminated independently with specialized techniques. Our work is the first to bring these two areas together by applying data preparation operations under a systematic approach prior to performing duplicate detection. <br /> Our process workflow can be summarized as follows: It begins with the user providing as input a sample of the gold standard, the actual dataset, and optionally some constraints to domain-specific data preparations, such as address normalization. The preparation selection operates in two consecutive phases. First, to vastly reduce the search space of ineffective data preparations, decisions are made based on the improvement or worsening of pair similarities. Second, using the remaining data preparations an iterative leave-one-out classification process removes preparations one by one and determines the redundant preparations based on the achieved area under the precision-recall curve (AUC-PR). Using this workflow, we manage to improve the results of duplicate detection up to 19% in AUC-PR.
TPC-H continues to be the most widely used benchmark for relational OLAP systems. It poses a number of challenges, also known as "choke points", which database systems have to solve in order to achieve good benchmark results. Examples include joins across multiple tables, correlated subqueries, and correlations within the TPC-H data set. Knowing the impact of such optimizations helps in developing optimizers as well as in interpreting TPC-H results across database systems.
This paper provides a systematic analysis of choke points and their optimizations. It complements previous work on TPC-H choke points by providing a quantitative discussion of their relevance. It focuses on eleven choke points where the optimizations are beneficial independently of the database system. Of these, the flattening of subqueries and the placement of predicates have the biggest impact. Three queries (Q2, Q17, and Q21) are strongly ifluenced by the choice of an efficient query plan; three others (Q1, Q13, and Q18) are less influenced by plan optimizations and more dependent on an efficient execution engine.
Indexes are essential for the efficient processing of database workloads. Proposed solutions for the relevant and challenging index selection problem range from metadata-based simple heuristics, over sophisticated multi-step algorithms, to approaches that yield optimal results. The main challenges are (i) to accurately determine the effect of an index on the workload cost while considering the interaction of indexes and (ii) a large number of possible combinations resulting from workloads containing many queries and massive schemata with possibly thousands of attributes. <br /> In this work, we describe and analyze eight index selection algorithms that are based on different concepts and compare them along different dimensions, such as solution quality, runtime, multi-column support, solution granularity, and complexity. In particular, we analyze the solutions of the algorithms for the challenging analytical Join Order, TPC-H, and TPC-DS benchmarks. Afterward, we assess strengths and weaknesses, infer insights for index selection in general and each approach individually, before we give recommendations on when to use which approach.
CloudStrike
(2020)
Most cyber-attacks and data breaches in cloud infrastructure are due to human errors and misconfiguration vulnerabilities. Cloud customer-centric tools are imperative for mitigating these issues, however existing cloud security models are largely unable to tackle these security challenges. Therefore, novel security mechanisms are imperative, we propose Risk-driven Fault Injection (RDFI) techniques to address these challenges. RDFI applies the principles of chaos engineering to cloud security and leverages feedback loops to execute, monitor, analyze and plan security fault injection campaigns, based on a knowledge-base. The knowledge-base consists of fault models designed from secure baselines, cloud security best practices and observations derived during iterative fault injection campaigns. These observations are helpful for identifying vulnerabilities while verifying the correctness of security attributes (integrity, confidentiality and availability). Furthermore, RDFI proactively supports risk analysis and security hardening efforts by sharing security information with security mechanisms. We have designed and implemented the RDFI strategies including various chaos engineering algorithms as a software tool: CloudStrike. Several evaluations have been conducted with CloudStrike against infrastructure deployed on two major public cloud infrastructure: Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform. The time performance linearly increases, proportional to increasing attack rates. Also, the analysis of vulnerabilities detected via security fault injection has been used to harden the security of cloud resources to demonstrate the effectiveness of the security information provided by CloudStrike. Therefore, we opine that our approaches are suitable for overcoming contemporary cloud security issues.
