Using the Earth Mover's Distance for perceptually meaningful visual saliency

Visual saliency is one of the mechanisms that guide our visual attention, or where we look. This topic has seen a lot of research in recent years, starting with biologicallyinspired models, followed by the information-theoretic and recently statistical-based models. This dissertation looks at a state-of-the-art statistical model and studies what effects the histogram construction method and histogram distance measures have on detecting saliency. Equi-width histograms, which have constant bin size, equi-depth histograms, which have constant density per bin, and diagonal histograms, whose bin widths are determined from constant diagonal portions of the empirical cumulative distribution function (ecdf), are used to calculate saliency scores on a publicly available dataset. Crossbin distances are introduced and compared with the currently employed bin-to-bin distances by calculating saliency scores on the same dataset. An exhaustive experiment with combinations of all histogram construction methods and histogram distance measures is performed. It was discovered that using the equi-depth histogram is able to improve various saliency metrics. It is also shown that employing cross-bin histogram distances improves the contrast of the resulting saliency maps, making them more perceptually meaningful but lowering their saliency scores in the process. A novel improvement is made to the model which removes the implicit center bias, which also generates more perceptually meaningful saliency maps but lowers saliency scores. A new scoring method is proposed which aims to deal with the perceptual and scoring disparities

Exécutions de requêtes respectueuses de la vie privée par utilisation de composants matériels sécurisés

Current applications, from complex sensor systems (e.g. quantified self) to online e-markets acquire vast quantities of personal information which usually end-up on central servers. This massive amount of personal data, the new oil, represents an unprecedented potential for applications and business. However, centralizing and processing all one's data in a single server, where they are exposed to prying eyes, poses a major problem with regards to privacy concern.Conversely, decentralized architectures helping individuals keep full control of their data, but they complexify global treatments and queries, impeding the development of innovative services.In this thesis, we aim at reconciling individual's privacy on one side and global benefits for the community and business perspectives on the other side. It promotes the idea of pushing the security to secure hardware devices controlling the data at the place of their acquisition. Thanks to these tangible physical elements of trust, secure distributed querying protocols can reestablish the capacity to perform global computations, such as SQL aggregates, without revealing any sensitive information to central servers.This thesis studies the subset of SQL queries without external joins and shows how to secure their execution in the presence of honest-but-curious attackers. It also discusses how the resulting querying protocols can be integrated in a concrete decentralized architecture. Cost models and experiments on SQL/AA, our distributed prototype running on real tamper-resistant hardware, demonstrate that this approach can scale to nationwide applications.Les applications actuelles, des systèmes de capteurs complexes (par exemple auto quantifiée) aux applications de e-commerce, acquièrent de grandes quantités d'informations personnelles qui sont habituellement stockées sur des serveurs centraux. Cette quantité massive de données personnelles, considéré comme le nouveau pétrole, représente un important potentiel pour les applications et les entreprises. Cependant, la centralisation et le traitement de toutes les données sur un serveur unique, où elles sont exposées aux indiscrétions de son gestionnaire, posent un problème majeur en ce qui concerne la vie privée.Inversement, les architectures décentralisées aident les individus à conserver le plein de contrôle sur leurs données, toutefois leurs traitements en particulier le calcul de requêtes globales deviennent complexes.Dans cette thèse, nous visons à concilier la vie privée de l'individu et l'exploitation de ces données, qui présentent des avantages manifestes pour la communauté (comme des études statistiques) ou encore des perspectives d'affaires. Nous promouvons l'idée de sécuriser l'acquisition des données par l'utilisation de matériel sécurisé. Grâce à ces éléments matériels tangibles de confiance, sécuriser des protocoles d'interrogation distribués permet d'effectuer des calculs globaux, tels que les agrégats SQL, sans révéler d'informations sensibles à des serveurs centraux.Cette thèse étudie le sous-groupe de requêtes SQL sans jointures et montre comment sécuriser leur exécution en présence d'attaquants honnêtes-mais-curieux. Cette thèse explique également comment les protocoles d'interrogation qui en résultent peuvent être intégrés concrètement dans une architecture décentralisée. Nous démontrons que notre approche est viable et peut passer à l'échelle d'applications de la taille d'un pays par un modèle de coût et des expériences réelles sur notre prototype, SQL/AA

