11,575 research outputs found
A Call to Arms: Revisiting Database Design
Good database design is crucial to obtain a sound, consistent database, and -
in turn - good database design methodologies are the best way to achieve the
right design. These methodologies are taught to most Computer Science
undergraduates, as part of any Introduction to Database class. They can be
considered part of the "canon", and indeed, the overall approach to database
design has been unchanged for years. Moreover, none of the major database
research assessments identify database design as a strategic research
direction.
Should we conclude that database design is a solved problem?
Our thesis is that database design remains a critical unsolved problem.
Hence, it should be the subject of more research. Our starting point is the
observation that traditional database design is not used in practice - and if
it were used it would result in designs that are not well adapted to current
environments. In short, database design has failed to keep up with the times.
In this paper, we put forth arguments to support our viewpoint, analyze the
root causes of this situation and suggest some avenues of research.Comment: Removed spurious column break. Nothing else was change
Generalized h-index for Disclosing Latent Facts in Citation Networks
What is the value of a scientist and its impact upon the scientific thinking?
How can we measure the prestige of a journal or of a conference? The evaluation
of the scientific work of a scientist and the estimation of the quality of a
journal or conference has long attracted significant interest, due to the
benefits from obtaining an unbiased and fair criterion. Although it appears to
be simple, defining a quality metric is not an easy task. To overcome the
disadvantages of the present metrics used for ranking scientists and journals,
J.E. Hirsch proposed a pioneering metric, the now famous h-index. In this
article, we demonstrate several inefficiencies of this index and develop a pair
of generalizations and effective variants of it to deal with scientist ranking
and with publication forum ranking. The new citation indices are able to
disclose trendsetters in scientific research, as well as researchers that
constantly shape their field with their influential work, no matter how old
they are. We exhibit the effectiveness and the benefits of the new indices to
unfold the full potential of the h-index, with extensive experimental results
obtained from DBLP, a widely known on-line digital library.Comment: 19 pages, 17 tables, 27 figure
Scalable Audience Reach Estimation in Real-time Online Advertising
Online advertising has been introduced as one of the most efficient methods
of advertising throughout the recent years. Yet, advertisers are concerned
about the efficiency of their online advertising campaigns and consequently,
would like to restrict their ad impressions to certain websites and/or certain
groups of audience. These restrictions, known as targeting criteria, limit the
reachability for better performance. This trade-off between reachability and
performance illustrates a need for a forecasting system that can quickly
predict/estimate (with good accuracy) this trade-off. Designing such a system
is challenging due to (a) the huge amount of data to process, and, (b) the need
for fast and accurate estimates. In this paper, we propose a distributed fault
tolerant system that can generate such estimates fast with good accuracy. The
main idea is to keep a small representative sample in memory across multiple
machines and formulate the forecasting problem as queries against the sample.
The key challenge is to find the best strata across the past data, perform
multivariate stratified sampling while ensuring fuzzy fall-back to cover the
small minorities. Our results show a significant improvement over the uniform
and simple stratified sampling strategies which are currently widely used in
the industry
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