Creation, collection and retention of knowledge in digital communities is an activity that currently requires being explicitly targeted as a secure method of keeping intellectual capital growing in the digital era. In particular, we consider it relevant to analyze and evaluate the empathetic cognitive personalities and behaviors that individuals now have with the change from face-to-face communication (F2F) to computer-mediated communication (CMC) online. This document proposes a cyber-humanistic approach to enhance the traditional SECI knowledge management model. A cognitive perception is added to its cyclical process following design thinking interaction, exemplary for improvement of the method in which knowledge is continuously created, converted and shared. In building a cognitive-centered model, we specifically focus on the effective identification and response to cognitive stimulation of individuals, as they are the intellectual generators and multiplicators of knowledge in the online environment. Our target is to identify how geographically distributed-digital-organizations should align the individual's cognitive abilities to promote iteration and improve interaction as a reliable stimulant of collective intelligence. The new model focuses on analyzing the four different stages of knowledge processing, where individuals with sympathetic cognitive personalities can significantly boost knowledge creation in a virtual social system. For organizations, this means that multidisciplinary individuals can maximize their extensive potential, by externalizing their knowledge in the correct stage of the knowledge creation process, and by collaborating with their appropriate sympathetically cognitive remote peers.
Gene expression data provide the expression levels of tens of thousands of genes from several hundred samples. These data are analyzed to detect biomarkers that can be of prognostic or diagnostic use. Traditionally, biomarker detection for gene expression data is the task of gene selection. The vast number of genes is reduced to a few relevant ones that achieve the best performance for the respective use case. Traditional approaches select genes based on their statistical significance in the data set. This results in issues of robustness, redundancy and true biological relevance of the selected genes. Integrative analyses typically address these shortcomings by integrating multiple data artifacts from the same objects, e.g. gene expression and methylation data. When only gene expression data are available, integrative analyses instead use curated information on biological processes from public knowledge bases. With knowledge bases providing an ever-increasing amount of curated biological knowledge, such prior knowledge approaches become more powerful. This paper provides a thorough overview on the status quo of biomarker detection on gene expression data with prior biological knowledge. We discuss current shortcomings of traditional approaches, review recent external knowledge bases, provide a classification and qualitative comparison of existing prior knowledge approaches and discuss open challenges for this kind of gene selection.
Many important graph-theoretic notions can be encoded as counting graph homomorphism problems, such as partition functions in statistical physics, in particular independent sets and colourings. In this article, we study the complexity of #(p) HOMSTOH, the problem of counting graph homomorphisms from an input graph to a graph H modulo a prime number p. Dyer and Greenhill proved a dichotomy stating that the tractability of non-modular counting graph homomorphisms depends on the structure of the target graph. Many intractable cases in non-modular counting become tractable in modular counting due to the common phenomenon of cancellation. In subsequent studies on counting modulo 2, however, the influence of the structure of H on the tractability was shown to persist, which yields similar dichotomies. <br /> Our main result states that for every tree H and every prime p the problem #pHOMSTOH is either polynomial time computable or #P-p-complete. This relates to the conjecture of Faben and Jerrum stating that this dichotomy holds for every graph H when counting modulo 2. In contrast to previous results on modular counting, the tractable cases of #pHOMSTOH are essentially the same for all values of the modulo when H is a tree. To prove this result, we study the structural properties of a homomorphism. As an important interim result, our study yields a dichotomy for the problem of counting weighted independent sets in a bipartite graph modulo some prime p. These results are the first suggesting that such dichotomies hold not only for the modulo 2 case but also for the modular counting functions of all primes p.
Spreadsheets are among the most commonly used file formats for data management, distribution, and analysis. Their widespread employment makes it easy to gather large collections of data, but their flexible canvas-based structure makes automated analysis difficult without heavy preparation. One of the common problems that practitioners face is the presence of multiple, independent regions in a single spreadsheet, possibly separated by repeated empty cells. We define such files as "multiregion" files. In collections of various spreadsheets, we can observe that some share the same layout. We present the Mondrian approach to automatically identify layout templates across multiple files and systematically extract the corresponding regions. Our approach is composed of three phases: first, each file is rendered as an image and inspected for elements that could form regions; then, using a clustering algorithm, the identified elements are grouped to form regions; finally, every file layout is represented as a graph and compared with others to find layout templates. We compare our method to state-of-the-art table recognition algorithms on two corpora of real-world enterprise spreadsheets. Our approach shows the best performances in detecting reliable region boundaries within each file and can correctly identify recurring layouts across files.
