When Things Matter: A Data-Centric View of the Internet of Things

With the recent advances in radio-frequency identification (RFID), low-cost wireless sensor devices, and Web technologies, the Internet of Things (IoT) approach has gained momentum in connecting everyday objects to the Internet and facilitating machine-to-human and machine-to-machine communication with the physical world. While IoT offers the capability to connect and integrate both digital and physical entities, enabling a whole new class of applications and services, several significant challenges need to be addressed before these applications and services can be fully realized. A fundamental challenge centers around managing IoT data, typically produced in dynamic and volatile environments, which is not only extremely large in scale and volume, but also noisy, and continuous. This article surveys the main techniques and state-of-the-art research efforts in IoT from data-centric perspectives, including data stream processing, data storage models, complex event processing, and searching in IoT. Open research issues for IoT data management are also discussed

StochKit-FF: Efficient Systems Biology on Multicore Architectures

The stochastic modelling of biological systems is an informative, and in some cases, very adequate technique, which may however result in being more expensive than other modelling approaches, such as differential equations. We present StochKit-FF, a parallel version of StochKit, a reference toolkit for stochastic simulations. StochKit-FF is based on the FastFlow programming toolkit for multicores and exploits the novel concept of selective memory. We experiment StochKit-FF on a model of HIV infection dynamics, with the aim of extracting information from efficiently run experiments, here in terms of average and variance and, on a longer term, of more structured data.Comment: 14 pages + cover pag

Learning Video Object Segmentation with Visual Memory

This paper addresses the task of segmenting moving objects in unconstrained videos. We introduce a novel two-stream neural network with an explicit memory module to achieve this. The two streams of the network encode spatial and temporal features in a video sequence respectively, while the memory module captures the evolution of objects over time. The module to build a "visual memory" in video, i.e., a joint representation of all the video frames, is realized with a convolutional recurrent unit learned from a small number of training video sequences. Given a video frame as input, our approach assigns each pixel an object or background label based on the learned spatio-temporal features as well as the "visual memory" specific to the video, acquired automatically without any manually-annotated frames. The visual memory is implemented with convolutional gated recurrent units, which allows to propagate spatial information over time. We evaluate our method extensively on two benchmarks, DAVIS and Freiburg-Berkeley motion segmentation datasets, and show state-of-the-art results. For example, our approach outperforms the top method on the DAVIS dataset by nearly 6%. We also provide an extensive ablative analysis to investigate the influence of each component in the proposed framework