Incremental View Maintenance For Collection Programming

In the context of incremental view maintenance (IVM), delta query derivation is an essential technique for speeding up the processing of large, dynamic datasets. The goal is to generate delta queries that, given a small change in the input, can update the materialized view more efficiently than via recomputation. In this work we propose the first solution for the efficient incrementalization of positive nested relational calculus (NRC+) on bags (with integer multiplicities). More precisely, we model the cost of NRC+ operators and classify queries as efficiently incrementalizable if their delta has a strictly lower cost than full re-evaluation. Then, we identify IncNRC+; a large fragment of NRC+ that is efficiently incrementalizable and we provide a semantics-preserving translation that takes any NRC+ query to a collection of IncNRC+ queries. Furthermore, we prove that incremental maintenance for NRC+ is within the complexity class NC0 and we showcase how recursive IVM, a technique that has provided significant speedups over traditional IVM in the case of flat queries [25], can also be applied to IncNRC+.Comment: 24 pages (12 pages plus appendix

Incremental and Modular Context-sensitive Analysis

Context-sensitive global analysis of large code bases can be expensive, which can make its use impractical during software development. However, there are many situations in which modifications are small and isolated within a few components, and it is desirable to reuse as much as possible previous analysis results. This has been achieved to date through incremental global analysis fixpoint algorithms that achieve cost reductions at fine levels of granularity, such as changes in program lines. However, these fine-grained techniques are not directly applicable to modular programs, nor are they designed to take advantage of modular structures. This paper describes, implements, and evaluates an algorithm that performs efficient context-sensitive analysis incrementally on modular partitions of programs. The experimental results show that the proposed modular algorithm shows significant improvements, in both time and memory consumption, when compared to existing non-modular, fine-grain incremental analysis techniques. Furthermore, thanks to the proposed inter-modular propagation of analysis information, our algorithm also outperforms traditional modular analysis even when analyzing from scratch.Comment: 56 pages, 27 figures. To be published in Theory and Practice of Logic Programming. v3 corresponds to the extended version of the ICLP2018 Technical Communication. v4 is the revised version submitted to Theory and Practice of Logic Programming. v5 (this one) is the final author version to be published in TPL

Automated Expected Amortised Cost Analysis of Probabilistic Data Structures

In this paper, we present the first fully-automated expected amortised cost analysis of self-adjusting data structures, that is, of randomised splay trees, randomised splay heaps and randomised meldable heaps, which so far have only (semi-) manually been analysed in the literature. Our analysis is stated as a type-and-effect system for a first-order functional programming language with support for sampling over discrete distributions, non-deterministic choice and a ticking operator. The latter allows for the specification of fine-grained cost models. We state two soundness theorems based on two different -- but strongly related -- typing rules of ticking, which account differently for the cost of non-terminating computations. Finally we provide a prototype implementation able to fully automatically analyse the aforementioned case studies.Comment: 39 page

QoS-Aware Middleware for Web Services Composition

The paradigmatic shift from a Web of manual interactions to a Web of programmatic interactions driven by Web services is creating unprecedented opportunities for the formation of online Business-to-Business (B2B) collaborations. In particular, the creation of value-added services by composition of existing ones is gaining a significant momentum. Since many available Web services provide overlapping or identical functionality, albeit with different Quality of Service (QoS), a choice needs to be made to determine which services are to participate in a given composite service. This paper presents a middleware platform which addresses the issue of selecting Web services for the purpose of their composition in a way that maximizes user satisfaction expressed as utility functions over QoS attributes, while satisfying the constraints set by the user and by the structure of the composite service. Two selection approaches are described and compared: one based on local (task-level) selection of services and the other based on global allocation of tasks to services using integer programming

LINVIEW: Incremental View Maintenance for Complex Analytical Queries

Many analytics tasks and machine learning problems can be naturally expressed by iterative linear algebra programs. In this paper, we study the incremental view maintenance problem for such complex analytical queries. We develop a framework, called LINVIEW, for capturing deltas of linear algebra programs and understanding their computational cost. Linear algebra operations tend to cause an avalanche effect where even very local changes to the input matrices spread out and infect all of the intermediate results and the final view, causing incremental view maintenance to lose its performance benefit over re-evaluation. We develop techniques based on matrix factorizations to contain such epidemics of change. As a consequence, our techniques make incremental view maintenance of linear algebra practical and usually substantially cheaper than re-evaluation. We show, both analytically and experimentally, the usefulness of these techniques when applied to standard analytics tasks. Our evaluation demonstrates the efficiency of LINVIEW in generating parallel incremental programs that outperform re-evaluation techniques by more than an order of magnitude.Comment: 14 pages, SIGMO

Theoretical Interpretations and Applications of Radial Basis Function Networks

Medical applications usually used Radial Basis Function Networks just as Artificial Neural Networks. However, RBFNs are Knowledge-Based Networks that can be interpreted in several way: Artificial Neural Networks, Regularization Networks, Support Vector Machines, Wavelet Networks, Fuzzy Controllers, Kernel Estimators, Instanced-Based Learners. A survey of their interpretations and of their corresponding learning algorithms is provided as well as a brief survey on dynamic learning algorithms. RBFNs' interpretations can suggest applications that are particularly interesting in medical domains