Large real-world networks typically follow a power-law degree distribution. To study such networks, numerous random graph models have been proposed. However, real-world networks are not drawn at random. Therefore, Brach et al. (27th symposium on discrete algorithms (SODA), pp 1306-1325, 2016) introduced two natural deterministic conditions: (1) a power-law upper bound on the degree distribution (PLB-U) and (2) power-law neighborhoods, that is, the degree distribution of neighbors of each vertex is also upper bounded by a power law (PLB-N). They showed that many real-world networks satisfy both properties and exploit them to design faster algorithms for a number of classical graph problems. We complement their work by showing that some well-studied random graph models exhibit both of the mentioned PLB properties. PLB-U and PLB-N hold with high probability for Chung-Lu Random Graphs and Geometric Inhomogeneous Random Graphs and almost surely for Hyperbolic Random Graphs. As a consequence, all results of Brach et al. also hold with high probability or almost surely for those random graph classes. In the second part we study three classical NP-hard optimization problems on PLB networks. It is known that on general graphs with maximum degree Delta, a greedy algorithm, which chooses nodes in the order of their degree, only achieves a Omega (ln Delta)-approximation forMinimum Vertex Cover and Minimum Dominating Set, and a Omega(Delta)-approximation forMaximum Independent Set. We prove that the PLB-U property with beta>2 suffices for the greedy approach to achieve a constant-factor approximation for all three problems. We also show that these problems are APX-hard even if PLB-U, PLB-N, and an additional power-law lower bound on the degree distribution hold. Hence, a PTAS cannot be expected unless P = NP. Furthermore, we prove that all three problems are in MAX SNP if the PLB-U property holds.
In recent years, the increased interest in application areas such as social networks has resulted in a rising popularity of graph-based approaches for storing and processing large amounts of interconnected data. To extract useful information from the growing network structures, efficient querying techniques are required.
In this paper, we propose an approach for graph pattern matching that allows a uniform handling of arbitrary constraints over the query vertices. Our technique builds on a previously introduced matching algorithm, which takes concrete host graph information into account to dynamically adapt the employed search plan during query execution. The dynamic algorithm is combined with an existing static approach for search plan generation, resulting in a hybrid technique which we further extend by a more sophisticated handling of filtering effects caused by constraint checks. We evaluate the presented concepts empirically based on an implementation for our graph pattern matching tool, the Story Diagram Interpreter, with queries and data provided by the LDBC Social Network Benchmark. Our results suggest that the hybrid technique may improve search efficiency in several cases, and rarely reduces efficiency.
“Broadcast your gender.”
(2022)
Social media platforms provide a large array of behavioral data relevant to social scientific research. However, key information such as sociodemographic characteristics of agents are often missing. This paper aims to compare four methods of classifying social attributes from text. Specifically, we are interested in estimating the gender of German social media creators. By using the example of a random sample of 200 YouTube channels, we compare several classification methods, namely (1) a survey among university staff, (2) a name dictionary method with the World Gender Name Dictionary as a reference list, (3) an algorithmic approach using the website gender-api.com, and (4) a Multinomial Naïve Bayes (MNB) machine learning technique. These different methods identify gender attributes based on YouTube channel names and descriptions in German but are adaptable to other languages. Our contribution will evaluate the share of identifiable channels, accuracy and meaningfulness of classification, as well as limits and benefits of each approach. We aim to address methodological challenges connected to classifying gender attributes for YouTube channels as well as related to reinforcing stereotypes and ethical implications.
In this paper, using an algorithm based on the retrospective rejection sampling scheme introduced in [A. Beskos, O. Papaspiliopoulos, and G. O. Roberts,Methodol. Comput. Appl. Probab., 10 (2008), pp. 85-104] and [P. Etore and M. Martinez, ESAIM Probab.Stat., 18 (2014), pp. 686-702], we propose an exact simulation of a Brownian di ff usion whose drift admits several jumps. We treat explicitly and extensively the case of two jumps, providing numerical simulations. Our main contribution is to manage the technical di ffi culty due to the presence of t w o jumps thanks to a new explicit expression of the transition density of the skew Brownian motion with two semipermeable barriers and a constant drift.
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.
The integration of multiple data sources is a common problem in a large variety of applications. Traditionally, handcrafted similarity measures are used to discover, merge, and integrate multiple representations of the same entity-duplicates-into a large homogeneous collection of data. Often, these similarity measures do not cope well with the heterogeneity of the underlying dataset. In addition, domain experts are needed to manually design and configure such measures, which is both time-consuming and requires extensive domain expertise. <br /> We propose a deep Siamese neural network, capable of learning a similarity measure that is tailored to the characteristics of a particular dataset. With the properties of deep learning methods, we are able to eliminate the manual feature engineering process and thus considerably reduce the effort required for model construction. In addition, we show that it is possible to transfer knowledge acquired during the deduplication of one dataset to another, and thus significantly reduce the amount of data required to train a similarity measure. We evaluated our method on multiple datasets and compare our approach to state-of-the-art deduplication methods. Our approach outperforms competitors by up to +26 percent F-measure, depending on task and dataset. In addition, we show that knowledge transfer is not only feasible, but in our experiments led to an improvement in F-measure of up to +4.7 percent.