CPUアーキテクチャを考慮した性能モデルの導入によるデータベース・クエリ最適化のためのコスト計算の精度向上

Non-volatile memory is applied not only to storage subsystems but also to the main memory of computers to improve performance and increase capacity. In the near future, some in-memory database systems will use non-volatile main memory as a durable medium instead of using existing storage devices, such as hard disk drives or solid-state drives. In addition, cloud computing is gaining more attention, and users are increasingly demanding performance improvement. In particular, the Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS) market is rapidly expanding. Attempts to improve database performance have led to the development of in-memory databases using non-volatile memory as a durable database medium rather than existing storage devices. For such in-memory database systems, the cost of memory access instead of Input/Output (I/O) processing decreases, and the Central Processing Unit (CPU) cost increases relative to the most suitable access path selected for a database query. Therefore, a high-precision cost calculation method for query execution is required. In particular, when the database system cannot select the most appropriate join method, the query execution time increases. Moreover, in the cloud computing environment the CPU architecture of different physical servers may be of different generations. The cost model is also required to be capable of application to different generation CPUs through minor modification in order not to increase database administrator\u27s extra duties. To improve the accuracy of the cost calculation, a cost calculation method based on CPU architecture using statistical information measured by a performance monitor embedded within the CPU (hereinafter called measurement-based cost calculation method) is proposed, and the accuracy of estimating the intersection (hereinafter called cross point) of cost calculation formulas for join methods is evaluated. In this calculation method, we concentrate on the instruction issuing part in the instruction pipeline, inside the CPU architecture. The cost of database search processing is classified into three types, data cache access, instruction cache miss penalty and branch misprediction penalty, and for each a cost calculation formula is constructed. Moreover, each cost calculation formula models the tendency between the statistical information measured by the performance monitor embedded within the CPU and the selectivity of the table while executing join operations. The statistical information measured by the performance monitor is information such as the number of executed instructions and the number of cache hits. In addition, for each element separated into elements repeatedly appearing in the access path of the join, cost calculation formulas are formed into parts, and the cost is calculated combining the parts for an arbitrary number of join tables. First, to investigate the feasibility of the proposed method, a cost formula for a two-table join was constructed using a large database, 100 GB of the TPC Benchmark(TM) H database. The accuracy of the cost calculation was evaluated by comparing the measured cross point with the estimated cross point. The results indicated that the difference between the predicted cross point and the measured cross point was less than 0.1% selectivity and was reduced by 71% to 94% compared with the difference between the cross point obtained by the conventional method and the measured cross point. Therefore, the proposed cost calculation method can improve the accuracy of join cost calculation. Then, to reduce the operating time of the database administration, the cost calculation formulawas constructed under the condition that the database for measuring the statistical value was reduced to a small scale (5 GB). The accuracy of cost calculations was also evaluated when joining three or more tables. As a result, the difference between the predicted cross point and the measured cross point was reduced by 74% to 95% compared with the difference between the cross point obtained by the conventional method and the measured cross point. It means the proposed method can improve the accuracy of cost calculation. Finally, a method is also proposed for updating the cost calculation formula using the measurement-based cost calculation method to support a CPU with architecture from another generation without requiring re-measurement of the statistical information of that CPU. Our approach focuses on reflecting architectural changes, such as cache size and associativity, memory latency, and branch misprediction penalty, in the components of the cost calcula-tion formulas. The updated cost calculation formulas estimated the cost of joining different generation-based CPUs accurately in 66% of the test cases. In conclusion, the in-memory database system using the proposed cost calculation method can select the best join method and can be applied to a database system with CPUs from different generations.首都大学東京, 2019-03-25, 博士（工学）首都大学東

Query-driven learning for predictive analytics of data subspace cardinality

Fundamental to many predictive analytics tasks is the ability to estimate the cardinality (number of data items) of multi-dimensional data subspaces, defined by query selections over datasets. This is crucial for data analysts dealing with, e.g., interactive data subspace explorations, data subspace visualizations, and in query processing optimization. However, in many modern data systems, predictive analytics may be (i) too costly money-wise, e.g., in clouds, (ii) unreliable, e.g., in modern Big Data query engines, where accurate statistics are difficult to obtain/maintain, or (iii) infeasible, e.g., for privacy issues. We contribute a novel, query-driven, function estimation model of analyst-defined data subspace cardinality. The proposed estimation model is highly accurate in terms of prediction and accommodating the well-known selection queries: multi-dimensional range and distance-nearest neighbors (radius) queries. Our function estimation model: (i) quantizes the vectorial query space, by learning the analysts’ access patterns over a data space, (ii) associates query vectors with their corresponding cardinalities of the analyst-defined data subspaces, (iii) abstracts and employs query vectorial similarity to predict the cardinality of an unseen/unexplored data subspace, and (iv) identifies and adapts to possible changes of the query subspaces based on the theory of optimal stopping. The proposed model is decentralized, facilitating the scaling-out of such predictive analytics queries. The research significance of the model lies in that (i) it is an attractive solution when data-driven statistical techniques are undesirable or infeasible, (ii) it offers a scale-out, decentralized training solution, (iii) it is applicable to different selection query types, and (iv) it offers a performance that is superior to that of data-driven approaches

Near-Optimal Distributed Band-Joins through Recursive Partitioning

We consider running-time optimization for band-joins in a distributed system, e.g., the cloud. To balance load across worker machines, input has to be partitioned, which causes duplication. We explore how to resolve this tension between maximum load per worker and input duplication for band-joins between two relations. Previous work suffered from high optimization cost or considered partitionings that were too restricted (resulting in suboptimal join performance). Our main insight is that recursive partitioning of the join-attribute space with the appropriate split scoring measure can achieve both low optimization cost and low join cost. It is the first approach that is not only effective for one-dimensional band-joins but also for joins on multiple attributes. Experiments indicate that our method is able to find partitionings that are within 10% of the lower bound for both maximum load per worker and input duplication for a broad range of settings, significantly improving over previous work