Energy-Aware Cloud Management through Progressive SLA Specification

Novel energy-aware cloud management methods dynamically reallocate computation across geographically distributed data centers to leverage regional electricity price and temperature differences. As a result, a managed VM may suffer occasional downtimes. Current cloud providers only offer high availability VMs, without enough flexibility to apply such energy-aware management. In this paper we show how to analyse past traces of dynamic cloud management actions based on electricity prices and temperatures to estimate VM availability and price values. We propose a novel SLA specification approach for offering VMs with different availability and price values guaranteed over multiple SLAs to enable flexible energy-aware cloud management. We determine the optimal number of such SLAs as well as their availability and price guaranteed values. We evaluate our approach in a user SLA selection simulation using Wikipedia and Grid'5000 workloads. The results show higher customer conversion and 39% average energy savings per VM.Comment: 14 pages, conferenc

DEVELOPMENT OF A MEDICAL STAFF RECRUITMENT SYSTEM FOR TEACHING HOSPITALS IN NIGERIA

Recruitment of staff into teaching hospitals in Nigeria, acts as the first step towards creating competitive strength and strategic advantage for such institutions. However, one of the major problems associated with these institutions in the South Western part of Nigeria is their mode of staff recruitment. In this research paper, we developed a suitable staff recruitment system for some health institutions in Nigeria, focusing specifically on some teaching hospitals. Three teaching hospitals in south west Nigeria, were visited and relevant information was collated through personal interviews and questionnaires administration to the staff of Human Resource Departments and other relevant health professionals of these teaching hospitals. The design and development of the system employs 3-tier web architecture. System design of the staff recruitment system consisted of design activities that produce system specifications satisfying the functional requirements that were developed in the system analysis process. A formal model of the staff recruitment system was built using Unified Modeling Language (UML). The UML, as a modeling system, which provides a set of conventions that were used to describe the software system in terms of objects, offers diagrams that provide different perspective views of the system parts. The Web-based Medical Recruitment System (WBMRS) was designed to be user friendly and it is easy to navigate

On-line planning and scheduling: an application to controlling modular printers

We present a case study of artificial intelligence techniques applied to the control of production printing equipment. Like many other real-world applications, this complex domain requires high-speed autonomous decision-making and robust continual operation. To our knowledge, this work represents the first successful industrial application of embedded domain-independent temporal planning. Our system handles execution failures and multi-objective preferences. At its heart is an on-line algorithm that combines techniques from state-space planning and partial-order scheduling. We suggest that this general architecture may prove useful in other applications as more intelligent systems operate in continual, on-line settings. Our system has been used to drive several commercial prototypes and has enabled a new product architecture for our industrial partner. When compared with state-of-the-art off-line planners, our system is hundreds of times faster and often finds better plans. Our experience demonstrates that domain-independent AI planning based on heuristic search can flexibly handle time, resources, replanning, and multiple objectives in a high-speed practical application without requiring hand-coded control knowledge

Modeling economic systems as locally-constructive sequential games

Real-world economies are open-ended dynamic systems consisting of heterogeneous interacting participants. Human participants are decision-makers who strategically take into account the past actions and potential future actions of other participants. All participants are forced to be locally constructive, meaning their actions at any given time must be based on their local states; and participant actions at any given time affect future local states. Taken together, these essential properties imply real-world economies are locally-constructive sequential games. This paper discusses a modeling approach, Agent-based Computational Economics, that permits researchers to study economic systems from this point of view. ACE modeling principles and objectives are first concisely presented and explained. The remainder of the paper then highlights challenging issues and edgier explorations that ACE researchers are currently pursuing

The Music Streaming Sessions Dataset

At the core of many important machine learning problems faced by online streaming services is a need to model how users interact with the content. These problems can often be reduced to a combination of 1) sequentially recommending items to the user, and 2) exploiting the user's interactions with the items as feedback for the machine learning model. Unfortunately, there are no public datasets currently available that enable researchers to explore this topic. In order to spur that research, we release the Music Streaming Sessions Dataset (MSSD), which consists of approximately 150 million listening sessions and associated user actions. Furthermore, we provide audio features and metadata for the approximately 3.7 million unique tracks referred to in the logs. This is the largest collection of such track metadata currently available to the public. This dataset enables research on important problems including how to model user listening and interaction behaviour in streaming, as well as Music Information Retrieval (MIR), and session-based sequential recommendations.Comment: 3 pages, introducing a new large scale datase