Challenges for self-driving database systems, which tune their physical design and configuration autonomously, are manifold: Such systems have to anticipate future workloads, find robust configurations efficiently, and incorporate knowledge gained by previous actions into later decisions. We present a component-based framework for self-driving database systems that enables database integration and development of self-managing functionality with low overhead by relying on separation of concerns. By keeping the components of the framework reusable and exchangeable, experiments are simplified, which promotes further research in that area. Moreover, to optimize multiple mutually dependent features, e.g., index selection and compression configurations, we propose a linear programming (LP) based algorithm to derive an efficient tuning order automatically. Afterwards, we demonstrate the applicability and scalability of our approach with reproducible examples.
Evaluating the performance of self-adaptive systems is challenging due to their interactions with often highly dynamic environments. In the specific case of self-healing systems, the performance evaluations of self-healing approaches and their parameter tuning rely on the considered characteristics of failure occurrences and the resulting interactions with the self-healing actions. In this paper, we first study the state-of-the-art for evaluating the performances of self-healing systems by means of a systematic literature review. We provide a classification of different input types for such systems and analyse the limitations of each input type. A main finding is that the employed inputs are often not sophisticated regarding the considered characteristics for failure occurrences. To further study the impact of the identified limitations, we present experiments demonstrating that wrong assumptions regarding the characteristics of the failure occurrences can result in large performance prediction errors, disadvantageous design-time decisions concerning the selection of alternative self-healing approaches, and disadvantageous deployment-time decisions concerning parameter tuning. Furthermore, the experiments indicate that employing multiple alternative input characteristics can help with reducing the risk of premature disadvantageous design-time decisions.
Social networking sites (SNS) are a rich source of latent information about individual characteristics. Crawling and analyzing this content provides a new approach for enterprises to personalize services and put forward product recommendations. In the past few years, commercial brands made a gradual appearance on social media platforms for advertisement, customers support and public relation purposes and by now it became a necessity throughout all branches. This online identity can be represented as a brand personality that reflects how a brand is perceived by its customers. We exploited recent research in text analysis and personality detection to build an automatic brand personality prediction model on top of the (Five-Factor Model) and (Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count) features extracted from publicly available benchmarks. Predictive evaluation on brands' accounts reveals that Facebook platform provides a slight advantage over Twitter platform in offering more self-disclosure for users' to express their emotions especially their demographic and psychological traits. Results also confirm the wider perspective that the same social media account carry a quite similar and comparable personality scores over different social media platforms. For evaluating our prediction results on actual brands' accounts, we crawled the Facebook API and Twitter API respectively for 100k posts from the most valuable brands' pages in the USA and we visualize exemplars of comparison results and present suggestions for future directions.
3D point clouds are a digital representation of our world and used in a variety of applications. They are captured with LiDAR or derived by image-matching approaches to get surface information of objects, e.g., indoor scenes, buildings, infrastructures, cities, and landscapes. We present novel interaction and visualization techniques for heterogeneous, time variant, and semantically rich 3D point clouds. Interactive and view-dependent see-through lenses are introduced as exploration tools to enhance recognition of objects, semantics, and temporal changes within 3D point cloud depictions. We also develop filtering and highlighting techniques that are used to dissolve occlusion to give context-specific insights. All techniques can be combined with an out-of-core real-time rendering system for massive 3D point clouds. We have evaluated the presented approach with 3D point clouds from different application domains. The results show the usability and how different visualization and exploration tasks can be improved for a variety of domain-specific applications.
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.
Viper
(2021)
Key-value stores (KVSs) have found wide application in modern software systems. For persistence, their data resides in slow secondary storage, which requires KVSs to employ various techniques to increase their read and write performance from and to the underlying medium. Emerging persistent memory (PMem) technologies offer data persistence at close-to-DRAM speed, making them a promising alternative to classical disk-based storage. However, simply drop-in replacing existing storage with PMem does not yield good results, as block-based access behaves differently in PMem than on disk and ignores PMem's byte addressability, layout, and unique performance characteristics. In this paper, we propose three PMem-specific access patterns and implement them in a hybrid PMem-DRAM KVS called Viper. We employ a DRAM-based hash index and a PMem-aware storage layout to utilize the random-write speed of DRAM and efficient sequential-write performance PMem. Our evaluation shows that Viper significantly outperforms existing KVSs for core KVS operations while providing full data persistence. Moreover, Viper outperforms existing PMem-only, hybrid, and disk-based KVSs by 4-18x for write workloads, while matching or surpassing their get performance.
