Fake View Analytics in Online Video Services

Online video-on-demand(VoD) services invariably maintain a view count for each video they serve, and it has become an important currency for various stakeholders, from viewers, to content owners, advertizers, and the online service providers themselves. There is often significant financial incentive to use a robot (or a botnet) to artificially create fake views. How can we detect the fake views? Can we detect them (and stop them) using online algorithms as they occur? What is the extent of fake views with current VoD service providers? These are the questions we study in the paper. We develop some algorithms and show that they are quite effective for this problem.Comment: 25 pages, 15 figure

Towards Identifying Performance Anomalies

AbstractLarge-scale-software systems (LSSs) are composed of hundreds of subsystems that interact with each other in an unforeseen and complex ways. The operators of these LSSs strictly monitor thousands of metrics (performance counters) to quickly identify performance anomalies before a catastrophe. The existing monitoring tools and methodologies have not kept in pace with the rapid growth and inherit complexity of these LSSs; hence are ineffective in assisting practitioners to effectively pinpoint performance anomalies. We propose a methodology that uses entropy analysis to assist practitioners/operators of LSSs in quickly detecting underlying anomalies in the system. Our performance tests conducted on an open source benchmark system reveal that the proposed methodology is robust in pinpointing anomalies, do not require any domain knowledge to operate, and avoid information overload on practitioners