Automatically Leveraging MapReduce Frameworks for Data-Intensive Applications

MapReduce is a popular programming paradigm for developing large-scale, data-intensive computation. Many frameworks that implement this paradigm have recently been developed. To leverage these frameworks, however, developers must become familiar with their APIs and rewrite existing code. Casper is a new tool that automatically translates sequential Java programs into the MapReduce paradigm. Casper identifies potential code fragments to rewrite and translates them in two steps: (1) Casper uses program synthesis to search for a program summary (i.e., a functional specification) of each code fragment. The summary is expressed using a high-level intermediate language resembling the MapReduce paradigm and verified to be semantically equivalent to the original using a theorem prover. (2) Casper generates executable code from the summary, using either the Hadoop, Spark, or Flink API. We evaluated Casper by automatically converting real-world, sequential Java benchmarks to MapReduce. The resulting benchmarks perform up to 48.2x faster compared to the original.Comment: 12 pages, additional 4 pages of references and appendi

Towards animal oriented rearing methods in organic production systems

One of the foundations of organic animal production systems is that animals are kept in a more natural way. In terms of housing, animals get more space, have access to outside areas and are fed organic rations. This results in unique, farm-specific production systems with emphasis on animal welfare and product quality. In recent years it has become clear that strategies to rear replacement animals are getting more important. There is a public demand for more animal oriented, sustainable production systems. Also farmers realize that rearing is the key to raise suitable animals that fit into their production system. Circumstances during the rearing period affect health, wellbeing and production, not only during the rearing period itself, but also during later life. In organic egg production and in organic milk production farmers realize that organic production requires organically sound rearing practices

What's unusual in online disease outbreak news?

Background: Accurate and timely detection of public health events of international concern is necessary to help support risk assessment and response and save lives. Novel event-based methods that use the World Wide Web as a signal source offer potential to extend health surveillance into areas where traditional indicator networks are lacking. In this paper we address the issue of systematically evaluating online health news to support automatic alerting using daily disease-country counts text mined from real world data using BioCaster. For 18 data sets produced by BioCaster, we compare 5 aberration detection algorithms (EARS C2, C3, W2, F-statistic and EWMA) for performance against expert moderated ProMED-mail postings. Results: We report sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive value (PPV), negative predictive value (NPV), mean alerts/100 days and F1, at 95% confidence interval (CI) for 287 ProMED-mail postings on 18 outbreaks across 14 countries over a 366 day period. Results indicate that W2 had the best F1 with a slight benefit for day of week effect over C2. In drill down analysis we indicate issues arising from the granular choice of country-level modeling, sudden drops in reporting due to day of week effects and reporting bias. Automatic alerting has been implemented in BioCaster available from http://born.nii.ac.jp. Conclusions: Online health news alerts have the potential to enhance manual analytical methods by increasing throughput, timeliness and detection rates. Systematic evaluation of health news aberrations is necessary to push forward our understanding of the complex relationship between news report volumes and case numbers and to select the best performing features and algorithms

Extensible Detection and Indexing of Highlight Events in Broadcasted Sports Video

Content-based indexing is fundamental to support and sustain the ongoing growth of broadcasted sports video. The main challenge is to design extensible frameworks to detect and index highlight events. This paper presents: 1) A statistical-driven event detection approach that utilizes a minimum amount of manual knowledge and is based on a universal scope-of-detection and audio-visual features; 2) A semi-schema-based indexing that combines the benefits of schema-based modeling to ensure that the video indexes are valid at all time without manual checking, and schema-less modeling to allow several passes of instantiation in which additional elements can be declared. To demonstrate the performance of the events detection, a large dataset of sport videos with a total of around 15 hours including soccer, basketball and Australian football is used

MANAGING THE INCONCEIVABLE: PARTICIPATORY ASSESSMENTS OF IMPACTS AND RESPONSES TO EXTREME CLIMATE CHANGE

A comprehensive understanding of the implications of extreme climate change requires an in-depth exploration of the perceptions and reactions of the affected stakeholder groups and the lay public. The project on “Atlantic sea level rise: Adaptation to imaginable worst-case climate change” (Atlantis) has studied one such case, the collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet and a subsequent 5-6 meter sea-level rise. Possible methods are presented for assessing the societal consequences of impacts and adaptation options in selected European regions by involving representatives of pertinent stakeholders. Results of a comprehensive review of participatory integrated assessment methods with a view to their applicability in climate impact studies are summarized including Simulation-Gaming techniques, the Policy Exercise method, and the Focus Group technique. Succinct presentations of these three methods are provided together with short summaries of relevant earlier applications to gain insights into the possible design options. Building on these insights, four basic versions of design procedures suitable for use in the Atlantis project are presented. They draw on design elements of several methods and combine them to fit the characteristics and fulfill the needs of addressing the problem of extreme sea-level rise. The selected participatory techniques and the procedure designs might well be useful in other studies assessing climate change impacts and exploring adaptation options.sea level rise, West Antarctic ice sheet, climate change