Prototyping a Web-Scale Multimedia Retrieval Service Using Spark

International audienceThe world has experienced phenomenal growth in data production and storage in recent years, much of which has taken the form of media files. At the same time, computing power has become abundant with multi-core machines, grids, and clouds. Yet it remains a challenge to harness the available power and move toward gracefully searching and retrieving from web-scale media collections. Several researchers have experimented with using automatically distributed computing frameworks, notably Hadoop and Spark, for processing multimedia material, but mostly using small collections on small computing clusters. In this article, we describe a prototype of a (near) web-scale throughput-oriented MM retrieval service using the Spark framework running on the AWS cloud service. We present retrieval results using up to 43 billion SIFT feature vectors from the public YFCC 100M collection, making this the largest high-dimensional feature vector collection reported in the literature. We also present a publicly available demonstration retrieval system, running on our own servers, where the implementation of the Spark pipelines can be observed in practice using standard image benchmarks, and downloaded for research purposes. Finally, we describe a method to evaluate retrieval quality of the ever-growing high-dimensional index of the prototype, without actually indexing a web-scale media collection

DeCP-Live: A Web-Interface for DeCP, a Distributed High-Throughput CBIR System

International audienceA vast number of algorithms and methods are proposed and developed every year in the domain of indexing and searching multimedia documents. Much of this work results in published papers and some sources are made openly available, but rarely will you find a fully working end-to-end system that has been pre-installed, configured, and is ready-to-go on a virtual machine available for download. In this paper we present such a system, the DeCPLive web interface, that is built on top of the distributed, high-throughput, content-based image retrieval algorithm DeCP The virtual machine is ready-to-go as on it we have pre-installed services, indexed openly available datasets, binaries for DeCP and DeCPLive as well as the source code

New IR & Ranking Algorithm for Top-K Keyword Search on Relational Databases ‘Smart Search’

Database management systems are as old as computers, and the continuous research and development in databases is huge and an interest of many database venders and researchers, as many researchers work in solving and developing new modules and frameworks for more efficient and effective information retrieval based on free form search by users with no knowledge of the structure of the database. Our work as an extension to previous works, introduces new algorithms and components to existing databases to enable the user to search for keywords with high performance and effective top-k results. Work intervention aims at introducing new table structure for indexing of keywords, which would help algorithms to understand the semantics of keywords and generate only the correct CN‟s (Candidate Networks) for fast retrieval of information with ranking of results according to user‟s history, semantics of keywords, distance between keywords and match of keywords. In which a three modules where developed for this purpose. We implemented our three proposed modules and created the necessary tables, with the development of a web search interface called „Smart Search‟ to test our work with different users. The interface records all user interaction with our „Smart Search‟ for analyses, as the analyses of results shows improvements in performance and effective results returned to the user. We conducted hundreds of randomly generated search terms with different sizes and multiple users; all results recorded and analyzed by the system were based on different factors and parameters. We also compared our results with previous work done by other researchers on the DBLP database which we used in our research. Our final result analysis shows the importance of introducing new components to the database for top-k keywords search and the performance of our proposed system with high effective results.نظم إدارة قواعد البيانات قديمة مثل أجيزة الكمبيوتر، و البحث والتطوير المستمر في قواعد بيانات ضخم و ىنالك اىتمام من العديد من مطوري قواعد البيانات والباحثين، كما يعمل العديد من الباحثين في حل وتطوير وحدات جديدة و أطر السترجاع المعمومات بطرق أكثر كفاءة وفعالية عمى أساس نموذج البحث الغير مقيد من قبل المستخدمين الذين ليس لدييم معرفة في بنية قاعدة البيانات. ويأتي عممنا امتدادا لألعمال السابقة، ويدخل الخوارزميات و مكونات جديدة لقواعد البيانات الموجودة لتمكين المستخدم من البحث عن الكممات المفتاحية )search Keyword )مع األداء العالي و نتائج فعالة في الحصول عمى أعمى ترتيب لمبيانات .)Top-K( وييدف ىذا العمل إلى تقديم بنية جديدة لفيرسة الكممات المفتاحية )Table Keywords Index ،)والتي من شأنيا أن تساعد الخوارزميات المقدمة في ىذا البحث لفيم معاني الكممات المفتاحية المدخمة من قبل المستخدم وتوليد فقط الشبكات المرشحة (s’CN (الصحيحة السترجاع سريع لممعمومات مع ترتيب النتائج وفقا ألوزان مختمفة مثل تاريخ البحث لممستخدم، ترتيب الكمات المفتاحية في النتائج والبعد بين الكممات المفتاحية في النتائج بالنسبة لما قام المستخدم بأدخالو. قمنا بأقتراح ثالث مكونات جديدة )Modules )وتنفيذىا من خالل ىذه االطروحة، مع تطوير واجية البحث عمى شبكة اإلنترنت تسمى "البحث الذكي" الختبار عممنا مع المستخدمين. وتتضمن واجية البحث مكونات تسجل تفاعل المستخدمين وتجميع تمك التفاعالت لمتحميل والمقارنة، وتحميالت النتائج تظير تحسينات في أداء استرجاع البينات و النتائج ذات صمة ودقة أعمى. أجرينا مئات عمميات البحث بأستخدام جمل بحث تم أنشائيا بشكل عشوائي من مختمف األحجام، باالضافة الى االستعانة بعدد من المستخدمين ليذه الغاية. واستندت جميع النتائج المسجمة وتحميميا بواسطة واجية البحث عمى عوامل و معايير مختمفة .وقمنا بالنياية بعمل مقارنة لنتائجنا مع االعمال السابقة التي قام بيا باحثون آخرون عمى نفس قاعدة البيانات (DBLP (الشييرة التي استخدمناىا في أطروحتنا. وتظير نتائجنا النيائية مدى أىمية أدخال بنية جديدة لفيرسة الكممات المفتاحية الى قواعد البيانات العالئقية، وبناء خوارزميات استنادا الى تمك الفيرسة لمبحث بأستخدام كممات مفتاحية فقط والحصول عمى نتائج أفضل ودقة أعمى، أضافة الى التحسن في وقت البحث

