55,689 research outputs found
Proactive cloud management for highly heterogeneous multi-cloud infrastructures
Various literature studies demonstrated that the cloud computing paradigm can help to improve availability and performance of applications subject to the problem of software anomalies. Indeed, the cloud resource provisioning model enables users to rapidly access new processing resources, even distributed over different geographical regions, that can be promptly used in the case of, e.g., crashes or hangs of running machines, as well as to balance the load in the case of overloaded machines. Nevertheless, managing a complex geographically-distributed cloud deploy could be a complex and time-consuming task. Autonomic Cloud Manager (ACM) Framework is an autonomic framework for supporting proactive management of applications deployed over multiple cloud regions. It uses machine learning models to predict failures of virtual machines and to proactively redirect the load to healthy machines/cloud regions. In this paper, we study different policies to perform efficient proactive load balancing across cloud regions in order to mitigate the effect of software anomalies. These policies use predictions about the mean time to failure of virtual machines. We consider the case of heterogeneous cloud regions, i.e regions with different amount of resources, and we provide an experimental assessment of these policies in the context of ACM Framework
Intrinsic Motivation Systems for Autonomous Mental Development
Exploratory activities seem to be intrinsically rewarding
for children and crucial for their cognitive development.
Can a machine be endowed with such an intrinsic motivation
system? This is the question we study in this paper, presenting a number of computational systems that try to capture this drive towards novel or curious situations. After discussing related research coming from developmental psychology, neuroscience, developmental robotics, and active learning, this paper presents the mechanism of Intelligent Adaptive Curiosity, an intrinsic motivation system which pushes a robot towards situations in which it maximizes its learning progress. This drive makes the robot focus on situations which are neither too predictable nor too unpredictable, thus permitting autonomous mental development.The complexity of the robot’s activities autonomously increases and complex developmental sequences self-organize without being constructed in a supervised manner. Two experiments are presented illustrating the stage-like organization emerging with this mechanism. In one of them, a physical robot is placed on a baby play mat with objects that it can learn to manipulate. Experimental results show that the robot first spends time in situations
which are easy to learn, then shifts its attention progressively to situations of increasing difficulty, avoiding situations in which nothing can be learned. Finally, these various results are discussed in relation to more complex forms of behavioral organization and data coming from developmental psychology.
Key words: Active learning, autonomy, behavior, complexity,
curiosity, development, developmental trajectory, epigenetic
robotics, intrinsic motivation, learning, reinforcement learning,
values
Down-Sampling coupled to Elastic Kernel Machines for Efficient Recognition of Isolated Gestures
In the field of gestural action recognition, many studies have focused on
dimensionality reduction along the spatial axis, to reduce both the variability
of gestural sequences expressed in the reduced space, and the computational
complexity of their processing. It is noticeable that very few of these methods
have explicitly addressed the dimensionality reduction along the time axis.
This is however a major issue with regard to the use of elastic distances
characterized by a quadratic complexity. To partially fill this apparent gap,
we present in this paper an approach based on temporal down-sampling associated
to elastic kernel machine learning. We experimentally show, on two data sets
that are widely referenced in the domain of human gesture recognition, and very
different in terms of quality of motion capture, that it is possible to
significantly reduce the number of skeleton frames while maintaining a good
recognition rate. The method proves to give satisfactory results at a level
currently reached by state-of-the-art methods on these data sets. The
computational complexity reduction makes this approach eligible for real-time
applications.Comment: ICPR 2014, International Conference on Pattern Recognition, Stockholm
: Sweden (2014
Learning a Partitioning Advisor with Deep Reinforcement Learning
Commercial data analytics products such as Microsoft Azure SQL Data Warehouse
or Amazon Redshift provide ready-to-use scale-out database solutions for
OLAP-style workloads in the cloud. While the provisioning of a database cluster
is usually fully automated by cloud providers, customers typically still have
to make important design decisions which were traditionally made by the
database administrator such as selecting the partitioning schemes.
In this paper we introduce a learned partitioning advisor for analytical
OLAP-style workloads based on Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL). The main idea
is that a DRL agent learns its decisions based on experience by monitoring the
rewards for different workloads and partitioning schemes. We evaluate our
learned partitioning advisor in an experimental evaluation with different
databases schemata and workloads of varying complexity. In the evaluation, we
show that our advisor is not only able to find partitionings that outperform
existing approaches for automated partitioning design but that it also can
easily adjust to different deployments. This is especially important in cloud
setups where customers can easily migrate their cluster to a new set of
(virtual) machines
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