Which event happened first?
(2021)
First come, first served: Critical choices between alternative actions are often made based on events external to an organization, and reacting promptly to their occurrence can be a major advantage over the competition. In Business Process Management (BPM), such deferred choices can be expressed in process models, and they are an important aspect of process engines. Blockchain-based process execution approaches are no exception to this, but are severely limited by the inherent properties of the platform: The isolated environment prevents direct access to external entities and data, and the non-continual runtime based entirely on atomic transactions impedes the monitoring and detection of events. In this paper we provide an in-depth examination of the semantics of deferred choice, and transfer them to environments such as the blockchain. We introduce and compare several oracle architectures able to satisfy certain requirements, and show that they can be implemented using state-of-the-art blockchain technology.
Background:
Research into the application of virtual reality technology in the health care sector has rapidly increased, resulting in a large body of research that is difficult to keep up with.
Objective:
We will provide an overview of the annual publication numbers in this field and the most productive and influential countries, journals, and authors, as well as the most used, most co-occurring, and most recent keywords.
Methods:
Based on a data set of 356 publications and 20,363 citations derived from Web of Science, we conducted a bibliometric analysis using BibExcel, HistCite, and VOSviewer.
Results:
The strongest growth in publications occurred in 2020, accounting for 29.49% of all publications so far. The most productive countries are the United States, the United Kingdom, and Spain; the most influential countries are the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. The most productive journals are the Journal of Medical Internet Research (JMIR), JMIR Serious Games, and the Games for Health Journal; the most influential journals are Patient Education and Counselling, Medical Education, and Quality of Life Research. The most productive authors are Riva, del Piccolo, and Schwebel; the most influential authors are Finset, del Piccolo, and Eide. The most frequently occurring keywords other than “virtual” and “reality” are “training,” “trial,” and “patients.” The most relevant research themes are communication, education, and novel treatments; the most recent research trends are fitness and exergames.
Conclusions:
The analysis shows that the field has left its infant state and its specialization is advancing, with a clear focus on patient usability.
We contribute to the theoretical understanding of randomized search heuristics by investigating their optimization behavior on satisfiable random k-satisfiability instances both in the planted solution model and the uniform model conditional on satisfiability. Denoting the number of variables by n, our main technical result is that the simple () evolutionary algorithm with high probability finds a satisfying assignment in time when the clause-variable density is at least logarithmic. For low density instances, evolutionary algorithms seem to be less effective, and all we can show is a subexponential upper bound on the runtime for densities below . We complement these mathematical results with numerical experiments on a broader density spectrum. They indicate that, indeed, the () EA is less efficient on lower densities. Our experiments also suggest that the implicit constants hidden in our main runtime guarantee are low. Our main result extends and considerably improves the result obtained by Sutton and Neumann (Lect Notes Comput Sci 8672:942-951, 2014) in terms of runtime, minimum density, and clause length. These improvements are made possible by establishing a close fitness-distance correlation in certain parts of the search space. This approach might be of independent interest and could be useful for other average-case analyses of randomized search heuristics. While the notion of a fitness-distance correlation has been around for a long time, to the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that fitness-distance correlation is explicitly used to rigorously prove a performance statement for an evolutionary algorithm.
Comprior
(2021)
Background
Reproducible benchmarking is important for assessing the effectiveness of novel feature selection approaches applied on gene expression data, especially for prior knowledge approaches that incorporate biological information from online knowledge bases. However, no full-fledged benchmarking system exists that is extensible, provides built-in feature selection approaches, and a comprehensive result assessment encompassing classification performance, robustness, and biological relevance. Moreover, the particular needs of prior knowledge feature selection approaches, i.e. uniform access to knowledge bases, are not addressed. As a consequence, prior knowledge approaches are not evaluated amongst each other, leaving open questions regarding their effectiveness.
Results
We present the Comprior benchmark tool, which facilitates the rapid development and effortless benchmarking of feature selection approaches, with a special focus on prior knowledge approaches. Comprior is extensible by custom approaches, offers built-in standard feature selection approaches, enables uniform access to multiple knowledge bases, and provides a customizable evaluation infrastructure to compare multiple feature selection approaches regarding their classification performance, robustness, runtime, and biological relevance.
