1,056 research outputs found
Algorithms for Provisioning Queries and Analytics
Provisioning is a technique for avoiding repeated expensive computations in
what-if analysis. Given a query, an analyst formulates hypotheticals, each
retaining some of the tuples of a database instance, possibly overlapping, and
she wishes to answer the query under scenarios, where a scenario is defined by
a subset of the hypotheticals that are "turned on". We say that a query admits
compact provisioning if given any database instance and any hypotheticals,
one can create a poly-size (in ) sketch that can then be used to answer the
query under any of the possible scenarios without accessing the
original instance.
In this paper, we focus on provisioning complex queries that combine
relational algebra (the logical component), grouping, and statistics/analytics
(the numerical component). We first show that queries that compute quantiles or
linear regression (as well as simpler queries that compute count and
sum/average of positive values) can be compactly provisioned to provide
(multiplicative) approximate answers to an arbitrary precision. In contrast,
exact provisioning for each of these statistics requires the sketch size to be
exponential in . We then establish that for any complex query whose logical
component is a positive relational algebra query, as long as the numerical
component can be compactly provisioned, the complex query itself can be
compactly provisioned. On the other hand, introducing negation or recursion in
the logical component again requires the sketch size to be exponential in .
While our positive results use algorithms that do not access the original
instance after a scenario is known, we prove our lower bounds even for the case
when, knowing the scenario, limited access to the instance is allowed
When the Hammer Meets the Nail: Multi-Server PIR for Database-Driven CRN with Location Privacy Assurance
We show that it is possible to achieve information theoretic location privacy
for secondary users (SUs) in database-driven cognitive radio networks (CRNs)
with an end-to-end delay less than a second, which is significantly better than
that of the existing alternatives offering only a computational privacy. This
is achieved based on a keen observation that, by the requirement of Federal
Communications Commission (FCC), all certified spectrum databases synchronize
their records. Hence, the same copy of spectrum database is available through
multiple (distinct) providers. We harness the synergy between multi-server
private information retrieval (PIR) and database- driven CRN architecture to
offer an optimal level of privacy with high efficiency by exploiting this
observation. We demonstrated, analytically and experimentally with deployments
on actual cloud systems that, our adaptations of multi-server PIR outperform
that of the (currently) fastest single-server PIR by a magnitude of times with
information theoretic security, collusion resiliency, and fault-tolerance
features. Our analysis indicates that multi-server PIR is an ideal
cryptographic tool to provide location privacy in database-driven CRNs, in
which the requirement of replicated databases is a natural part of the system
architecture, and therefore SUs can enjoy all advantages of multi-server PIR
without any additional architectural and deployment costs.Comment: 10 pages, double colum
A Computable Economist’s Perspective on Computational Complexity
A computable economist's view of the world of computational complexity theory is described. This means the model of computation underpinning theories of computational complexity plays a central role. The emergence of computational complexity theories from diverse traditions is emphasised. The unifications that emerged in the modern era was codified by means of the notions of efficiency of computations, non-deterministic computations, completeness, reducibility and verifiability - all three of the latter concepts had their origins on what may be called 'Post's Program of Research for Higher Recursion Theory'. Approximations, computations and constructions are also emphasised. The recent real model of computation as a basis for studying computational complexity in the domain of the reals is also presented and discussed, albeit critically. A brief sceptical section on algorithmic complexity theory is included in an appendix
A Computable Economist’s Perspective on Computational Complexity
A computable economist.s view of the world of computational complexity theory is described. This means the model of computation underpinning theories of computational complexity plays a central role. The emergence of computational complexity theories from diverse traditions is emphasised. The unifications that emerged in the modern era was codified by means of the notions of efficiency of computations, non-deterministic computations, completeness, reducibility and verifiability - all three of the latter concepts had their origins on what may be called "Post's Program of Research for Higher Recursion Theory". Approximations, computations and constructions are also emphasised. The recent real model of computation as a basis for studying computational complexity in the domain of the reals is also presented and discussed, albeit critically. A brief sceptical section on algorithmic complexity theory is included in an appendix.
An Expressive Language and Efficient Execution System for Software Agents
Software agents can be used to automate many of the tedious, time-consuming
information processing tasks that humans currently have to complete manually.
However, to do so, agent plans must be capable of representing the myriad of
actions and control flows required to perform those tasks. In addition, since
these tasks can require integrating multiple sources of remote information ?
typically, a slow, I/O-bound process ? it is desirable to make execution as
efficient as possible. To address both of these needs, we present a flexible
software agent plan language and a highly parallel execution system that enable
the efficient execution of expressive agent plans. The plan language allows
complex tasks to be more easily expressed by providing a variety of operators
for flexibly processing the data as well as supporting subplans (for
modularity) and recursion (for indeterminate looping). The executor is based on
a streaming dataflow model of execution to maximize the amount of operator and
data parallelism possible at runtime. We have implemented both the language and
executor in a system called THESEUS. Our results from testing THESEUS show that
streaming dataflow execution can yield significant speedups over both
traditional serial (von Neumann) as well as non-streaming dataflow-style
execution that existing software and robot agent execution systems currently
support. In addition, we show how plans written in the language we present can
represent certain types of subtasks that cannot be accomplished using the
languages supported by network query engines. Finally, we demonstrate that the
increased expressivity of our plan language does not hamper performance;
specifically, we show how data can be integrated from multiple remote sources
just as efficiently using our architecture as is possible with a
state-of-the-art streaming-dataflow network query engine
Running Probabilistic Programs Backwards
Many probabilistic programming languages allow programs to be run under
constraints in order to carry out Bayesian inference. Running programs under
constraints could enable other uses such as rare event simulation and
probabilistic verification---except that all such probabilistic languages are
necessarily limited because they are defined or implemented in terms of an
impoverished theory of probability. Measure-theoretic probability provides a
more general foundation, but its generality makes finding computational content
difficult.
We develop a measure-theoretic semantics for a first-order probabilistic
language with recursion, which interprets programs as functions that compute
preimages. Preimage functions are generally uncomputable, so we derive an
abstract semantics. We implement the abstract semantics and use the
implementation to carry out Bayesian inference, stochastic ray tracing (a rare
event simulation), and probabilistic verification of floating-point error
bounds.Comment: 26 pages, ESOP 2015 (to appear
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