GiViP: A Visual Profiler for Distributed Graph Processing Systems

Analyzing large-scale graphs provides valuable insights in different application scenarios. While many graph processing systems working on top of distributed infrastructures have been proposed to deal with big graphs, the tasks of profiling and debugging their massive computations remain time consuming and error-prone. This paper presents GiViP, a visual profiler for distributed graph processing systems based on a Pregel-like computation model. GiViP captures the huge amount of messages exchanged throughout a computation and provides an interactive user interface for the visual analysis of the collected data. We show how to take advantage of GiViP to detect anomalies related to the computation and to the infrastructure, such as slow computing units and anomalous message patterns.Comment: Appears in the Proceedings of the 25th International Symposium on Graph Drawing and Network Visualization (GD 2017

Knowledge Based Systems: A Critical Survey of Major Concepts, Issues, and Techniques

This Working Paper Series entry presents a detailed survey of knowledge based systems. After being in a relatively dormant state for many years, only recently is Artificial Intelligence (AI) - that branch of computer science that attempts to have machines emulate intelligent behavior - accomplishing practical results. Most of these results can be attributed to the design and use of Knowledge-Based Systems, KBSs (or ecpert systems) - problem solving computer programs that can reach a level of performance comparable to that of a human expert in some specialized problem domain. These systems can act as a consultant for various requirements like medical diagnosis, military threat analysis, project risk assessment, etc. These systems possess knowledge to enable them to make intelligent desisions. They are, however, not meant to replace the human specialists in any particular domain. A critical survey of recent work in interactive KBSs is reported. A case study (MYCIN) of a KBS, a list of existing KBSs, and an introduction to the Japanese Fifth Generation Computer Project are provided as appendices. Finally, an extensive set of KBS-related references is provided at the end of the report

Protecting your software updates

As described in many blog posts and the scientific literature, exploits for software vulnerabilities are often engineered on the basis of patches, which often involves the manual or automated identification of vulnerable code. The authors evaluate how this identification can be automated with the most frequently referenced diffing tools, demonstrating that for certain types of patches, these tools are indeed effective attacker tools. But they also demonstrate that by using binary code diversification, the effectiveness of the tools can be diminished severely, thus severely closing the attacker's window of opportunity