Conclusion
Comprior allows reproducible benchmarking especially of prior knowledge approaches, which facilitates their applicability and for the first time enables a comprehensive assessment of their effectiveness
While the role of and consequences of being a bystander to face-to-face bullying has received some attention in the literature, to date, little is known about the effects of being a bystander to cyberbullying. It is also unknown how empathy might impact the negative consequences associated with being a bystander of cyberbullying. The present study focused on examining the longitudinal association between bystander of cyberbullying depression, and anxiety, and the moderating role of empathy in the relationship between bystander of cyberbullying and subsequent depression and anxiety. There were 1,090 adolescents (M-age = 12.19; 50% female) from the United States included at Time 1, and they completed questionnaires on empathy, cyberbullying roles (bystander, perpetrator, victim), depression, and anxiety. One year later, at Time 2, 1,067 adolescents (M-age = 13.76; 51% female) completed questionnaires on depression and anxiety. Results revealed a positive association between bystander of cyberbullying and depression and anxiety. Further, empathy moderated the positive relationship between bystander of cyberbullying and depression, but not for anxiety. Implications for intervention and prevention programs are discussed.
Business processes constantly generate, manipulate, and consume data that are managed by organizational databases. Despite being central to process modeling and execution, the link between processes and data is often handled by developers when the process is implemented, thus leaving the connection unexplored during the conceptual design. In this paper, we introduce, formalize, and evaluate a novel conceptual view that bridges the gap between process and data models, and show some kinds of interesting insights that can be derived from this novel proposal.
Generating a novel and descriptive caption of an image is drawing increasing interests in computer vision, natural language processing, and multimedia communities. In this work, we propose an end-to-end trainable deep bidirectional LSTM (Bi-LSTM (Long Short-Term Memory)) model to address the problem. By combining a deep convolutional neural network (CNN) and two separate LSTM networks, our model is capable of learning long-term visual-language interactions by making use of history and future context information at high-level semantic space. We also explore deep multimodal bidirectional models, in which we increase the depth of nonlinearity transition in different ways to learn hierarchical visual-language embeddings. Data augmentation techniques such as multi-crop, multi-scale, and vertical mirror are proposed to prevent over-fitting in training deep models. To understand how our models "translate" image to sentence, we visualize and qualitatively analyze the evolution of Bi-LSTM internal states over time. The effectiveness and generality of proposed models are evaluated on four benchmark datasets: Flickr8K, Flickr30K, MSCOCO, and Pascal1K datasets. We demonstrate that Bi-LSTM models achieve highly competitive performance on both caption generation and image-sentence retrieval even without integrating an additional mechanism (e.g., object detection, attention model). Our experiments also prove that multi-task learning is beneficial to increase model generality and gain performance. We also demonstrate the performance of transfer learning of the Bi-LSTM model significantly outperforms previous methods on the Pascal1K dataset.
Research publications and data nowadays should be publicly available on the internet and, theoretically, usable for everyone to develop further research, products, or services. The long-term accessibility of research data is, therefore, fundamental in the economy of the research production process. However, the availability of data is not sufficient by itself, but also their quality must be verifiable. Measures to ensure reuse and reproducibility need to include the entire research life cycle, from the experimental design to the generation of data, quality control, statistical analysis, interpretation, and validation of the results. Hence, high-quality records, particularly for providing a string of documents for the verifiable origin of data, are essential elements that can act as a certificate for potential users (customers). These records also improve the traceability and transparency of data and processes, therefore, improving the reliability of results. Standards for data acquisition, analysis, and documentation have been fostered in the last decade driven by grassroot initiatives of researchers and organizations such as the Research Data Alliance (RDA). Nevertheless, what is still largely missing in the life science academic research are agreed procedures for complex routine research workflows. Here, well-crafted documentation like standard operating procedures (SOPs) offer clear direction and instructions specifically designed to avoid deviations as an absolute necessity for reproducibility. Therefore, this paper provides a standardized workflow that explains step by step how to write an SOP to be used as a starting point for appropriate research documentation.
The aim of our project design space exploration with answer set programming is to develop a general framework based on Answer Set Programming (ASP) that finds valid solutions to the system design problem and simultaneously performs Design Space Exploration (DSE) to find the most favorable alternatives. We leverage recent developments in ASP solving that allow for tight integration of background theories to create a holistic framework for effective DSE.