MC2: MPEG-7 content modelling communities

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel UniversityThe use of multimedia content on the web has grown significantly in recent years. Websites such as Facebook, YouTube and Flickr cater for enormous amounts of multimedia content uploaded by users. This vast amount of multimedia content requires comprehensive content modelling otherwise retrieving relevant content will be challenging. Modelling multimedia content can be an extremely time consuming task that may seem impossible particularly when undertaken by individual users. However, the advent of Web 2.0 and associated communities, such as YouTube and Flickr, has shown that users appear to be more willing to collaborate in order to take on enormous tasks such as multimedia content modelling. Harnessing the power of communities to achieve comprehensive content modelling is the primary focus of this research. The aim of this thesis is to explore collaborative multimedia content modelling and in particular the effectiveness of existing multimedia content modelling tools, taking into account the key development challenges of existing collaborative content modelling research and the associated modelling tools. Four research objectives are pursued in order to achieve this; first, design a user experiment to study users’ tagging behaviour with existing multimedia tagging tools and identify any relationships between such user behaviour; second, design and develop a framework for MPEG-7 content modelling communities based on the results of the experiment; third, implement an online service as a proof of concept of the framework; fourth, validate the framework through the online service during a repeat of the initial user experiment. This research contributes first, a conceptual model of user behaviour visualised as a fuzzy cognitive map and, second, an MPEG-7 framework for multimedia content modelling communities (MC2) and its proof of concept as an online service. The fuzzy cognitive model embodies relationships between user tagging behaviour and context and provides an understanding of user priorities in the description of content features and the relationships that exist between them. The MC2 framework, developed based on the fuzzy cognitive model, is deep-rooted in user content modelling behaviour and content preferences. A proof of concept of the MC2 framework is implemented as an online service in which all metadata is modelled using MPEG-7. The online service is validated, first, empirically with the same group of users and through the same experiment that led to the development of the fuzzy cognitive model and, second, functionally against the folksonomy and MPEG-7 content modelling tools used in the initial experiment. The validation demonstrates that MC2 has the advantages without the shortcomings of existing multimedia tagging tools by harnessing the ease of use of folksonomy tools while producing comprehensive structured metadata.Supported by UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC

Real-world Machine Learning Systems: A survey from a Data-Oriented Architecture Perspective

Machine Learning models are being deployed as parts of real-world systems with the upsurge of interest in artificial intelligence. The design, implementation, and maintenance of such systems are challenged by real-world environments that produce larger amounts of heterogeneous data and users requiring increasingly faster responses with efficient resource consumption. These requirements push prevalent software architectures to the limit when deploying ML-based systems. Data-oriented Architecture (DOA) is an emerging concept that equips systems better for integrating ML models. DOA extends current architectures to create data-driven, loosely coupled, decentralised, open systems. Even though papers on deployed ML-based systems do not mention DOA, their authors made design decisions that implicitly follow DOA. The reasons why, how, and the extent to which DOA is adopted in these systems are unclear. Implicit design decisions limit the practitioners' knowledge of DOA to design ML-based systems in the real world. This paper answers these questions by surveying real-world deployments of ML-based systems. The survey shows the design decisions of the systems and the requirements these satisfy. Based on the survey findings, we also formulate practical advice to facilitate the deployment of ML-based systems. Finally, we outline open challenges to deploying DOA-based systems that integrate ML models.Comment: Under revie