21,838 research outputs found
Topological data analysis of contagion maps for examining spreading processes on networks
Social and biological contagions are influenced by the spatial embeddedness
of networks. Historically, many epidemics spread as a wave across part of the
Earth's surface; however, in modern contagions long-range edges -- for example,
due to airline transportation or communication media -- allow clusters of a
contagion to appear in distant locations. Here we study the spread of
contagions on networks through a methodology grounded in topological data
analysis and nonlinear dimension reduction. We construct "contagion maps" that
use multiple contagions on a network to map the nodes as a point cloud. By
analyzing the topology, geometry, and dimensionality of manifold structure in
such point clouds, we reveal insights to aid in the modeling, forecast, and
control of spreading processes. Our approach highlights contagion maps also as
a viable tool for inferring low-dimensional structure in networks.Comment: Main Text and Supplementary Informatio
Towards a Swiss National Research Infrastructure
In this position paper we describe the current status and plans for a Swiss
National Research Infrastructure. Swiss academic and research institutions are
very autonomous. While being loosely coupled, they do not rely on any
centralized management entities. Therefore, a coordinated national research
infrastructure can only be established by federating the various resources
available locally at the individual institutions. The Swiss Multi-Science
Computing Grid and the Swiss Academic Compute Cloud projects serve already a
large number of diverse user communities. These projects also allow us to test
the operational setup of such a heterogeneous federated infrastructure
POEM: Pricing Longer for Edge Computing in the Device Cloud
Multiple access mobile edge computing has been proposed as a promising
technology to bring computation services close to end users, by making good use
of edge cloud servers. In mobile device clouds (MDC), idle end devices may act
as edge servers to offer computation services for busy end devices. Most
existing auction based incentive mechanisms in MDC focus on only one round
auction without considering the time correlation. Moreover, although existing
single round auctions can also be used for multiple times, users should trade
with higher bids to get more resources in the cascading rounds of auctions,
then their budgets will run out too early to participate in the next auction,
leading to auction failures and the whole benefit may suffer. In this paper, we
formulate the computation offloading problem as a social welfare optimization
problem with given budgets of mobile devices, and consider pricing longer of
mobile devices. This problem is a multiple-choice multi-dimensional 0-1
knapsack problem, which is a NP-hard problem. We propose an auction framework
named MAFL for long-term benefits that runs a single round resource auction in
each round. Extensive simulation results show that the proposed auction
mechanism outperforms the single round by about 55.6% on the revenue on average
and MAFL outperforms existing double auction by about 68.6% in terms of the
revenue.Comment: 8 pages, 1 figure, Accepted by the 18th International Conference on
Algorithms and Architectures for Parallel Processing (ICA3PP
For a learnable mathematics in the digital cultures
I begin with some general remarks concerning the co-evolution of representational forms and mathematical meanings. I then discuss the changed roles of mathematics and novel representations that emerge from the ubiquity of computational models, and briefly consider the implications for learning mathematics. I contend that a central component of knowledge required in modern societies involves the development of a meta-epistemological stance – i.e. developing a sense of mechanism for the models that underpin social and professional discourses. I illustrate this point in relation to recent research in which I am investigating the mathematical epistemology of engineering practice. Finally, I map out one implication for the design of future mathematical learning environments with reference to some data from the "Playground Project"
PersLay: A Neural Network Layer for Persistence Diagrams and New Graph Topological Signatures
Persistence diagrams, the most common descriptors of Topological Data
Analysis, encode topological properties of data and have already proved pivotal
in many different applications of data science. However, since the (metric)
space of persistence diagrams is not Hilbert, they end up being difficult
inputs for most Machine Learning techniques. To address this concern, several
vectorization methods have been put forward that embed persistence diagrams
into either finite-dimensional Euclidean space or (implicit) infinite
dimensional Hilbert space with kernels. In this work, we focus on persistence
diagrams built on top of graphs. Relying on extended persistence theory and the
so-called heat kernel signature, we show how graphs can be encoded by
(extended) persistence diagrams in a provably stable way. We then propose a
general and versatile framework for learning vectorizations of persistence
diagrams, which encompasses most of the vectorization techniques used in the
literature. We finally showcase the experimental strength of our setup by
achieving competitive scores on classification tasks on real-life graph
datasets
HPC Cloud for Scientific and Business Applications: Taxonomy, Vision, and Research Challenges
High Performance Computing (HPC) clouds are becoming an alternative to
on-premise clusters for executing scientific applications and business
analytics services. Most research efforts in HPC cloud aim to understand the
cost-benefit of moving resource-intensive applications from on-premise
environments to public cloud platforms. Industry trends show hybrid
environments are the natural path to get the best of the on-premise and cloud
resources---steady (and sensitive) workloads can run on on-premise resources
and peak demand can leverage remote resources in a pay-as-you-go manner.
Nevertheless, there are plenty of questions to be answered in HPC cloud, which
range from how to extract the best performance of an unknown underlying
platform to what services are essential to make its usage easier. Moreover, the
discussion on the right pricing and contractual models to fit small and large
users is relevant for the sustainability of HPC clouds. This paper brings a
survey and taxonomy of efforts in HPC cloud and a vision on what we believe is
ahead of us, including a set of research challenges that, once tackled, can
help advance businesses and scientific discoveries. This becomes particularly
relevant due to the fast increasing wave of new HPC applications coming from
big data and artificial intelligence.Comment: 29 pages, 5 figures, Published in ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR
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